The main argument in the article is that as Google has gotten bigger, its profit motive has become more important to the company, which is negatively impacting new and old products. While Google may have to continue to generate more revenue growth from AdWords and AdSense and YouTube in order to keep the stock going up and generate more cash, the majority of Google products aren't at all impacted by profit motive. In fact, most of the product initiatives at Google sap profit.

Android is a multi-billion dollar bet on mobile OS Calico is a billion dollar bet on extending life ChromeOS is a multi-billion dollar bet on laptop/TV ChromeBrowser is a hundred-million dollar bet on browsing Google Glass is a multi-billion dollar bet on next gen devices Self driving cars are a multi-billion dollar bet on, well, self driving cars.

None of these, save perhaps Android, has any chance of driving material revenue to the business in the next five years. Most of the hardware bets Google makes are money losers because they routinely subsidize hardware.

When I was there, I launched two product features that each cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and were visible on the earnings-per-share number in the quarterly revenues we reported to Wall Street.

The argument might stand on Google.com, where the number of ads has increased. But for the majority of products (Gmail, Drive, Spreadsheets, Docs, Keep, Maps, Calendar, Books, Finance, Music, etc), it's hard to justify a profit motive argument.