I kind of feel like Google actually believed what they were saying at the time. Paul Buchheit, speaking of "don't be evil," said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out"--he wanted people to remember it and call them out if they broke it.

The fact that Page and Brin have increasingly distanced themselves from it, and gotten increasingly irritated when reminded of it, says to me that they've changed a lot since back then. The people they are today would never have saddled themselves with such a slogan in the first place.