The article does say Google risked all their China money at one point to stay true to their "don't be evil" mantra. They turned heel only recently. I'd say they genuinely believed and practiced it for a while, but once the upper management started to get infected with business types instead of technologists, that was the beginning of the end.
There's a question to be asked, though: Is it not PR nonsense just because employees believe it enough to act on it?
Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads?
In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?
