I don't know what the original poster meant, but I may (I'm not sure I would) argue that he may mean things other than simple income/profit. Such things as core competencies/competitiveness/managerial and employee talent and motivation/corporate "cohesiveness"/ability to create successful products/other, maybe more difficult to measure criteria and so forth.

I wouldn't say all (or even most) of the above applies to Google, but I do believe that for large corporate systems in general, these sorts of things become a major issue when you have half a million employees and hundreds of subsidiaries/divisions.

Just trying to make things clearer.