In a sense, building any company is a charitable act, because you leave consumers better off than they were before
Are you daft?
It's not a charitable act to start a for-profit company, because you get paid for providing the service that leaves the people better off. The whole point of charities is that they provide the service without getting paid.
(If your business is a startup that has deferred monetization until later, that still doesn't make you a charity; you've just chosen to turn away payment now in the hope that doing so will yield you a bigger payment down the road.)
That's not to say that starting a business is a bad thing or that businesses can't improve the world; but there's a clear line between what a business is and what a charity is, and it involves the expectation of getting paid. Which means a business is always going to be lower on the Do-Gooder Scale than a charity is.
Would you consider Google or Facebook a charity, then?
Or the person at a sports event selling me beer? Are they a charity? I do want beer, and they are facilitating that...for $10/glass.
(I think that most people would not consider the beer vendor a charity, and since English is a living language, I think that the cited definition is incomplete)
Obviously I wouldn't call either "a charity" because charity used in that (comparatively recent sense) means a nonprofit.
Crazygringo's point is that there is a much older and more important sense of "charity," which simply means helping those in need. In that sense, Google is a very charitable project. In fact it is hard to imagine a nonprofit doing a better job.
Not a charity, but generates huge consumer surplus (i.e. makes my life better by a lot more than they cost).
If Google didn't exist, my life would probably be $20k/yr worse due to search, $5-10k for maps, and $3k/yr worse due to Reader. Maybe $500/yr for News. Google Plus not existing would make my life better (since people who post would post on fb instead, where I'd actually read them).
I dunno about Google's definition, but Merriam-Webster's makes it pretty clear that "charitable" involves giving, not making a mutually beneficial exchange as one does in the marketplace: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charitable
There's a long line of argument that free entreprise is actually more helpful than charity in many circumstances.
In a sense, building any company is a charitable act, because you leave consumers better off than they were before .