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Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

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Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#81

Post by deelowe »

api wrote: post #25
donw wrote: post #18

Few people remember it, but the same thing happened at HP. It used to be that HP engineers were expressly given Friday afternoons and full access to company resources to just play with new ideas. Among other things, this led to HP owning the printer market. Then "professional" management came in and killed the proverbial goose. They had to focus more on the "bottom line". To do what was easy to measure and track, rat…

It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think. I mean sure-- if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet's the boss. But if you're not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys proba…

I don't think the decision had anything to do with money. It's part of the whole "more wood behind fewer arrows" initiative. Essentially, a defrag. 20% time was seen as having created too much fragmentation with little benefit. Gmail was the only major success to come from the program. Also, Google has a separate team for working on skunk works style projects.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#82

Post by trailfox »

anxious wrote: post #48
levosmetalo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this anti Google propaganda? I can't see a single point that is not reasonable enough on its own merit, and none of them applies to Google alone, but to all search engine providers.

First and foremost it's off-topic. Second, these are the same citations used by those who were pushing for the FTC to sue Google for antitrust, so they have political baggage, third: it's before the company was founded so it's all academic and theoretical with no actual experience behind it, fourth: context matters - choice quotes from long texts have been used for Google bashing before, some earlier this week even.

> choice quotes from long texts have been used for Google bashing before, some earlier this week even

Somebody on the Internet is wrong and said something bad about Google? How dare they! At what time did this serious offence occur?

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#83

Post by [deleted] »

g20 wrote: post #24

20% time isn't dead -- I have been using it at Google consistently for over 7 years, and it has immensely benefited me. You don't need any permission, at least in engineering. However, I would agree that it is "as good as dead". What killed 20% time? Stack ranking. Google's perf management is basically an elaborate game where using 20% time is a losing move. In my time there, this has become markedly more the case. I…

[deleted]

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#86

Post by notacoward »

lmm wrote: post #58
david927 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what Yahoo thought, 15 years ago.

Yahoo has been, on the whole, an astonishingly successful company; they may not have been as sexy as those we cover here, but they've kept plodding along. Stuff like this is why I think Yahoo will outlast Google in the long run.

Exactly. If Yahoo was such a failure, we wouldn't be talking about them. There were many other very similar companies that were founded about the same time as Yahoo. Some got acquired (including some by Google or Yahoo) and more just died, but all essentially lost the race and even those of us who were around at the time barely remember them any more.

Yahoo has survived, and made a lot of money for a lot of stakeholders over the years. I would also say that they have a better record than Google when it comes to privacy, legal entanglements, and general good open-source citizenship. Yahoo is a success story. Anyone who presents it otherwise is just putting their own lack of perspective and/or business sense on display.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#87

Post by Laremere »

smackfu wrote: post #5

Honestly, this completely makes sense given how Google has been killing off non-profitable products lately. Why pay engineers to work on projects that will never meet a business case? This isn't the olden days of Google, where they would shovel anything out there and see if it stuck.

Google Wave failed quite horribly. However the resulting technology developed has been rolled into Docs, revolutionizing how Docs is used for collaboration.

There was a good image I saw on reddit awhile back that I can't find off hand. On the left was titled what most people view success and failure as, and it had a single branch, you fail or you succeed. Then it had what successful people view it as, and it was a chain of failure after failure finally leading to a success.

If you eliminate failure, you eliminate the success you gain from learning from failures.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#88

Post by api »

jusben1369 wrote: post #23
leoc wrote: post #17

Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?

In all fairness 18 months ago the perception of Google is it was doing a LOT of things but none of them very well. Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) is just one example. So narrowing their focus (still) seems like a good idea. But having great engineers is the most important thing for any success so not sure why you'd take away a mystical founding pillar of your cultu…

Wave was just bizarre. I called it "4chan enterprise" almost instantly upon checking it out.

I did get the impression it had some interesting innovation under the hood though that made it into Plus and Docs.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#89

Post by notacoward »

[deleted] wrote: post #83
g20 wrote: post #24

20% time isn't dead -- I have been using it at Google consistently for over 7 years, and it has immensely benefited me. You don't need any permission, at least in engineering. However, I would agree that it is "as good as dead". What killed 20% time? Stack ranking. Google's perf management is basically an elaborate game where using 20% time is a losing move. In my time there, this has become markedly more the case. I…

[deleted]

Reviews affect salaries even without promotions, and salary ranges are often tied to titles. If you're at the top of the range for your grade, even a good review might get you nothing. Anything that affects reviews - such as stack ranking - is therefore going to affect salaries, and I hardly think it's unreasonable to "give a shit" about salaries.

Re: Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

#90

Post by eitally »

JamesCRR wrote: post #15

"if 20% time has been abandoned at Google, are other companies, which reportedly include Apple, LinkedIn, 3M and a host of others, wise to continue trying to copy it?" That's incorrect, AFAIK 3M were the first company to pioneer this approach (with 15% of time spent on self-directed projects). For example see: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-day... Talking to a friend at 3M (who has been ther…

I offered 20% time to my team and only about 5% of them ever wanted to take advantage of it. I wanted a higher percentage of time spent thinking outside the box so I ended up creating a formal "innovation" group, through which individuals are cycled based on ideas, needs, and desires.
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