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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

#101

Post by dagw »

mathattack wrote: post #92
api wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wouldn't blame this on MBA-think. The folks doing it at Google aren't MBAs, and the 3M/Google/HP approach is treated as a positive case study. It's an issue of central control versus decentralized organization, and where the company thinks innovation will come from. One could also argue you get a short term price bump too.

I wouldn't blame this on MBA-think. The folks doing it at Google aren't MBAs

An MBA is neither necessary nor sufficient to suffer from MBA-think.

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

#102

Post by nine_k »

alooPotato wrote: post #73
api wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who says this has anything to do with money? I thing the decision is more about a new strategy - focus instead of experimentation. Personally I think this makes sense. 20% time was great when you're a small company trying to see what works. When you're a big company, you usually get disrupted because you lost focus.

To my mind, it's exactly the other way around.

When you're small, you need a source of revenue quickly, or you'll die. You don't have a luxury to experiment too much, you have to build one thing that works.

When you're a huge company and have untold millions in cash, you can afford experimentation. In fact, you have to, because your revenue source is probably finite and you have to find another before the current source dries up.

This is why Google dived into mobile phones, self-driving cars, home entertainment, renewable energy, Internet providing, consumer cloud computing, goods delivery, etc. Some of the experiments became huge successes (see Android), some failed (see the long list of closed projects), some are too immature to judge (e.g. self-driving cars).

It just looks that experimentation is now locked at a thinner top exec level, while 'simple engineers' are not expected to do too much of it. Which is, of course, a pity.

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

#105

Post by toyg »

tikhonj wrote: post #97
toyg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) You mean Orkut. That was weird: it got wildly popular in Brazil, India, Turkey and other places, but never really took off in "the West" (weird name, bad quality when first released, boring UI...). I guess most of its members (it's still going!) will become G+ users, so it wasn't a complete failure in the end (in fact, a large userba…

He probably meant Google Buzz, which was an unmitigated failure. Orkut, all things considered, is actually reasonably successful.

Fair enough! I always thought of Buzz as a twitter clone more than a real attempt at a social network though (which Orkut undeniably was).

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

#106

Post by at-fates-hands »

I know a few people who have worked there over the years and they confirmed the same thing - albeit with a huge caveat.

The two people I know said the 20% was a way for their brains to take a break and think creatively. Nothing was too crazy or far fetched not to try out. They said it helped combat the crazy hours and working from dusk till dawn. In short, it helped prevent burnout. I would be willing to bet the turnover rate will start increase as their employees start to work more hours, without any breaks, and nothing to give them something to look forward to and burnout starts to settle in much faster.

Sure, it's not going to make them go bankrupt, but it will have a real world cost to their bottom line.

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

#107

Post by raverbashing »

officemonkey wrote: post #36
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…

Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate. If you don't keep innovating, you're going to lose your lead in established products (post-it notes, corningware) to China or WallMart. Apple has a similar story with Android phones. Keep innovating or get your low-end eaten. Google doesn't have to innovate. They're already China. If somebody makes something they like, they'll buy it. Or make…

> Businesses that make material goods like 3M and Corning _have_ to innovate

No, they don't "have to". But then they die, or just keep doing what they do. It's an option.

There are boundaries that sometimes protect business: geography, client base, product specifics, etc.

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

#108

Post by adventured »

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.

Being before or after the company was founded, being 10 years ago or today, has absolutely no bearing on whether what was said is right or not. Experience != truth, just having experience doesn't mean what you say is more likely to be right. The theoretical can be right or wrong. You haven't proven your argument at all.

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

#109

Post by cpcarey »

20% time helps bring in the "entrepreneurial" types of engineers that Google seeks to hire and as it starts to disappear, they might see fewer of those hires and more of those engineers leaving. Perhaps it's simply because Google has grown to the size where it can take on really big innovative projects (Google X) instead of the respectively smaller projects that were created under 20% time. They've found that they can't have both without hurting their bottom line, so they've decided to go after the big projects. It's a significant shift, but in the end, it could be good for all of us because many have the resources to go after the small and medium wins, but only a few can go after the really big wins.

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

#110

Post by btipling »

jrockway wrote: post #98
[deleted] wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

You may want to graduate to management or UML architect or be bogged down in valueless meetings, but that's not for me. I just want to make computers do magical things. That's not what promotions are at Google. If you want to become a manager, that's called a ladder transfer, not a promotion. Promotions are basically for paying you more for making computers do more magical things. You are never asked to do anything o…

Quite a lot has been accomplished by just that, opening an editor and typing in code. It's what it all comes down to, and it's why startups can take the lunch from big corps who lose competency in opening an editor and typing in good code.
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