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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

#111

Post by shin_lao »

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…

Apple would be a good counter-example to your:

This should make a lot of entrepreneurs happy, as there will continue to be a lot of top-down management-driven products that, if history shows, will continue to be market failures.

There's no rule to success.

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

#112

Post by potatolicious »

elliottcarlson wrote: post #78

My previous employer had a 10% time in place - which while in theory was a great idea, I found myself always too busy to take advantage of the time. This is in no fault to my employer, or my direct management - but lets face it - at a startup, there is little room to not be working. When you already are coding long hours, trying to make quick changes, implementing new features constantly - there just isn't enough tim…

I disagree. I currently work at a startup with 10% time, and barring rare "the servers are on fire!" events, we're pretty religious about doing it. Even when we skip it, it's credited so we can take it later (arguably better since you get longer stretches of it).

Like most startups, we also operate at breakneck pace, we're not exactly sitting around twiddling our thumbs. This strikes me as the same as "I don't have time to..." excuses people make in their personal lives. If you value it enough, you will find a place for it.

It's all about how much you actually value the 10%-time, or if it's just a recruiting/PR gimmick. If the company approaches it from a "it would be nice if..." angle, it will always find a million things that are higher-priority than 10%-time. If you approach it from the "this is a critical part of company strategy" angle, you will find ways to keep it sacrosanct.

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

#113

Post by jmatthews »

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.

I'm not sure you could back that up with case studies. Most companies are disrupted because they focus too narrowly. They also tend to think they're in the "tool" business when they grew successful as a solution business. E.G. Whip and Buggy company think they're in the buggy business, get disrupted by a company that thinks they're in the transportation business.

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

#114

Post by arcosdev »

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…

Shareholder primacy trumps all

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

#115

Post by skittles »

It's human nature to stop "screwing around" in order to get "real" work done and make your boss happy. The only way to keep 20% time is to force everyone to take it. If others on your team stop doing it, then the competitive balance isn't fair anymore. If your boss can get away with unofficially taking it from you, then she will. Something like 20% time must be in the company policies with punishment for those that discourage it.

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

#116

Post by grsites »

winter_blue wrote: post #68

> Six months after he took the reins, Page announced that Google would adopt a “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy that would put more of Google’s resources and employees behind a smaller number of projects. This meant killing off Google Labs, which had previously been Google’s showcase for its experimental projects—many of them products of employees’ 20% time. Guess who advised Larry Page to focus on a small nu…

On the other hand, focusing on a small number of great products is what Apple always did under Jobs. The first thing Jobs did when he came back to Apple was jettison superfluous products and concentrate on what Apple was good at. Seems to me like he was giving genuine advice.

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

#117

Post by tomasien »

Isn't their continued investment in things like Google X sort of the more scalable replacement to 20% time, now that not all of the engineers are brilliant and driven? Just kind of a natural result of scale - find the people that were actually using 20% time and give them 100% time.

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

#118

Post by elliottcarlson »

potatolicious wrote: post #112
elliottcarlson wrote: post #78

My previous employer had a 10% time in place - which while in theory was a great idea, I found myself always too busy to take advantage of the time. This is in no fault to my employer, or my direct management - but lets face it - at a startup, there is little room to not be working. When you already are coding long hours, trying to make quick changes, implementing new features constantly - there just isn't enough tim…

I disagree. I currently work at a startup with 10% time, and barring rare "the servers are on fire!" events, we're pretty religious about doing it. Even when we skip it, it's credited so we can take it later (arguably better since you get longer stretches of it). Like most startups, we also operate at breakneck pace, we're not exactly sitting around twiddling our thumbs. This strikes me as the same as "I don't have t…

I was often encouraged to just take the 10% time - and perhaps it is an excuse on my part, but at the same time I valued my work and took pride in accomplishing certain tasks that I felt that that work was far more important. In the end, I did spend some time on personal projects that ended up getting implemented, but in the year and a half I was there, it was definitely not an often used perk (on my part).

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

#119

Post by api »

wslh wrote: post #96
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…

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. This is the con of being a public company: a lot of cynicism. Imagine that you have inside information that Blackberry will revolutionize the mobile market, you will put money in their stocks and may be move on fast once it increases significantl…

I've had a speculation for a while that this is why Google, Apple, and many other tech giants like to keep their stock float small and thus their stock price per share very high. I wonder if it's a way of trying to select for longer-term investors. ???

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

#120

Post by mkolodny »

ferdo wrote: post #11

I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998: “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.” “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” “Advertising income often provides an incentiv…

This is an interesting point, but I don't see how it relates to Google doing away with 20% time.
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