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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

#161

Post by api »

ferdo wrote: post #146
mkolodny wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just watching as an interested outsider for all these years and partly based on the paper quoted above, much of Google's early energy and innovation was based on the simple idea of extending and applying knowledge of the new field in service to users. When that focus shifted to exactly what Page and Brin had criticized themselves in 1998, we can clearly see that it's not the interests of the users being served anymor…

I sometimes do wonder what would have happened if they'd decided to charge for their search engine.

Of course, putting it behind a paywall would have been a failure. But they could have possibly done a freemium model, offering better and more detailed search capability for a small monthly or yearly fee.

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

#162

Post by zeckalpha »

shin_lao wrote: post #111
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.

Actually, Apple (1988-1998) is a perfect example.

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

#163

Post by ryanbrunner »

varelse wrote: post #138
JabavuAdams wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: productive people. We have this notion of the 10x producer, but the real problem is high variability within the same person's work. I know productivity superstars, but if you catch them on the wrong day or at the wrong time, they look like lazy bums. Over a year, they're extremely productive. On any given day, they may look like they're wasting time. This property of conceptual work is at the core of a lot of cul…

1,000x yes! My productivity comes in intense bursts of effort, with quiescent periods of research and reflection between them (or what looks like goofing off to rigidly process-oriented sorts). Combine that variability with mandatory daily scrum meetings and it makes me want to figuratively slit my wrists.

I'll even go a step further. I have a reputation as one of those people who has an ability to get things done at an incredible pace, but there's definitely days where I'm flat-out procrastinating and being lazy.

For me, personally, and I suspect other people like me, it comes down to an ability to perform remarkably well under pressure, along with a lack of ability to perform well when the pressure is off. If there's no urgency to what I need to do, I find it very hard to commit myself to doing something.

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

#164

Post by calinet6 »

dekhn wrote: post #135
VikingCoder wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my last job, I had to wait two weeks to get a VM created and assigned to me. At my current job, I can't get a port opened to make an OUTBOUND connection to Amazon Web Services. Yeah, working at Google, it's definitely easier to use big tools to try new things, huh?

We have a lot of perks, including great food, but ultimately it comes down to: 1) awesome coworkers I learn from daily 2) access to infrastructure and few barriers 3) a competent IT team for corporate IT The combination of the three is rare in industry.

What I'm hearing is that the dream of Google has been reduced to some characteristic bullet points and a reasonably positive conclusion.

This isn't a criticism or negativity, all things considered it seems to be a great company to work for; it just seems to be a bit more homogenized than it used to be.

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

#165

Post by dscb »

wslh wrote: post #130
api wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ???

I am not sure because you can own half of an stock. For example if you invest in ETFs you don't an integer number of stocks.

The shares of stock in an EFT are controlled by an independent group. Essentially you are buying shares of someone else's shares.

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

#167

Post by zeckalpha »

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…

The difference between Google's advertisements and OpenText's is Google (usually) identifies advertisements as advertisements.

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

#168

Post by api »

bane wrote: post #155
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 watched them do shit like destroy products that big customers had money in hand ready to pay for when they were inches away from release. I'm watching friends in two different, reasonably large consulting companies (~700-1000 employees) suffer as their respective companies go through the consulting version of this kind of MBA suicide. In one case the company even decided to change their name and go through a rebr…

"At one company I used to work for, I also saw my leadership completely lose their minds and fire off all of the development staff, thinking we could coast with a new sales team and the product we had and pull ourselves into profitability."

LOLZ

I watched this particular face-plant occur once as well. When they actually got customers the results were hilarious. Hilarious because I was not a direct employee, mind you.

It was like having a high-end trendy restaurant with excellent branding, great decor, a great location, and no food. So they run across the street to McDonalds and order fifty Big Macs, run back over, dress them up on plates (who will notice), and...

Running out of money sucks, but this maneuver was destined to fail from the get-go. Anyone who knows anything about tech could have told them that. One smarter alternative would have been to lean the development staff -- they had to -- and hire a small number of salespeople on contract (not full time) and offer them disproportionate bonuses to bring in sales.

What they actually did was fire anyone who knew how to make anything -- and in a way that burned bridges! -- and hire a bunch of sales guys full time and at full salary. Hilarity ensued.

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

#169

Post by bane »

Spooky23 wrote: post #91
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…

From a management perspective, you're forgetting about the obvious: the less than productive people. The benefit of giving employees no- or few-strings attached time to work on whatever is clear. Things like GMail, Apple 1, etc. The "cost" is that people are doing things that don't necessarily contribute to the bottom line -- for every GMail, there are 1,000 low-impact ideas. When your ability to make money hand over…

In the case of Google's 20%. The numbers are easy to quantify, how much does 20% of the engineering staff's time cost? How much money has the output of 20% time earned? It might be that Google thought the work was too unfocused, and outside of some pretty obvious early big hits, fairly little else of value was coming out of the work year after year.

The best way to deal with it, I think, is to have people submit proposals, pick the best, then take those people out of regular work for a few months and put them into a "lab" where they come up with an MVP. If it looks good at that stage, invest more in the idea.

but...oh yeah...Google got rid of "Labs".

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

#170

Post by mindcrime »

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.

When you're a big company, you usually get disrupted because you lost focus.

That sounds completely backwards to me. Big companies get disrupted because they are too locked-in to milking their current cash cow, and they either don't see - or consciously choose to ignore - any threat to that cash cow. It's more like a case of myopia combined with tunnel-vision, IMO.

Meanwhile, scrappy upstarts are experimenting and trying new ideas, find a better new approach, and can launch it and start growing it, while $BIGCORP remains blissfully unaware, until it's too late. Basically, the classic Innovator's Dilemma situation.

And while $BIGCORPs often ignore disruptive innovations even when they develop them themselves, it still seems to me that you're better off to be the one developing the disruptive innovation yourself, so you at least have a shot at adapting before somebody else comes along and takes your lunch money.

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