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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

#441

Post by freshhawk »

api wrote: post #161
ferdo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they hadn't done advertising then many of the non-search products (Gmail especially) could have been behind a paywall. The brand recognition from search would build the other businesses for them.

All the analytics, google alerts, etc would have been non-free products as well.

It just would have made them much, much, much less money.

But god damn that search engine would be amazing by now.

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

#442

Post by Cookingboy »

spankalee wrote: post #243
enraged_camel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Church (an outspoken ex-Googler) would disagree with you. One thing I remember him saying that was verified by several other Googlers, both current and ex, is that whether you are allowed 20% time depends on your team and your manager. And in fact, most teams in Google do not get 20% time, so you may be one of the lucky ones.

Michael Church is someone who is not worth listening to. He made massively incorrect assertions while at Google, and continues to after he basically talked himself out of his job in a very public way. Engineers get 20% time period. You can be asked to defer it for a quarter. On the other hand, most don't take it.

I'm a Googler myself and my manager has told us that although 20% time is ok, we should only do it if the project has some direct contribution to the core work we work on. Really depends on the team/department you work at, the policy is there to allow it, but different team have different culture. I believe it's more discouraged in certain departments such as Android and Social (G+) (those teams are probably under more constant pressure to "produce") than some of the more "old school" departments.

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

#443

Post by ericd »

dkrich wrote: post #390
JPKab wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This community is getting worse every day." You've been in "this community" for less than 3 months according to your username. I'm not SV technorati, and I've run a business, as well as been a founder in a non-tech business that grew to 150 employees. I know business, and I know what I said is correct. "SV technorati" is itself a stereotype.

Yep, absolutely correct. Well, save for Nike, which was founded by an MBA. Oh yeah, and Apple, whose CEO has an MBA and was personally selected by Steve Jobs. Well, now that I think about it, Meg Whitman, the current CEO of HP and former CEO of eBay has an MBA. And wasn't Bonobos founded by a Stanford MBA? I think Birchbox was born by a group of MBA's as well. Except for those and probably thousands of other exceptio…

Did I miss HP turning around and becoming an awesome company again? Has Apple been doing as well as it did under Jobs? Do you think it still will be in 5 years?

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

#444

Post by dragonwriter »

varelse wrote: post #439
dragonwriter wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that every incarnation of Agile that I've encountered is a rigid implementation of scrum plus sprint planning plus Jira. This is not a problem with Agile; anything that works anywhere will lead to imitations that steal the name and attempt to extract some simple recipe from the "lessons" of that thing that worked. > While I agree that this is against the agile manifesto, that's no excuse. This is how it ends…

If the Agile Manifesto were just that and little more, I'd agree with you... But instead it has become an enormous metastasizing moneymaker for minting Certified Scrum Masters, Certified Scrum Product Owners, Agile Certified Practitioners, and all sorts of other Agile titles for $1000+ a pop. So I guess we're going to have to disagree because I think this means a little ownership of the issues that arise in the pract…

> But instead it has become an enormous metastasizing moneymaker for minting Certified Scrum Masters, Certified Scrum Product Owners, Agile Certified Practitioners, and all sorts of other Agile titles for $1000+ a pop.

As long as there are people looking for packaged solutions and willing to pay top dollar for them, there will be people willing to sell them to you under any name that you ask.

But if the name on the tin is refers to something diametrically opposed to that kind of packaged-solution approach, well, its probably not going to be an accurate label.

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

#445

Post by YZF »

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…

To be honest the world has also changed while this was happening. HP used to make quality stuff that people would pay more for. Today for the most part they have succumbed to commoditization where it's a race to the bottom. When people (for the most part) put price ahead of quality there's less value for things that create quality.

That said there's lot of penny wise pound foolish style thinking everywhere. That also tends to relate to the growth of the business to the point where management can't really figure out what going on any more (assuming they could at some point).

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

#446

Post by Apocryphon »

JPKab wrote: post #326
onebaddude wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The top-10 MBA cult is awful." SV technorati pretentiousness is awful. > "MBA people love to go to school and get pieces of paper that say "pay me I'm smart." As opposed to some "Silicon Valley" types that don't have a clue about what it means to run a business, and say "pay me with investors money, I have lots of users!" > "I have to go in and deal with these assholes all the time. I have hard numbers, they have…

"This community is getting worse every day." You've been in "this community" for less than 3 months according to your username. I'm not SV technorati, and I've run a business, as well as been a founder in a non-tech business that grew to 150 employees. I know business, and I know what I said is correct. "SV technorati" is itself a stereotype.

Perhaps all stereotypes are harmful and should be avoided.

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

#447

Post by lukejduncan »

dekhn wrote: post #122

I am a Googler. I will only speak to my personal experience, and the experience of people around me: 20% time still exists, and is encouraged as a mechanism to explore exciting new ideas without the complexity and cost of a real product. My last three years were spent turning my 20% project into a product, and my job now is spent turning another 20% project into a product. There was never any management pressure from…

> Calling 20% time 120% time is fair. Realistically it's hard to do your day job productively and also build a new project from scratch. You have to be willing to put in hours outside of your normal job to be successful.

LinkedIn'er here.

One of the things I love about our culture is InDay/HackDay. It works out to less than 20% time, but the entire company is given 1 day a month - generally the middle Friday - to do anything they want. This results in a lot of things ranging from prototyping ideas; learning new tools (I spent my day today brushing up on Scala); or just taking a fitness class.

The best part? The day is honored. It's not 100+n% time. Unless you own something that is bleeding money or users from a serious bug no one is going to come to you and ask you to do anything other maybe grab a beer.

I know we're not the only company doing this, I think Twitter has hack weeks every quarter, but it's a huge differentiator from our neighbors.

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

#448

Post by sytelus »

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…

Companies like Google are not limited by money, they are limited by available people. There are only 1.3 million professional software developers in US. Make it 2 million to account for immigrable developers. Now you want to hire top 1% of the best of the best. How many can you hire? It's not money limitation, it's people limitation.

About MBAs, I don't think changes at Google is because of MBA-invasion. Most of the changes we see today at Google are actually directly influenced by Steve Jobs. When Larry Page became CEO, he requested mentoring meeting with Jobs which he surprisingly granted even though he was very angry about Android. The strongest point Jobs made to Larry was that company should do only 5 things and do it very well (paraphrase). Larry took this to heart and realized Google was extremely fragmented with lots of small undirected efforts going no where. Rest is the history... It's debatable if Google's old model was better than new one. Personally I think the best thing for a company is to keep continuous balance between two extremes. Historically, companies starts believing in one end, drift there and then realize that it's too much then drift towards another end.

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

#449

Post by ctl »

thisisnotatest wrote: post #426
thisisnotatest wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, michaelochurch. His experience was extremely atypical. He had a legitimately awful time at Google. I don't know what happened between him and his manager and team so I can't say who or what was to blame. But I think he was put on a performance improvement plan (whether fairly or unfairly). And I think it would make sense to most people that an employee on a performance improvement plan would be strongly disco…

Oh, and, unfortunately, he has a known history for creating sockpuppet accounts, which unfortunately makes me unrecoverably skeptical of anyone who cites or endorses his ideas.

Citation?

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

#450

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

I think that due to new focus on google+ the company is now less able to adopt new projects, if the new idea does not originate from project management. With google+ all features have to be integrated, so simply there is also less incentive/room for innovation; things that stand out of the google+ user experience must be cut for the sake of consistency;

This tendency is self enforcing: If there is less opportunity for the side project to make it then developers will be less inclined to follow through with the idea.

So as an outside observer I can identify a cycle: less room for innovation breeds less incentive for an individual to come up with initiative. Management sees that its liberalism is besides the point, so free room for initiative is scrapped.

Maybe google can still keep on to a culture of innovation in areas of infrastructure and research, but in a wider sense google+ probably did them in.

Maybe that is the right thing to do: they have enough money to buy any start-up if it looks promising. I don't know which one is more cost effective: exploring ideas in-house or buying out start-ups; however if Google looks like any other ordinary shop then it will be less able to attract top talent. I would guess that the free food is not the winning perk that attracts developers.

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