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

(qz.com)
581 points antr | 2 comments | 16 Aug 13 12:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.428s | source
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donw ◴[16 Aug 13 12:59 UTC] No.6223679[source]▶
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, rather than what was necessary for the next step of the company, and now HP is a mere shadow of its former glory -- directionless and bleeding.

3M and Corning have largely avoided this fate, but it seems that Google won't. 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. Yet somehow, I'm incredibly sad, as it seems that too many companies go down this road.

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officemonkey ◴[16 Aug 13 13:13 UTC] No.6223758[source]▶
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 a knock-off.

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david927 ◴[16 Aug 13 13:19 UTC] No.6223789[source]▶
That's what Yahoo thought, 15 years ago.
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1. lmm ◴[16 Aug 13 13:28 UTC] No.6223843[source]▶
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.
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2. notacoward ◴[16 Aug 13 13:55 UTC] No.6223970[source]▶
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.