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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 | 8 comments | 16 Aug 13 12:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.642s | source | bottom
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leoc ◴[16 Aug 13 12:58 UTC] No.6223673[source]▶
Wasn't the "all the wood behind one arrow" motto famous for heralding the decline of Sun Microsystems?
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jusben1369 ◴[16 Aug 13 13:04 UTC] No.6223699[source]▶
In all fairness 18 months ago the perception of Google is it was doing a LOT of things but none of them very well. Embarrassing attempts at social networks (wave, err, that other one I'm forgetting) is just one example. So narrowing their focus (still) seems like a good idea. But having great engineers is the most important thing for any success so not sure why you'd take away a mystical founding pillar of your culture.
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1. toyg ◴[16 Aug 13 13:32 UTC] No.6223862[source]▶
>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 userbase in developing countries is an insurance policy for the future, if you can keep it going).

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2. tikhonj ◴[16 Aug 13 14:05 UTC] No.6224027[source]▶
He probably meant Google Buzz, which was an unmitigated failure. Orkut, all things considered, is actually reasonably successful.
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3. toyg ◴[16 Aug 13 14:13 UTC] No.6224071[source]▶
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).
4. riffraff ◴[16 Aug 13 14:35 UTC] No.6224216[source]▶
More likely imho, he meant google buzz
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5. jacquesm ◴[16 Aug 13 14:51 UTC] No.6224318[source]▶
or + ?
6. jusben1369 ◴[16 Aug 13 16:45 UTC] No.6225119[source]▶
I did mean buzz. I think Orkut was an acquisition if I remember correctly.
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7. toyg ◴[16 Aug 13 17:14 UTC] No.6225338[source]▶
I'm sure it was a 20% but I could misrember, it was a long time ago.

EDIT: Wikipedia says "Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google. Orkut Büyükökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google. While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, In Circle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on In Circle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in Orkut that also existed in Circle."

8. seunosewa ◴[16 Aug 13 20:40 UTC] No.6226631[source]▶
For what it's worth, I really loved Google Buzz, and all the techies I knew used it, but we didn't migrate to Google+ when Google Buzz was discontinued. We were just very sad.