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

> 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 number of projects? Steve Jobs.[1] It seems like Larry's acceptance of Jobs' advice has sabotaged Google. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but one does wonder if this was Jobs' secret intention.

[1] See the second quote in: http://www.edibleapple.com/2011/10/22/steve-jobs-advice-to-l...

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.

I think it lines up with how Jobs ran Apple. He killed a ton of "blue sky" research projects after he took over as CEO, and Apple under his leadership spent a lot less on research than Microsoft or Google.

He was giving genuine advice for himself. Apple did awesome with focus and top-down management because the guy at the top was Steve Jobs, who has an uncanny knack for sensing what the market needs. But companies are different: what was a core competency of Apple is something that Google doesn't have, and Google has various other core competencies that Apple never had. The general rule of business is "play to your strengths", not "emulate the winner".