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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 | 1 comments | 16 Aug 13 12:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | 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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1. blktiger ◴[16 Aug 13 13:48 UTC] No.6223928[source]▶
The main difference in my mind is that innovation in software is relatively cheap compared to innovation in material goods. With material goods, the only way to know if your innovation works is to make a bunch of it and hope it sells. Software just wastes a little employee time and maybe a bit of server space/bandwidth. Plus, with software even if the whole project fails you can often recover parts of it to use elsewhere.