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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: 0.202s | source
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smackfu ◴[16 Aug 13 12:40 UTC] No.6223589[source]▶
Honestly, this completely makes sense given how Google has been killing off non-profitable products lately. Why pay engineers to work on projects that will never meet a business case? This isn't the olden days of Google, where they would shovel anything out there and see if it stuck.
replies(4): >>6223739 #>>6223773 #>>6223980 #>>6224660 #
1. Laremere ◴[16 Aug 13 13:58 UTC] No.6223980[source]▶
Google Wave failed quite horribly. However the resulting technology developed has been rolled into Docs, revolutionizing how Docs is used for collaboration.

There was a good image I saw on reddit awhile back that I can't find off hand. On the left was titled what most people view success and failure as, and it had a single branch, you fail or you succeed. Then it had what successful people view it as, and it was a chain of failure after failure finally leading to a success.

If you eliminate failure, you eliminate the success you gain from learning from failures.