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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: 0.206s | source
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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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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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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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1. 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).