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

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.

The same thing may have happened at HP, but at Google is isn't happening (yet). It may happen but to claim that 20% time is gone is simply false.

Do you have information that contradicts the description in the article? Because the article claims that the 20% time is still "official policy", but that employees are expected to still put in 100% time on their normal project (and measured on doing so) and that they also need permission to start a "20% time" project and finally that management has been instructed to be parsimonious in granting this permission.

The article claims that "20% time" at Google is no longer real; do you dispute this?