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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: 0.2s | 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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1. YZF ◴[16 Aug 13 23:23 UTC] No.6227439[source]▶
To be honest the world has also changed while this was happening. HP used to make quality stuff that people would pay more for. Today for the most part they have succumbed to commoditization where it's a race to the bottom. When people (for the most part) put price ahead of quality there's less value for things that create quality.

That said there's lot of penny wise pound foolish style thinking everywhere. That also tends to relate to the growth of the business to the point where management can't really figure out what going on any more (assuming they could at some point).