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> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a

> Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. Big tech is in a really tough spot when it comes to innovation. Google has developed a reputation for killing off products too easily. Many have commented here and elsewhere that you can’t trust them to invest in using their new products because they might just kill it off and leave you in the lurch. Of course, you get a self fulfilling prophecy as then too few people use the product for fear that it’ll get killed off. But I’m guessing Google is also more hesitant to launching a new products that since it neither wants to worsen its reputation for killing them, nor does it want to support a product indefinitely, even if it’s not profitable. So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits. Google actually is investing in a lot of very transformative technologies—AI obviously, but also quantum computers, biotech, and autonomous vehicles. Those are things that just aren’t well very well suited to 20% projects.

voiceblue 3y ago
The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.
- tonfa 3y ago
  Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. Buchheit was asked to work on it.
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    I thought Gmail or its predecessor was a third party/acquihire situation?
    - wyclif 3y ago
      No, Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He also developed AdSense as part of Gmail.
      - aspenmayer 3y ago
        I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?
        _heimdall 3y ago
        YouTube was a huge early acquisition for them around 2005 or 2006.
        aspenmayer 3y ago
        True, although I thought there was another big one whose name escapes me. Any ideas? Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.
        _heimdall 3y ago
        Looks like Wikipedia actually has the full list. DoubleClick and Waze are two other big ones that I remember seeming important at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
        aspenmayer 3y ago
        Thanks for that list! One of my favorite Wikipedia-isms are these very “list of” pages. I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-05-09/meet-the-cias-venture-capitalist https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel From that page: > As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized. > […] > While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded. https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cias-venture-capital-firm-like-its-sponsor-operates-in-the-shadows-1472587352 https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.c... Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_trading_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_...
  - jasode 3y ago
    >Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia: - >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:10-6:~:text=Google%20is%20credited%20for%20popularizing%20the%20practice%20that%2020%20percent%20of%20an%20employee%27s%20time%20may%20be%20used%20for%20side%20projects.%5B5%5D%20At%20Google%2C%20this%20led%20to%20the%20development%20of%20products%20such%20as%20Gmail%20and%20AdSense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1.... The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project: - >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.” : https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail%20is%20often,an%20email%20thing.%E2%80%9D https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
  - veselin 3y ago
    The product they often presented as started in 20% time is Google news. I don't know the actual details, just this is what I remember from my time at Google (2006-2012).
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  It's not a myth. I had a successful 20% project when I was there and I was nobody special. I started an anti-bot system in 2010 and by 2014 it had become integrated into most of the top products. Last I heard there is a whole team working on it still, and there were also spinoffs. That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it. It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines. I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project. I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.
  - voiceblue 3y ago
    I appreciate your comment and anecdata, and I’m glad you commented here. That being said, I’m not sure whether it is you or I who does not know what “quasi” means.
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      I think we both have a quasi-understanding of the word :)
huevosabio 3y ago
They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP. Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons: * Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google * most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP * A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk * Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere). It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
  - wyclif 3y ago
    Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.
    - cjmcqueen 3y ago
      I'm hard pressed to remember a feature in Wave that does not exist in Docs now. What is it that you miss? I just remember it being dog slow with a lot of latency.
skybrian 3y ago
Even in the early days, I don't believe Google was all that fast about launching new products? The "fail fast" stuff was about people working on blue-sky ideas that failed to get traction before they were launched, or maybe just launched in Google Labs [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs
eftychis 3y ago
The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name. There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product. If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.
- eastbound 3y ago
  > There is little to no “this is an experimental project by x team” They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long. Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1]. [1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-reader-comes-out-of-beta/ https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...
  - khuey 3y ago
    Google Domains was born in 2015, exited beta in 2022, and was killed in 2023.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  They do that, this is what their various Labs and subsidiaries and internal accelerators are there for. The issue is that people figure out it's associated with Google and then expect it to be maintained as such.
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    I do wonder how people figured out that Google was associated with Google+, Google Inbox, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Video, Google Wave, ... (I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mizzao 3y ago
I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.
- esafak 3y ago
  I don't understand why they never fixed the incentives.
lutarezj 3y ago
https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/ Google’s reputation is not only in innovation
Rebelgecko 3y ago
FWIW, the only person I've ever actually met with a 20% project was working on quantum
- cjmcqueen 3y ago
  I had several 20% projects from 2012 to 2016, all of which were on the Cloud Business side (ie not engineering). It was very much a thing up until Larry Page stepped down as CEO
mcmcmc 3y ago
> So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits. And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.

voiceblue 3y ago

The success of 20% projects is a quasi-myth. Gmail is often touted, but you would do well to look up the employee # at Google of the inventor. Point being, you need (very) early hire clout or your 20% project isn’t going anywhere either.

tonfa 3y ago
Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. Buchheit was asked to work on it.
- aspenmayer 3y ago
  I thought Gmail or its predecessor was a third party/acquihire situation?
  - wyclif 3y ago
    No, Buchheit was employee #23 at Google. He also developed AdSense as part of Gmail.
    - aspenmayer 3y ago
      I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?
      - _heimdall 3y ago
        YouTube was a huge early acquisition for them around 2005 or 2006.
        aspenmayer 3y ago
        True, although I thought there was another big one whose name escapes me. Any ideas? Thanks for mentioning that for the rest of HN’s sake.
        _heimdall 3y ago
        Looks like Wikipedia actually has the full list. DoubleClick and Waze are two other big ones that I remember seeming important at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
        aspenmayer 3y ago
        Thanks for that list! One of my favorite Wikipedia-isms are these very “list of” pages. I’m pretty sure it was Keyhole, for what it’s worth. Curiously, both Google and Keyhole are In-Q-Tel investments, although I’m not sure if that impacted/steered/influenced the acquisition, however. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-05-09/meet-the-cias-venture-capitalist https://web.archive.org/web/20130605121646/http://www.busine... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel From that page: > As of 2016, In-Q-Tel listed 325 investments, but more than 100 were kept secret, according to the Washington Post. The absence of disclosure can be due to national security concerns or simply because a startup company doesn’t want its financial ties to intelligence publicized. > […] > While In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit corporation, it differs from IARPA and other models in that its employees and trustees can profit from its investment. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that in 2016, nearly half of In-Q-Tel's trustees had a financial connection with a company the corporation had funded. https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cias-venture-capital-firm-like-its-sponsor-operates-in-the-shadows-1472587352 https://web.archive.org/web/20160831020609/https://www.wsj.c... Which is to say, apparently insider trading isn’t just “illegal except when Congress/the President does it, except when it is illegal, actually,” if I’m parsing all this correctly; apparently In-Q-Tel gets special treatment too, in some cases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_trading_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_congressional_insider_tra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#By_members_of_...
- jasode 3y ago
  >Gmail wasn't a 20%, I don't know why anyone thinks it is. It's because some media stories used GMail as an example of a 20% project -- and -- those stories also end up being cited in places like Wikipedia: - >Google is credited for popularizing the practice that 20 percent of an employee's time may be used for side projects. At Google, this led to the development of products such as Gmail and AdSense. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:10-6:~:text=Google%20is%20credited%20for%20popularizing%20the%20practice%20that%2020%20percent%20of%20an%20employee%27s%20time%20may%20be%20used%20for%20side%20projects.%5B5%5D%20At%20Google%2C%20this%20led%20to%20the%20development%20of%20products%20such%20as%20Gmail%20and%20AdSense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time#cite_note-:1.... The Time Magazine article is one of the places where they say GMail was not a 20% project: - >Gmail is often given as a shining example of the fruits of Google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divvy off part of their work hours for personal projects. Paul Buchheit, Gmail’s creator, disabused me of this notion. From the very beginning, “it was an official charge,” he says. “I was supposed to build an email thing.” : https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail%20is%20often,an%20email%20thing.%E2%80%9D https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
- veselin 3y ago
  The product they often presented as started in 20% time is Google news. I don't know the actual details, just this is what I remember from my time at Google (2006-2012).
mike_hearn 3y ago
It's not a myth. I had a successful 20% project when I was there and I was nobody special. I started an anti-bot system in 2010 and by 2014 it had become integrated into most of the top products. Last I heard there is a whole team working on it still, and there were also spinoffs. That wasn't only a 20% project but a secret one! For several months I told my manager in daily standups that today was my 20% day, and that it was related to what the team did, but not what the project actually was. Everyone was cool with it. It's possible that this was achievable only because I worked in an operational role. We had firefights that sometimes disrupted my ability to take the 20%, but you could partially bank the time and there weren't top-down imposed project deadlines. I also used and experienced many other people's 20% projects whilst I was there. Many were small internal tools and systems that made working life easier but weren't the right size/shape to be staffed up as a full project with management attention, but some were products. At one point someone did a project that let you bid against yourself in the ad auction, to experiment with how to pay to remove ads. IIRC that was a 20% project. Google's early reputation for ML skill was established on the outside by Google Sets, a (for the time) astonishing demo that revealed Google was no mere fancy keyword matcher but had semantic understanding of words too. Pretty sure that was also a 20% project. I felt pretty strongly at the time that the 20% policy was one of Google's secret weapons. The disdain and disinterest with which it's so often greeted outside of Google's walls is puzzling and sad, as is the quasi-myth that it didn't exist at all. I can believe that it existed to varying degrees depending on where and when you were, but, it's definitely not a myth.
- voiceblue 3y ago
  I appreciate your comment and anecdata, and I’m glad you commented here. That being said, I’m not sure whether it is you or I who does not know what “quasi” means.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    I think we both have a quasi-understanding of the word :)

huevosabio 3y ago

They could keep starting products and instead of killing them, release them as open source. Or one click deploy on GCP. Actually, that last one makes a lot of sense for pushing for more GCP adoption.

vlovich123 3y ago
Open source is very hard for a bunch of reasons: * Code at Google3 is one giant monolith that has dependencies on things that aren’t open sourced. Even if they could be, they don’t make sense outside of Google * most services internally run on internal services like Borg and GFS rather than GCP for historical reasons. That maybe has changed now but I suspect a lot of stuff depends on internal infra not available on GCP * A product can often have data dependencies. Just being able to spin up a separate copy may not mean much in terms of keeping a product alive past Google’s interest if the data is locked away behind Google’s private data stores. Then you want Google to start adding easy export options so that data can be exfiltrated from Google’s onto 3p versions of the product which is a legal, business, PR and technical risk * Google has invested some amount of money and resources into a product. If a competitor takes that concept and is successful it’s embarrassing to execs at Google who missed the opportunity. Google Wave was dropped even though in many ways it’s a precursor to slack (it was open sourced though and went nowhere). It’s a nice wish but I can’t imagine any realistic scenario where any business would go down this road until their shown a successful roadmap by a more enterprising business first.
- wyclif 3y ago
  Google Wave was my fave sunsetted project or Google graveyard project. First time I used it I could really see the potential. But as you pointed out, it's often not that simple.
  - cjmcqueen 3y ago
    I'm hard pressed to remember a feature in Wave that does not exist in Docs now. What is it that you miss? I just remember it being dog slow with a lot of latency.

skybrian 3y ago

Even in the early days, I don't believe Google was all that fast about launching new products? The "fail fast" stuff was about people working on blue-sky ideas that failed to get traction before they were launched, or maybe just launched in Google Labs [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Labs

eftychis 3y ago

The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name. There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product. If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated about experimenting.

eastbound 3y ago
> There is little to no “this is an experimental project by x team” They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long. Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1]. [1] https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-reader-comes-out-of-beta/ https://www.alphr.com/news/home-and-leisure/125603/google-re...
- khuey 3y ago
  Google Domains was born in 2015, exited beta in 2022, and was killed in 2023.
saagarjha 3y ago
They do that, this is what their various Labs and subsidiaries and internal accelerators are there for. The issue is that people figure out it's associated with Google and then expect it to be maintained as such.
- Vinnl 3y ago
  I do wonder how people figured out that Google was associated with Google+, Google Inbox, Google Reader, Google Talk, Google Video, Google Wave, ... (I'm just kidding; I don't actually hold a grudge against Google for terminating projects. Although I do miss Inbox. And it does looks like Google Labs was killed too?)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mizzao 3y ago

I had understood that the main reason products were killed off so easily were the promotion incentives: you get big awards for launching a product, less so for maintaining it and growing it and doing the hard iteration work required to continue improving it.

esafak 3y ago
I don't understand why they never fixed the incentives.

lutarezj 3y ago

https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/ Google’s reputation is not only in innovation

Rebelgecko 3y ago

FWIW, the only person I've ever actually met with a 20% project was working on quantum

cjmcqueen 3y ago
I had several 20% projects from 2012 to 2016, all of which were on the Cloud Business side (ie not engineering). It was very much a thing up until Larry Page stepped down as CEO

mcmcmc 3y ago

> So then what? The answer probably should be that Google should buy up startups that have figured out product-market fit and just need to scale. They can’t do that though because the FTC is already breathing down their neck with anti-trust suits. And for damn good reason. That kind of behavior quashes competition and encourages that ZIRP era thinking of growth at all costs so you can get acquired before everyone realizes your business model sucks. Maybe they should just focus on their core business so they don’t get buried in the shift to AI.