I just wanted to bring up a counterpoint. I work on Google Moderator, with a smattering of other 20%ers. My boss semi-discouraged me from putting time into it (

I just wanted to bring up a counterpoint. I work on Google Moderator, with a smattering of other 20%ers. My boss semi-discouraged me from putting time into it (he would prefer I spent my "20% time" on a project within my department), but its been a pretty positive experience all around. When we were used by change.gov (and then whitehouse.gov), we basically all took a deep breath and asked very politely that the appengine guys turn up the scaling-knob. (And miscellaneous other jiggery-pokery that deserves tons of praise but I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to talk about it.) We built on Google infrastructure (app engine, gwt), and pulled in people from all over who were interested. I don't think it has much profit potential (which is part of why I like working on it), but the concept of being able to take a nifty idea and transform it into a working product that has more users than anything else I've ever directly made? Thats pretty awesome. (This is basically why I joined Google actually. The food is definitely better than warmed-up pizza, or the hot pockets I've eaten elsewhere ;) but the technology, infrastructure and people are all awesome. There are definitely rough patches, but compared to the 3 startups I've worked at, there certainly are advantages to being able to shout for help and have people come running.)