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The Decline of '20% Time' at Google
One of the things Google is known for is giving their employees so-called '20% time' — that is, the freedom to use a fifth of their working hours to pursue their own projects. Many of these projects have directly improved Google's existing products, and some have spawned new products entirely. An article at Quartz on Friday made that claim that 20% time was all but dead at Google, largely due to interference from upper management. Some Google engineers responded, and said that it has essentially turned into 120% time — they're still free to undertake their own projects, but they typically need their whole normal work week to meet productivity goals. "What 20% time really means is that you- as a Google eng- have access to, and can use, Google’s compute infrastructure to experiment and build new systems. The infrastructure, and the associated software tools, can be leveraged in 20% time to make an eng far more productive than they normally would be." An article at Ars makes the case that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now, making the more innovative 20% time less useful. "Google wasn’t hurting for successful products when it started to tout its 20 percent time: off the backs of its pre-IPO services, it earned a market cap of over $23 billion. But if it was a company that wanted to grow and diversify beyond products that were either related to search or derivative of what already existed, it needed more ideas, better ideas, as quickly as possible. Hence, liberal use of 20 percent time made a lot of sense. Now, Google is not only an enormous company of nearly 45,000 employees with a market cap twelve times that of its first IPO ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great."
The stock market kills companies.
Isn't that what the MBAs and metric gurus teach?
Once again the Excel numbers make the day and if there is a hidden cost or an opportunity cost then it doesn't exist according to the CPA
http://saveie6.com/
Now that they got a product they want to stop looking for new ones. When people move on from android to something else, when browser vendors have a way to search the web without relying on Google and friends etc Google will have no replacement products.
R&D isn't something that is ever done. You can't just say: we have a product now so lets cut the expense of the engineering department. Your competitors are always looking to leapfrog you or make your entire business obsolete. That is why you hire smart people and pay them to keep thinking.
A change from a work environment where you can spend 20% of your time experimenting with new ideas you have, and 80% working on the "regular" mainline products, to one where you're expected to spend at least 100% of a regular workweek iterating on the "regular" products, seems like a bad thing from the perspective of the engineer at least. Ars seems to be arguing that it's not necessarily a bad thing for Google's stockholders, which is a pretty different question.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That can't seem to make the simplest of services work correctly, look nice, or make something profitable.
iGoogle was a perfectly simple product, needed a little love, but it was functional.
It could also easily have been made profitable. Nuked for tablet-crap and extensions.
How can you take a company seriously that can't even ADVERTISE their own products well? AN ADVERTISING COMPANY AT THAT.
Google Maps, the content for my town is OLDER THAN GOOGLE MAPS. That crap is from my CHILDHOOD. I can see the big wooden house out the back of the garden I was in. The town I live in has changed considerably. Entire buildings gone, entire sections of town added, entire streets knocked down and replaced, entire flats imploded and replaced. Both of the schools I went to are gone. What use is that? Even Bing Maps of all things is more up to date. That is just sad.
Sure, for the 20%-if-you-are-lucky people that will bother to look out for apps and extensions that are useful to them or even know the features to search for, they will be happy, but they are also the ones that will likely use your services less in the first place, especially with the whole spying crap going on recently.
Even people that use RSS feed sites probably don't know what an RSS feed is for the most part. This is why they exist. Descriptions for a lot of extensions are absolutely atrocious at times.
People are lazy. People GOOGLE for Facebook for crying out loud. What makes you think they even know about extensions. A lot of people think Google is their web browser!
But really, Google has made terrible decisions recently. They didn't need to nuke the thing in the first place, they could have just cut it down to a smaller allocation of time like 5%. Do-it-in-your-own-time just ruins any point of ever wanting to work at Google in the first place since they are just another company now.
Google were a very research-heavy company and it gave them absolutely glorious products. Now that they have essentially killed most of that, all it has resulted in is stagnation. The software world is constantly changing. The WEB is constantly changing. 20% time was the one thing keeping Google ahead of everyone else. Now they are just the same or even lesser than everyone else.
Having to use Bing Maps is terrible, Google. Please, save me. That flickering shit is atrocious on Bing Maps, why isn't that shit fixed Microsoft, that could cause seizures in some people!
Encourage employees to use the 20% time to Innovate within the existing projects; for example, by finding ways to make them better or lower their costs.
The value of people doing more than their jobs doesn't go away --- they just need to be more focused, in exactly, what those 20% projects are.
It's also only fair that the benefit of their 20% projects get included in their productivity. If an employee uses their intellectual resources to do something particularly innovative, they should be given an opportunity to reduce their required working hours by 50% with a net increase in pay and benefits, or an opportunity to move from "20% time" to "40% time" working on their own projects.
That is: the value delivered via the employee's hard work should be shared with the employee fairly. When the employee delivers more value than the average employee; they should be given back more opportunity.
On the other hand: if their 20% time doesn't win over management with a benefit within a year, perhaps they should get 15% time instead, from then on, until they can do better.
a few months before he died he had dinner with sergey to mentor him. he said you have too much crap that no one cares about and google needs to focus on what brings in the cash. that's when they started their purge of anything that doesn't make money
same with facebook steve. he had dinner with him as well to tell him what he thought was wrong with facebook
Everyone in a position of being judged wants to show that they're productive compared to others. Without a strong force to oppose the progression towards everyone doing everything they can to look busy, the trend in every business is to force everyone towards a saturation point of perceived effort.
That tends to include things like more time filling out checklists, more time in more kinds of meetings, "peter principle"-style promotions, increasingly redundant cross-checks with everyone your work touches, and inevitable legacy management of previous projects.
Many of those projects, of course, will be created with the goal of reducing the overhead of other things, and some will succeed - but the culture always seems to still shift towards everyone at least acting busy so they can focus on what they see as more important with the discretionary time they have.
It's the nature of perspective - people will always see things slightly differently, have different priorities, and compromises will be made in any cooperation in order to make something that serves the shared needs. The more "important" perspectives you bring in over time, the more difficult it tends to become to optimize the shared collaboration, and the more time is needed to find a working compromise. And everyone becomes busy just to work through the ever-growing details.
Ryan Fenton
More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great.
But GOOG isn't being priced by the stock market as a company that is just going to refine its existing set of ideas; it's priced as a company that is going to "grow and diversify beyond [existing] products."
Did you notice what happened to AAPL when the market decided that Apple is only going to make its existing ideas great instead of continuing to diversify beyond existing products? Nearly cut their company value in half ... and Google simply isn't as cash-rich as Apple is which means they depend more on external money supplies.
In most other jobs 20% time would be better described as, "Use 20% of your time to come up with ways the company can make more money off of you". It is interesting how at Google it takes on a different meaning.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"Business is a good game lots of competition and a minimum of rules.
You keep score with money."
Nolan Bushnell
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
The more MBAs in your organization the less innovation you will have.
They don't think in terms of success through better (or more diverse) products, only in squeezing maximum efficiency from everything - Marx would applaud them.
The original report of "For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects." can be explained well like this: people who are below average productivity in their team can't spare the time to work on 20% projects.
I don't think this is a harsh thing; it's just a fact of life.
By the way, the Google version of stack ranking (if I recall correctly from my time there) is something like "If you're a manager, and there's a guy on the team who isn't being very productive, make sure he knows about the problem, so he can do something about it."
Also not a harsh thing.
Google doesn't want to become a Cisco, where all the good ideas come from buying up little companies. I suspect that people of above average productivity at Google still have plenty of freedom to try experiments 20% time.
What has changed a bit is that since the mantra of the company became "Features, not products", those 20% experiments are almost always going to involve adding features or other improvements to existing products, not wholly new products.
And that's ok, too. There is a whole lot of room to add features and make things better under the hood.
You are now IBM.
Work harder for less. It's the American Way.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
... "stolen" from already established open source projects that were started and developed BY OTHERS, I have no idea what you rant.
Maybe people should learn how Google is the king of stealing code from open source projects and then claiming that they developed something.
Public companies have a lot of latitude in fulfilling their fiduciary interests to shareholders. Look at what bank CEO's (and Larry Ellison of Oracle) are paid now. Are they really worth a salary that is over 1000 times that of the average employee? Maybe they are sometimes, but certainly not when they are running the business into the ground with layoff's, bad decisions and huge losses.
IF QZ is correct- they probably are, as I've read this elsewhere- that the 20% time had ended, then it is Google management's decision. It isn't motivated by fiduciary interests to shareholders. Google could justify why it is necessary for their employees to have that 20% time. Maybe it really is necessary. I've read that Google employees have been leaving at a higher rates than in the past. But I'm not sure, can't remember sources for that.
tempus fugit
Motorola in 1981 they used to say "work smarter, not harder", we got comp time off for overtime worked, etc. After a while it became "work harder", and the comp time off went away, and overtime was expected with no compensation. A little while later it became "work!", followed by "work, goddamit!" where you were viewed unfavorably if you used company time to take a leak.
The bean counters always win...
I work for Google. 20% time is unpopular, undertaken by single-digit percentages of engineers. Despite that, the message coming down from management is generally positive.
My sense of the issue is that a lot of engineers are spooking at shadows, worried about their performance reviews if they spend 80% of their time on their teams' main business rather than 100%. The solution to this, as far as I am concerned, is to make sure there is someone who is willing to stand up and say positive things about your project at review time. Since Google has an intricate system of peer review, that should be enough.
And if you can't find _one_ person who thinks your project is a good idea, take some time to figure out what you are hoping to accomplish before continuing.
I too see that line of "laws require publicly traded companies to maximize stockholder profit" every so often. It is such a lazy argument that makes no sense, that it is hard to see how people accept it to repeat it in these discussions.
Sadly, we'll see it again in a month in a discussion about Microsoft or Nintendo or IBM. :(
At some companies, the management is exactly how you described (Eric Schmidt is like that, from what I can tell). But Google is not like other companies in terms of management. They even had Schmidt step down, so that Larry Page could be CEO again. Larry Page and Sergey Brin know that cost cutting at the expense of design and research is unwise. Well, they should. They did, in the past.. Maybe they are too distant now.
tempus fugit
I have an actual Bachelor's of Science in Business (w/ MIS concentration) to go with CS degree work (90'120 cr. hrs done for Bachelor's there too & way, Way, WAY Past the 60 cr. Associates) - I can tell you that by combining BOTH disciplines I was doing things MBA's couldn't - or, face it: I wouldn't be there doing it FOR them!
* In MIS coding you use business logic constantly via formulas that're proven, applicable, & that when applied are practicle, useful, & actually do work!
(Things like Shortest Path/Route for Logistics firms for instance - 80/20 rules, ROI, & many more come to mind as well... list goes on).
APK
P.S.=> So, as a single example thereof, I can answer "NO! I am better than that" by far as having more skills overall, Per 1 of my film heros Chieng "The Master of Sinanju"...
... apk
I expect a disproportionate number of the 20 percent skunk work projects that finally make it into released products (OK, "beta"), are quick to end up on the Google cut list as products that "didn't gain the expected traction with our customers." Easy come, easy go.
My last job was kinda odd this way, they were so frightened of me spending some extra time on my actual project to ensure it works in cases of bad input and to simplify some code that they laid me off. Of course, I was a bit cavalier about ensuring management backing.
I would call this a sign of the times, I currently work for some guy for free because he has an interesting project and yet I still don't want to fool around with stuff that needs doing but isn't highest priority. This is a startup and needs some help so I better show some manners.
But in general I squarely blame net energy decline for it. While it may look to some as if financial mismanagement caused this short term thinking craze that has gripped CEOs and associated ilk, I think it is actually the awareness that we really do have no future for projects mankind doesn't need anyway. If our world is turning into an energy starved wasteland much like the onion suggests:
http://knowyourmeme.com/videos/66081-the-onion
then there is really no need for engineers who have a passion for their job and improving their knowledge of highly complex systems that depend on a working industrial society for its continued existence. Ultimately you will be overspecialized in a field that due to its multiple hard dependencies has an increased probability of failure in an environment that is characterized by shortages and sub standard performance because somebody tried to follow the growth paradigm
by eating its own flesh, i.e. abused the trust still existing in society to sell a shoddy, substandard product while the usual drivers for growth like population growth and energy input have become unavailable.
Je me souviens.
An entire workweek (100%) to meet productivity goals you are being unproductive. The development of new projects (hardware or software) cannot be simply crammed into a given timeframe and measured by a performance metric. If you do this you get badly written code and less design time. Engineers need time to take a step back and look at the whole picture, to consider the project as a whole... this can't be easily measured in any significant fashion.
...you ruin projects with a dull blade. Because you cannot learn on the job (nobody should be reading the manual for a gun while in the trenches), the best thing company can do is provide this 20% time so the company can grow qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
The other day a Google tech recruiter (not a headhunter) contacted me about an interview at Google. This after I turned down a second interview with them seven years ago. Yes, seven years ago. It got me to thinking: Is Google that desperate for qualified employees that they are having to dig that deep into their interview files to find talent? After doing some research, it seems as though they want to interview me for a "technical sales engineering" position or some such thing. Still, this article and the fact that Google is searching their archives for help seems to point to a dwindling supply of technical types in the market.
And since I'm a few years older than Vince Vaughan, I seriously doubt I'd quite fit in anymore. Say what you want about The Internship, but Google's imprimatur was all over it.
The thing so many people don't realize is that 20% time was not invented to increase productivity or innovation. It was primarily intended as a mental health initiative to reduce mental fatigue. Certainly, "120% time" would not satisfy that purpose.
"because Google has enough good products that simply need iteration now,"
Actually no, Google has many good products that are becoming worse due to fiddling and iteration. Some things should be left ALONE. If you came into my house and fiddled with the layout of the buttons on my microwave, eventually I'm going to break your fingers. This needs to occur to some of the 'fiddlers' at Google right about now.
STOP
"20% time" is just a minor status perk like "company car" and not something you should put much long term value on.
Somehow, I've never had to justify my every working moment either as a permanent employee or contractor. I've devoted significant time in both positions to things I thought would benefit the money-source without worrying about how to justify it on a timesheet.
So essentially google retroactively downgraded the status of a majority of its workforce to mere peons.
Welcome to corporate bureaucracy Engies. Not surprised. You can only have so many "chiefs" and "innovators" on the payroll. They probably overfilled positions or used the title to attract people who were overqualified to apply.
Or the economy is doing so bad that it artificially filled low level positions with people more qualified causing them to be hired at incorrect rates. Because believe it or not people do try to throw you a bone now and then.
AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.
On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.
Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.
@de_machina
They no longer need those brilliant minds. Now they're going to put the patient on life support and milk the dying body for everything it's worth by moving development from engineers to iterating code monkeys.
In 10 years they'll be around the "Windows ME" stage of Microsoft's decline.
I'm sorry but Apple deserves what they get as Jobs knew for a decade his time was running out but right up almost to the bitter end he refused to groom his replacement and make sure the company would continue down the path he set. You read the emails and other behind the scenes stuff and its really hard to get the impression all that Jobs cared about was Jobs and that the company tanking when he died would just boost his legend that much more which was fine by him.
As for Google they need to remember who was ruling the roost when they started, Altavista and Yahoo...where are they now? Altavista is gone and Yahoo is a shell of its former self. Google NEEDS all those bright young people cooking up new products on their dime as that is what lets them stay ahead of the game and in tech if you sit on ass and just ride on existing products it really don't take long for the hot new thing to come out and steal your thunder. Remember folks once upon a time Yahoo and MSFT were kings and Apple had Michael Dell telling them to give the money to the shareholders and give up as they had NO chance to recover, in tech you innovate or you sit on ass and if you ain't doing one you are probably doing the other.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
After reading all the 3 FAs I see a pattern --- the overarching focus of "20%" has flushed out one crucial inefficiency, not that of the corporation (Google), but of the engineers, ie.,
Those who claim that "20% time enticement" has turned into "120% overtime nightmare" are the same ones having terrible time management skills
Those who do not know how to manage their time tend to blame "meeting productivity goals" on their inability to meet their goals while using their time effectively
I used to be very terrible on managing my own time - and ended up wasting too much time on unimportant/unnecessary/meaningless routines - looking back on what I had done, I realize that the change of mindset (plus the time management methodology that I'm practicing) has not only has prevented me from wasting time on meaningless routine, it enables me to invest my NEW FOUND FREE TIME to experiment on new things that I've always wanted to try
I bet not all Google Engineers are making the same complain - those who do practices time management still manage to hit their productivity goals within their preset time frame and use their 20% time exploring new ideas, just as it was intended to be
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/
But there is something else going on here.
Google was, a long time ago, a young idealistic company full of people that had drunk the Kool-Aid and were willing to pour out their energy into neat little side projects that one day might make Google greater.
Times have changed.
The smart folks at Google percolate their ideas on their own time in secret, and then bail out and start a "start-up" (and then possible sell the idea back to Google).
The whole "creativity" dynamic has changed at Google. It is still a pool of VERY smart people, but they know better than to give their ideas away for free.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Google is moving more towards hiring temporary employees. As a contractor, I wasn't eligible for the 20% time.
Even if Google doesn't "need" new ideas right now and execution is more important, once they get rid of 20% time and it disappears from the corporate culture, it will be VERY difficult to bring back. I worked at a place where they tried to promote 20%. It never gained traction because of management's inability to reallocate the 20% from pre-existing tasks. Some day when Google is in need of brilliant ideas, they will probably regret this move.
FTFY
for real, Steve Jobs is overrated as an 'tech innovator' I'll grant you...I could go on all day about it...
but there's no evidence that Jobs' legacy is as bad as you say...IMHO it is the reverse...
Jobs' wasn't an engineer. He was a marketer. We make a serious mistake when we look at major decisions Steve Jobs made and treat them as some sort of pattern for emulation.
He was hard headed and understood, as many salesman do, that you have to make a personal connection with the user.
He pushed through ideas whether they made sense or not based on his wild-eyed notions 'innovation'. Because American business is so risk-averse and because the competition was so egregiously poorly designed, by the law of averages some of his 'innovations' paid off well.
One that kills me is how, by fiat, Jobs decreed that the iPod 'just work' when you plug it in...
For over a decade, I'd have friends/family ask me for help 'putting music on my iPod'...because due to Jobs' wild-eyed 'user centered design' decree, the iPod would, when connected, automatically open itunes and start downloading your entire .mp3 library to the ipod, no matter how much space the ipod had or how big your music folder was...
It would start seemingly at a random place and go alphabetically until it was full.
By default, the iPod preferences in iTunes did NOT allow for the user to add or delete files to their iPod.
Non-tech friends/family would assume this is just how it worked...maybe make playlists to add songs.
It was ridiculous.
There are other examples.
Jobs' weilded user-centered design principles like barbarian...by sheer lack of options from competitors it was, comparitively 'more usable'...
Thank you Dave Raggett
It would be totally cool, and I am not sure the 20% consisted of this, but let the employees get together and use the 20% to fund projects that are bigger in scale. I wonder if Google has a process where an employee can submit a plan at a low level, then have it work its way up management, who then decides if a team will be created to work on that project. I would hate to see Google just giving its employees "goals" once a project is assigned and not based on the fear of being a slacker. Maybe an employee's performance needs to assessed not in numbers, but actually reviewed as to how effective they are in growing google. Or was this the old way?
Society use your Sciences
The reasons for the decline of 20% time are valid: Google has a huge number of products, it's not clear the the company is best served by spinning of many new ones when it can improve what it has.
On a personal level it might be rewarding, but I don't think it's a big factor in every employee's decision. I am about to start working at Google and I'm not sure if I will actually use my 20% time because the projects I will be working on for my main job are already extremely interesting and varied. Not having 20% time doesn't automatically imply that your job will be monotonous and boring.
"eventually I'm going to break your fingers. This needs to occur to some of the 'fiddlers' at Google right about now.
STOP"
Gmail and its admin panels were at there best 2 years ago. They've been "improved" to the point where they're now a pain in the ass. Google Docs was handy, Google Drive takes so long to load and update I no longer use them. At least Google lets me use the old style layout.
Google Sites is worthless. Google Checkout was interesting until every customer had to both have an account and be signed in, who was the moron specifiying that?
Google has jumped the shark.
Companies don't like that they have to pay for some form of R&D. This is essentially what 20% time is except it is open to all employees. So it is possible to make improvements in all facets of the company, not just certain strategic areas. Of course, someday this will backfire, when innovation, learning, and growth comes to a halt.
The typical slow degenerative death of great companies in the USA is almost always caused by bean counters seeking "efficiency." To MBAs and accountants, if can't be seen as a number on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist. What's behind the numbers is just magic that can be safely ignored.
Until the rot is too far gone and the ship sinks, but the rats can always find another ship. Hi ho!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
When I started at Bell Labs in the 70s, the unofficial rule was 80% for the Labs and 20% for you. Either your projects or self improvement. As long as you met your yearly goals, no one cared what hours you kept or what you worked on. That concept helped me learn microprocessors and C in the 70s and PCs in the early 80s, as well as many other new things. As I learned new things/concepts, they were used to improve my job performance or come up with new projects that I was able to sell to management. The example that was always given was the inventors of the transistor were told to stop working on it because it was a useless project and nothing would come of it. They worked on it on in their spare time anyway and look what happened. When I left Bellcore/Telcordia Technologies (the Baby Bell spin off out of Bell Labs), in the mid 2000s, they were tracking our time in 15 minutes increments. The only free time I had was lunch where I worked at my desk. I looked at Google and others as learning from the Bell Labs model, even if the Labs didn't use it anymore. It is sad to see the concept drawing to a close. If you have innovative people, and give them some latitude, you can never imagine what they will invent. Where is the new place to invest in the future by using the 20% rule?
From what I have seen and heard from Google engineers (and I know quite a few) its alive and well. Many spend in excess of 50% of their time on 20% time projects. They have some legit related complaints though.
(1) The OKR and promotions process is extremely time consuming.
(2) The peer review process is even worse. They often state that every 3 months, they lose 1-2 weeks dealing with reviews.
(3) Many teams are weighed down by far too many people that have never worked outside of Google, so they have no idea about real world issues or how the rest of the world needs to interact with them. Man projects get derailed or delayed by absurd unnecessary excursions led by very smart but naive 25yo kids that are somehow level 5 or 6.
The end result is not that 20% time projects are suffering, but that actual projects are suffering. Engineers get frustrated and then use 20% time projects to switch teams.
To be honest, many of the best people I know there cant wait to leave or already have.
Google,s practice allowing 20 percent creative time is one of the defining elements about Google. Allowing them to have a work environment that frees up their creativity is one of the most important things you can do. I can see where your pencil pushers and low level tech support and such and such might not need the 20 percent. But surely you're top creative personnel and the people who are out there inventing things need to have that 20 percent in order to be able to be the most free as that they can be. As a small business owner I only wish that I can afford for some of my people at 20 percent creativity time. Remember to follow Yahoo's footsteps is not necessarily a brilliant move. Much love and take care!
HP used to be really innovative. They even bragged about how innovative their _engineers_ were.
A few years later as they started the long downhill grade, they started bragging about how innovative their management was.
Saying the Google employees don't need the 20% innovation time anymore sounds like exactly the sort of innovative nonsense from management that HP used.
I expect similar results.
Cancer is a tough disease and, sometimes, the treatments are rougher on the patient than the cure. Chemotherapy impairs your ability to think coherently. You're like the dog in the movie "Up!" ('Next quarter we'll release the Uber Widget to prepare out markets for... SQUIRREL!!!'), I don't know if Steve Jobs availed himself of chemotherapy toward the end, but you can rest assured that he laid out his vision for the management team before he shuffled off this mortal coil; he was too much of a control freak (in the great sense) not to.
Google became big. This happens to all big companies.
It's just the way of the world.
(/me goes back to reading Antifragile...)
HAND.
I'm sorry but Apple deserves what they get as Jobs knew for a decade his time was running out but right up almost to the bitter end he refused to groom his replacement and make sure the company would continue down the path he set. You read the emails and other behind the scenes stuff and its really hard to get the impression all that Jobs cared about was Jobs and that the company tanking when he died would just boost his legend that much more which was fine by him.
Jobs had groomed his replacement for years in Jony Ive. And despite Tim Cook running the company because of his business background, look who's running all the Apple design devisions, and is single handedly determining the direction of major products like iOS 7? Looks he's doing what Steve used to do, and by initial accounts, is doing a damn good job after Forstall got shown the door?
If your thesis is that Jobs never groomed a successor, you're dead wrong.
He didn't, but anyone who chooses acupuncture can't be thinking too clearly anyway.
Really sounds like 150% time (120 for work as schedules are already pushed to their limits) and 20% time on your project and 10% to get your project any traction.
Projects back in the day were options for google profits, so making the employees over work and feel they get to do their projects was important. Now Google makes big cash, why have everyone do R&D--it's expensive (R&D). Only get the grad students in GoogleX do it.
Making $6.9 billion in quarterly profit sure is sucking.
That still doesn't excuse the first half a decade that he had it where it has been reported he had NO chemo or radiation, just the Whipple after trying to cure it himself with diet and quacks which probably shortened his life.
When you are the head of something as huge as Apple the FIRST THING you should do when told of a life threatening illness is to get your house in order and have a plan in place should anything go wrong. What Jobs did was basically ignore the signs and continue as though he was gonna be there forever and its biting them on the ass right now, see how they haven't come out with anything innovative since he passed and the "iWatch" idea is pretty much being laughed at before its even being released. Again you read the man's writings and you get the feeling that if Apple tanks after he died that would have been fine with him as it would make him look like that much more of a genius and with his ego the bigger the statues and legend the better.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.