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Report: Google Developing New 'Area 120' Corporate Incubator (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Information has released a new report about how Google is developing its own "startup incubator" called "Area 120." According to sources, the incubator will be helmed by Google executives Don Harrison and Bradley Horowitz. The way it will work is teams of Google employees will pitch their ideas for inclusion in Area 120. If a team's idea is approved, they will then be able to work full-time on their idea, and eventually start a new company after the business plan is created. The timing is unclear but the whole process will likely take several months. According to The Next Web, "The '120' in Area 120 is a homage to Google's famed '20 percent time,' which asks that employees spend one-fifth of their working hours on projects that excite them." Both Gmail and AdSense were a result of Google's 20 percent time workplace philosophy. The report claims Area 120 will be tied exclusively to Google, not its parent company, Alphabet. It also says it will remain separate from Google's Mountain View campus.
HOLY CRAP! It's not a literal incubator! Turn on the air conditioning!!!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Remember, Google was just a search engine to start with. And obviously, successful side projects don't stay side projects.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
When I worked at the Google help desk in 2008, one of the old timers who trained the new staff members told us about Area 51, which was also called Building 51 on some of the older campus maps. That was the nickname for the Sports Page sports bar off of Shoreline Boulevard at the far edge of the campus. I was told then that Molly Magees Irish pub in downtown Mountain View was the go to spot for Goolgers at that time, but they had to be careful not to discuss business as Yahooers also hung out there.
Spend 20% of your time doing what excites you! (As long as it doesn't impact the 100% we pay you for...)
AREA_120 ->(project builds a user base)-> AREA_404_NOT_FOUND
Large companies try this every so often. If you have a good business idea then you're allowed to work on it full time for your current salary, but you'll be expected to put in the hours of a CEO in order to make the business work. If the business is successful, you get to go back to your old job, maybe you get a token raise (that won't come close to compensating you for all the extra work you put in), the company owns the new business, and you receive no equity or stock. If the new business fails (as most new businesses do), then there's a very serious chance that you'll be laid off because the company did just fine while you were away working on your side project and, besides, who wants to employ someone whose business failed?
What usually happens is that most of the employees see this for the raw deal that it is, and don't participate. Maybe one or two gullible saps take part and work themselves into an early grave and/or get fired. A year and a half later, HR shuts down the program while simultaneously declaring it a massive success. Executives pat themselves on the back for being innovative, and accounting decides that Christmas bonuses won't be happening anymore because they need to recoup the costs of the side projects.
For some reason I thought they were always monetised with ads. A rather successful side project in that case!
According to "In the Plex" by Steven Levy, even after Google moved off of the Stanford campus it wasn't monetized at all for the first year or two. It was supported by capital investments, and operated on a shoestring budget to keep those low. Page and Brin knew they needed to find a way to make it profitable, but had a hard time finding an approach they liked. They were strongly opposed to advertising, mostly because they found the dominant model of web advertising at the time (banner ads) to be really obnoxious.
It took the combination of a few key ideas to make advertising as a business model acceptable to them. One was the idea that ads could be chosen that were related to the terms being searched for, hopefully making the ads useful to the users, and to rank the ads based on quality (measured by click-through rate, primarily). Another was to require the ads to be small, unobtrusive and text-only, so that users would have to look for them, rather than be blasted by them, and to maintain the clean, simple appearance of the search engine. A third was to charge only for clicks, rather than impressions, and to set the price with a real-time auction among relevant ads, essentially incorporating the advertisers' bids into the ranking system. That way the advertisers themselves which was conceptually cool, logistically convenient and ensured that advertisers would only pay what a click was actually worth to them. I don't know if Page and Brin understood it at the time, but they were solving a core problem advertisers have had since the dawn of advertising: to figure out exactly how effective their advertising budget was. With Google's system they paid only for the clicks that actually brought a visitor, and they could determine precisely how many of those visits converted to sales.
The resulting system seemed to Page and Brin like a win for users, who got unobtrusive and possibly-useful ads, for advertisers, who got visitors who were highly likely to be interested in buying and got them for a reasonable cost, and for Google, who got a funding source that would allow the search engine to grow -- and eventually to do other things.
It's worth pointing out, though, that Page and Brin saw advertising as an engineering solution to a business problem, how to generate revenue from the highly-successful search engine. They weren't ad men, never became ad men and never turned their company over to ad men. When it came time to hire a CEO, they hired an engineer from an engineering company, and they continued building out a technology-focused and engineer-heavy company culture, consistently ensuring that at least half of the employees were engineers and that nearly all of the management were engineers, at all levels and especially in the engineering departments. To date, Alphabet remains a technology company which is primarily funded by advertising technology, not an advertising company. Many might think that's a distinction without a difference, but it's not, because advertisers and engineers have fundamentally different views of the world and the problems they set out to solve.
(Disclosure/disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer. I read "In the Plex" five years ago just after I joined the company and the historical info above is from memory and may contain significant errors. Corrections appreciated.)
I always heard the joke that the famed 20% time had changed into 120% time. I.e. it changed from the old 20% time you're allowed to spend a day a week working on random stuff, provided you work 5 full days on your normal stuff.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Disclosure/disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer.
You're a Google employee.
How do you know he/she doesn't specialise in "engineering Googles"?