In the Google Q1 Earnings Call, Eric Schmidt seems to admit that the the ‘cool idea’ by Google to let their employees work 20% of their time on non-search related projects has been a waste of time. Schmidt said:
Sometimes I worry that we spend so much time talking about all the new things that we don’t focus as much on the core business, especially in our marketing and messaging. In looking at the quarter, the most important message is that our core business is very strong. It is the core business that is driving our success. Core services are as vital and vibrant and innovative as they could possibly be.
In our opinion, many of the projects that Google released (Orkut, Gmail, Answers, Speadsheet) were released too soon and under-supported by staffing. Google disconnected with the world and got it in their head that slapping beta on any new idea would mean the we would forgive them for churning out crap.
And it’s not just the services they’ve developed that have been left to die. Valleywag suggests that the Dodgeball service that Google purchased in 2005 is about to hit the Web 2.0 graveyard too through lack of ownership. Valleywag says:
Founder Dennis Crowley, frustrated with the utter lack of support he got while trying to develop the service at Google, finally quit Google (along with Dodgeball’s other remaining employee) earlier this month. Hey, maybe someone just unplugged the machine and it’ll be back up tomorrow. (Yeah right.) But for now, the few hundred geeks who used this service will have to find something else — Twitter, perhaps? — to announce where they’re drinking. Hope they raise a glass to this actually useful service, struck down before its prime.
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