This still exists today. For example, I am on the payments team but I have a 20% project working on protobuf. I had to get formal approval from my management chain and someone on the protobuf team. And it is tracked as part of my performance reviews. They just want to make sure I'm not building something useless that nobody wants and that I'm not just wasting the company's time.
I never worked at Google (or any other large corp for that matter), but this sounds like the exact opposite of an environment that spawned GMail.
As you think back even to the very early days of computing, you'll find individuals or small teams like Grace Hopper, the Unix gang, PARC, etc that managed to change history by "building something useless". Granted, throughout history that happened less than 1% of the time, but it will never happen if you never try.
Maybe Google no longer has any space for innovation.
Before LLMs and ChatGPT even existed ... a lot of us somehow hallucinated the idea that GMail came from Google's 20% Rule. E.g. from 2013-08-16 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466
I see, thank you for debunking. But I think my general point still stands. You can progress by addressing a need, but true innovation requires adequate space.
I see why they do this, but man it almost feels like asking your boss for approval on where you go on vacation. Do people get dinged if their 20% time project doesn't pan out, or they lose interest later on?
