What's the alternative? Does having a daycare for highly paid adults to dick around all day create innovation? You can't force creativity out of people no matter how much you pay them or how well you treat them.
The web is way more mature right now than 20 or even 10 years ago. There's way lass untouched niches waiting to be filled by the new killer product. And Google already owns the search market, the ads market, the smartphone market, the email market, the browser market, the maps market, and soon maybe AI market, etc. What new untapped multi billion market is left for them to conquer? The pond is already fished out at this point. So of course most Googlers are gonna have to be factory workers keeping the factory running instead of dicking around creating new useless things that bring in maybe no significant revenue. The days of Google & Co. spending billions on pipe dreams is over for now.
Innovation is at start-ups which Google then buys because it has ad revenue. People go to work at Google because it pays well and less headaches than working at startups, not because they're gonna invent something new.
> Does having a daycare for highly paid adults to dick around all day create innovation? You can't force creativity out of people no matter how much you pay them or how well you treat them
Google is proof that yes, it does create innovation. How many products and tools came out of people dicking around?
I think an aspect there is that Google nowadays has quite a backlog of stuff, which just needs maintenance. Established products which each have limited room for big innovation. And maintenance doesn't work well with goofing around. And finding the balance between having maintenance work done and doing new things is hard. (Just see their messenging solutions ...)
At the same time at their scale the measures of success are different. If a solution doesn't reach a huge audience it's quickly lost between the big products, while it might be profitable.
Back in the days an Orkut which served primarily Brazilian audience was okay, but compared to scale of Gmail, YouTube and Search (and the aimed reach of Google+) it was a distraction, not helping the core brand.
Just because it’s my best work doesn’t mean I created a database. I don’t work at Google so I don’t have access to their world class resources and knowledge. For me, my best work is furniture that I didn’t plan beforehand, I just had a general idea of the dimensions and purpose.
I was talking from the perspective of working for an employer, where you would get paid to dick around and need to provide a profitable output at the end to justify why dicking around is valuable to your employer. Not about your hobby work in your spare time since we all do nice things in our spare time, FOR US.
Why do you keep moving the goalposts towards you? The conversation was whether it's beneficial for the company to be paying workers to dick around at work in hopes they'll make something creative and highly valuable, not what creative things you do in your spare time.
I mean, you asked about examples I had, so I was being specific. I’m not here just to answer your questions, but to have a discussion, I don’t know why you’re being aggressive.
I don’t run a company, so I can’t tell you if dicking around would be worth it. I do know at the place I currently work they are making a new product based on some dicking around by another employee.
