[jasode]

>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.

Friendly fyi... GMail was not a "20% project" which I mentioned previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39052748

Somebody (not me but maybe a Google employee) also revised the Wikipedia article a few hours after my comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Side_project_time...

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

[rollcat]

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.