I completely agree with @evilmushroom and strongly disagree with the article. Especially about the "That allows the company to encourage engineers to waste 20% of their time on "projects", like Google Wave."
Maybe I was the one user that really enjoyed using wave, it is a great collaboration tool if you have between 2 and 8 people working on one thing. We wrote entire(60+pages) of design documents in wave. Its also a great note taking tool since for example in class, especially if you have many people working together on the same set of notes.
And now to get to the "20% of wasted time", this time is NOT wasted. It is an investment in the companies ability to innovate and also in their employees themselves. Without time to spend on other projects, one starves the creative mind, which is bad for the individual and especially bad for the company as a whole.
Google Wave sucked, and was a stupid idea on way too many levels to list (the concept, the technology, and the interface to begin with).
But Wave was not a 20% project, and that is probably one of the reasons it flopped, it got over hyped and over engineered in ways that would never have happened if it had been a 20% project.
I would be very interested in why you believe that Wave sucked.
Did you use it?
It is the only collaboration tool i know that works well on Windows/Mac/Linux.
Yes it has its bugs, and I agree it could be implemented differently. But there is nothing like it, especially when many people want to edit the same document,
Maybe I was the one user that really enjoyed using wave, it is a great collaboration tool if you have between 2 and 8 people working on one thing. We wrote entire(60+pages) of design documents in wave. Its also a great note taking tool since for example in class, especially if you have many people working together on the same set of notes.
And now to get to the "20% of wasted time", this time is NOT wasted. It is an investment in the companies ability to innovate and also in their employees themselves. Without time to spend on other projects, one starves the creative mind, which is bad for the individual and especially bad for the company as a whole.