Google’s Mac efforts begin to bear fruit
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
“One thing stood out,” Singh said. “There was no easy way to do file systems.” So Singh decided to create one, even though he worked for Google’s search team at the time and wasn’t part of the company’s Mac development efforts.
The reaction of his bosses to this use of company time? Go for it.
Singh’s project, which became the open-source file-system utility MacFUSE, is just one of the many employee-driven efforts that go on within the walls of the search-engine and text-advertising giant all the time.
Google calls it “20-percent time,” encouraging its engineers to pursue other Google-related interests for up to 20 percent of their work hours—even if that interest has little to do with their regular duties at the search and software company.
Efforts such as 20-percent projects by engineers like Singh are par for the course at Google, a company that sees encouraging employees to pursue subjects they find interesting as a critical part of its own development goals.
“A lot of things that happen at Google are based on empowering people to come up with ideas and pursue them if [those ideas are] good,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s director of product management.
Many 20-percent projects have wound up becoming major Google products: both Google News and Gmail, for instance, started that way. Among the Mac-specific efforts that began as 20-percent projects are Notifier, which offers Gmail and Google Calendar notifications, and the Google Mac Developer Playground, an online collection of open-source Mac projects created at Google.
