With the killing going on in the economy, we have been expecting some downsizing in Mountain View as well. So far Mister Google was tracking on just fine, but it seems now there are some dark clouds coming on the horizon.
The Google is famous about their 70-20-10 rule. 70% of the employee time is spend on actual work as described in the job description, 20% is spend on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth, and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative.
Now it seems The Google is killing some of the interesting, but not so lucrative projects employees have spent their time on thinking, building and most of all fantasizing…
Today The Official Google Blog is announcing that Lively.com will be closing down. Killed…
Lively no More
In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives. But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.
That’s why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.
(blod added by me)
What’s next? Can you tell me what is not making money at the Googleplex? Free food, all the candy and soda’s, or are the beach volleyball fields next.
Ah well, back to work…
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