Back in the day it was widely mentioned that you had to spend 20% of your worktime at Google at an project that you personally care about and that is not directly your ‘day job’. Rumor has it that gmail got started that way. I could guess that the google earth flight simulator was such a thing. It must really really suck to work for Yahoo and having to observe how your competition runs circles around you.
On the other side people are guestimating that the average google employee gets up to half a thousand emails originating at google. A day. It is interesting to see how Google will do in the future. It’s history and application are truly unprecedented. It’s impact is quiet astonishing. My daughter, being 7, never was on the internet. Try to keep it that way for as many years as possible. But she is a curious person. The other day she wanted to know what I am doing. I explained that I added another internet server. She wanted to know how many I had and what they were used for. The next question she had after she heard me talk about my current and future setup was: “And Google, how many servers do they have?”.