It was a nice ideal: that Google engineers, in the "20% time" they were allocated for personal projects, would come up with Mountain View's next world-changing offering. And, like the search engine's don't-be-evil mantra, one always knew that the Google founders' noble intentions would never survive mundane corporate reality. One anonymous Googler notes: "20% time is pejoratively known as '120% time', since nobody really gets around to those projects for all their other work. And even if you did a project, your odds of it being a hit (on the Orkut or Gmail level) are basically zero."

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