[curryst]

Google owns the stuff you make during 20% time, iirc, so they use it as a feeder for new products.

Allegedly (I can't verify, but can't see why they'd lie) GMail, Google Maps and AdSense were all born out of people's 20% time and Google just swooped in and turned them into full on products.

It might be worth staying #3 in cloud if they could pull off products like that again. I can't help but notice that those products are all old, though.

[pflanze]

From all I can tell, Google Maps was not started from within Google, but started in early 2003 as Where 2 Technologies [1] and was purchased by Google in October 2004 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Eilstrup_Rasmussen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_maps#History

[propogandist]

>Google Maps

Google Maps started off as KeyHole, a technology company that was funded by In-Q-Tel aka the VC arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it was acquired by Google.

https://www.iqt.org/news/in-q-tel-announces-strategic-invest...

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...