I never worked at Google (or any other large corp for that matter), but this sounds like the exact opposite of an environment that spawned GMail.
As you think back even to the very early days of computing, you'll find individuals or small teams like Grace Hopper, the Unix gang, PARC, etc that managed to change history by "building something useless". Granted, throughout history that happened less than 1% of the time, but it will never happen if you never try.
Maybe Google no longer has any space for innovation.
>I never worked at Google (or any other large corp for that matter), but this sounds like the exact opposite of an environment that spawned GMail.
Friendly fyi... GMail was not a "20% project" which I mentioned previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39052748
Somebody (not me but maybe a Google employee) also revised the Wikipedia article a few hours after my comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Side_project_time...
Before LLMs and ChatGPT even existed ... a lot of us somehow hallucinated the idea that GMail came from Google's 20% Rule. E.g. from 2013-08-16 : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223466
I see, thank you for debunking. But I think my general point still stands. You can progress by addressing a need, but true innovation requires adequate space.