Hard to verify this comment by a Hans Cardinal at Valleywag:

<<Google recruiters are out of touch. This 20% project concept is a thing of the past yet they still promote it as if it exists. Recent survey (Googlegeist) shows that most people don't even have a 5% project since they're working overtime on their primary project. Nothing really innovative has come from within in the past few years. Most of the stuff is just maintenance.

There's a 70/20/10 initiative, meaning 70% of the resources are spent on ads. Not surprisingly most of the new hires work on ads. Maintenance. Bug fixes. Fun. Most of the Adwords and Adsense managers are young kids who have had little work and management experience and the code base is absolutely hideous. In fact most of the engineers from Google ads are some of the worst engineers I've ever worked with. The only reason why they're keeping their job is because Google needs them to be around. I don't even want to get into ad PMs. They are very territorial and very unpleasant to work with.

Thank god I vested and left before the implosion.>>
http://valleywag.com/362868/googlers-vent-working-here-sucks-too#c4516442

"Nothing really innovative has come from within in the past few years. Most of the stuff is just maintenance"

We really feel that,

"Thank god I vested and left before the implosion"

it is apparent that Google growth has slowed down, when we hear all this things and the multiple departure from Google of potential hrs i think Google is going toward a true crisis.
this in the time yahoo and microsoft are going into merger (their execs met yesterday).

<<There's a 70/20/10 initiative, meaning 70% of the resources are spent on ads. >>

I don't think he's a Googler. 70% = search, ads and apps, not just ads.

If they don't like working there, quit and let the spot be filled by someone who wants to work there.

<<There's a 70/20/10 initiative, meaning 70% of the resources are spent on ads. >>

Same as Ionut, I thought it was 70% (search / ads), 20% (related areas) and 10% (crazy ideas like Orkut).

Maybe the employee just work in the Ads division, so they personally were supposed to spend 70% working on Ads.

Or maybe the employee gave a more unfiltered view on things as opposed to official, filtered releases, which often go through the publci relations department. I've heard personal stories from someone who was a verified Google employee, and he told us that the ads division sort of had the final word in meetings, as they bring the money in (not that I'd agree with that notion). Might be just an issue of that person's department though.

Also, look at Eric Schmidt's first reply in this Wired interview:

<<When you joined Google it was just a search engine. It has grown into much more. How should we think about Google today?

One is as an advertising system. Another one is as this end-user system (the search, email, and other applications Google delivers to users through an Internet browser). A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And then a fourth way is to think of Google as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values – all that kind of stuff.>>
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/mag_schmidt_trans

(Not to say the comment at Valleywag is authentic, I don't know. I tried to get "Googlegeist" verified as that would give a clue but don't know more yet...)

Philipp, The part that intrigues me the most from Eric's comments is the 'supercomputer' statement. Google is creating new Data centers all over the world and with that comes even more computer processing power and bandwidth. Will they offer a content delivery system similar to Akamai in the near future? Imagine if they backed a media delivery application like iTunes. Fast speeds anywhere in the world.