The Google Story

I think a few guys at IBM where called the "Fellows" and had 100% of there time free for personnal research.
More recently Pascal Belaud was granted Microsoft 30% of his time to develop his personnal Olymars :
http://www.microsoft.com/france/msdn/olymars/default.mspx

what i would like to know, is how successful gmail is? for all the bells and whistles it offers, i'd like to know what the actual numbers are for its success? I suspect i'm similar to a lot of people that have a gmail account, got one just to check it out, but then went back to my normal mail account. It didn't really offer me anything that i couldn't get in other web based clients and. I read an interesting article on google and its plans to take over the net... or the way it seems... http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/google.html... the thing i seem to keep noticing is that google seems to assert itself in a number of spaces with the intent to dominate that space, but nobody seems to care, however if microsoft was to take the same approach people would cry foul that they're just trying to take over the industry... on the workplace thing scott... don't you have everyday to work on your own stuff now that you are self employed :) where i work, we don't get 20% but we have a 7.5 hour working day, 5.5 of which is code time 2 hours is research and dev, while it isn't actually time for developing our own products, we are encouraged to use it to develop our own skills and discover things that could help us improve the way we do things. I'm a big fan of that model aswell.