The sad thing is that at bigger companies like IBM dozens and dozens of billion-dollar ideas have been rejected out of hand for no good reason, far out of line with unfortunate serendipity. IBM rejected xerography, minicomputers, personal computing, and ignored the work its researchers did on relational databases.

Back in the 19th century, there were people who thought telephony was a lousy idea.

Things will always be like this.

Thats what startups and small teams and companies are for ;)

Often times people have families and other obligations that keep them from taking the huge risk that is starting up. Or they just don't have the courage. Or whatever. To the detriment of the business world and consumers.

Wow. Marissa Mayer is a serious self-promoter. When she can't take credit for an idea, she tries to take credit for "not killing" an idea?

hey, anyone at that time that wanted to keep something free was against advertisments, and many were trying to find a way to do just that. obviously you are too young to remember that, and obviously Google did it first with Paul and AdSense. A lot of ad skepticals changed their view of ads when adSense came. So, I would say its good that she recognizes that

This was my impression after reading a valleywag article. Probably bad form on my part, but whatever.

Also, I doubt I'm "too young" to remember much about google, since I remember when it didn't exist.

She was the Program Manager, and I don't think that she's taking credit for anything here.

She's obviously open to reviewing her decisions and opinions, and that's more than most people are able to do. I think your criticism is a little undeserved based on this article.

PM actually stands for "Product Manager", and she wasn't in a position to directly kill anything, though she was very much against the ads (the story makes it sound as though she quickly changed her mind, which is not what I remember).

If she was still very much against the ads after seeing your implementation, then yes, the story is very different. It says she changed her mind while waiting for you to come into the office after your all-nighter implementing it.

Thanks for the clarification Paul.

I for one have never quite understood the whole argument with how gmail "reads" people's emails. Yes.. it does get a little spooky at times. But how much more spookier is it than Google (or for that matter any other search engine) keeping track of what you search for? Fact is, privacy is non-existent and the onus is on the end user to protect it.

The closer analogy is actually spam filtering -- it's a very similar process (computers processes message content in order to classify it). The computer is processing and storing the data anyways, so there is no impact on privacy (eliminating spam filtering or ads won't improve your privacy in any way).