I completely agree with @evilmushroom and strongly disagree with the article. Especially about the "That allows the company to encourage engineers to waste 20% of their time on "projects", like Google Wave."

Maybe I was the one user that really enjoyed using wave, it is a great collaboration tool if you have between 2 and 8 people working on one thing. We wrote entire(60+pages) of design documents in wave. Its also a great note taking tool since for example in class, especially if you have many people working together on the same set of notes.

And now to get to the "20% of wasted time", this time is NOT wasted. It is an investment in the companies ability to innovate and also in their employees themselves. Without time to spend on other projects, one starves the creative mind, which is bad for the individual and especially bad for the company as a whole.