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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

"The Google incubator" is particularly accurate here, if you look at the tags on the blog: "Area 120". This is an app developed by one of their "let these people write random stuff" groups: https://area120.google.com/

To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.

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Area 120 is definitely not a bunch of random people coming together. The projects there are fully funded and do have corporate backing. They launch separate from the rest of Google, with the positive end result being absorbed by another team into a fully supported product.

Name one project that’s lived long term that came out of a120?

By lived I do mean no changes to end user for the absorption into another team.

Perhaps not a perfect example but Reply by Google seemingly got integrated into Android itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_(Google)

Grasshopper

> To my knowledge, nothing majorly successful or long-term supported has ever come out of Area 120.

Instead try evaluating the success of Area 120 by the number of Google staff members who have had their "incredible journey" itch scratched and then returned to a product or infrastructure team at Google when their Area 120 project is EOL'ed. From a corporate perspective, it's worth spending some money on throw-away projects to retain staff who might otherwise quit to pursue an actual startup.

I definitely understand why it benefits Google. But I don't see why a user should ever bother with an Area 120 project.

Agreed

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