The New York Times has a fluff piece on Google’s “20% time” this weekend. While this concept of “slack” time isn’t new in our industry (remember Tom DeMarco anyone?), it definitely isn’t new at Google. Joe Beda, a former Microsoft engineer, wrote extensively about 20% time in March of 2005. The Official Google Blog has included multiple mentions of 20% time, including one back in May of 2006 related to keyboard shortcuts in GMail. So how is this news? I think the answer is that it isn’t.