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Amit Singh thought something was missing from OS X. The Google engineer--and author of Mac OS X Internals--took a look at what the Mac operating system didn't have that Linux and Solaris did.
"One thing stood out," Singh said. "There was no easy way to do file systems." So Singh decided to create one, even though he worked for Google's search team at the time and wasn't part of the company's Mac development efforts.

The reaction of his bosses to this use of company time? Go for it.

Singh's project, which became the open-source file-system utility MacFUSE, is just one of the many employee-driven efforts that go on within the walls of the search-engine and text-advertising giant all the time. Google calls it "20-percent time," encouraging its engineers to pursue other Google-related interests for up to 20 percent of their work hours--even if that interest has little to do with their regular duties at the search and software company.

Efforts such as 20-percent projects by engineers like Singh are par for the course at Google, a company that sees encouraging employees to pursue subjects they find interesting as a critical part of its own development goals.

"A lot of things that happen at Google are based on empowering people to come up with ideas and pursue them if [those ideas are] good," said Sundar Pichai, Google's director of product management.

Many 20-percent projects have wound up becoming major Google products: both Google News and Gmail, for instance, started that way. Among the Mac-specific efforts that began as 20-percent projects are Notifier, which offers Gmail and Google Calendar notifications, and the Google Mac Developer Playground, an online collection of open-source Mac projects created at Google.

From sideline to mainstream

These days Google's offerings for Mac users include everything from a desktop search tool to a 3-D mapping tool to a suite of Web-based office productivity apps. In between, you'll also find a 3-D modeling program and add-ons for the Firefox Web browser.

But Google's Mac offerings weren't always so vast. The company has stepped up its Mac efforts in the past couple of years, as a result of a strategic push from executives as well as prodding from Mac-using Google employees.

Google Docs gives users access to online tools such as a word processor and spreadsheet app, though support for the Safari browser has been spotty.

Google's corporate philosophy is to make information as accessible and useful as possible. Still, "as a company, when you're starting out, you have to make hard tradeoffs," Pichai explains, and for Google, that meant initially building desktop products that worked on Microsoft Windows.

But Mac-using Google employees were working hard in the background to expand the company's products onto the platform they loved. When Karen Grunberg, now a product manager for Google's client software on the Mac, first joined Google, she found the limited portfolio of Mac products to be "very ungoogley"--a term you'll hear around the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., to describe something that doesn't measure up to the company's way of doing things.

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