On one hand it's basically admitting that regular development teams and managers don't have the freedom or latitude to build experimental stuff. On the other, at somewhere like an aerospace company, experimental projects are just too big and complex to do without an incubator like skunk workshop so it can be a good thing.

Good points.

Software obviously doesn't inherit the physical aspects involved with aerospace experimentation (e.g. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works). The limiting factor is typically only employee focus/time.

In-house incubators are pretty much normal these days (see ambidextrous organization). Even smaller companies like JetBrains are running them for ages. Nobody wants to miss the next big thing but you need to shield your existing business from anything it might disrupt it, so you make your incubator organizationally separate.

I really want the Stacks app for IOS.. I have this problem. I have so many scanned PDFs that need organizing...

I hope these layoffs don’t impact the GA release of Google Tables. It’s marked for GA release but still under Area120 domain.

Why not use AirTable? That's what they are trying to copy.

From speaking with folks who worked in Area120, one underappreciated benefit to having an inhouse incubator in a conglomerate is that ambitious folks will go there instead of leaving for a startup.

Then they get "acquired" back into another division of the conglomerate. Startup scratch itched, equity in pocket.

So the real outcome was retention. Though that's hard to measure.

Sure, I can see the value of something like that.

Perhaps that's why I never heard of these things - it was an inhouse holiday resort.

Yep. You can’t innovate by saying “make something innovative by copying AirTable”. At that point you’re no longer an “incubator” but a fast-follow and is a standard product development cycle.

Virtually everyone is trying to copy AirTable... and failing.

Microsoft is trying with Lists (https://lists.live.com). They released the public preview a year ago, missing key features, and failed to release final version.

Amazon tried with Honeycode (https://www.honeycode.aws/). They are no longer trying to build a spreadsheet-like interface to database.

Google tried with Tables (https://tables.area120.google.com/). They were supposed to release GA in 2022, didn't happen.

AirTable remains the king of the hill.

Bell labs was an in house incubator which was probably the most productive research institution of all time.

I wasn't there, but from what I've read calling Bell Labs an incubator seems very wrong. It was much more of a research facility funded by some mandate that e.g. 1% of the revenue of Western Electric must go to research, or something along those lines.