When it made its initial public offering (IPO) in 2004, Google described its startup ideal of "20 percent time," where any employee could take a day’s worth of time out of the normal work week and come up with a cool project to work on. And it worked: Google came up with a lot of really cool stuff. So much cool stuff that Google, as a company, doesn’t really need 20 percent time anymore.

We hear a lot less about the famous 20 percent time now, and Quartz said Friday that within Google's company culture, the concept is “as good as dead.” In some cases, Google employees need approval for projects, and in others, their extracurricular stuff is tacked on top of their normal work week rather than included in it.

Google’s 20 percent time was part of the culture at a time when, comparatively speaking, the company didn’t have a whole lot going on. Major projects that had launched by the time of the IPO included Google Search, AdWords, Toolbar, News, Product Search, Orkut, and Gmail beta. Google Print (later Google Book Search) launched a few months prior to the IPO, and Google had acquired a couple of companies that became Google Groups and Blogger.

But much of the company’s future was still ahead of it: Maps, Earth, Talk, and later Chat for Gmail, Reader, Analytics, Docs, Picasa, and Checkout were all still yet to launch in the two years following the IPO. At a talk Marissa Mayer gave in June 2006, she stated that the 20 percent time principle was responsible for half of the products Google launched in the second half of 2005. This is not to mention the much larger moves that would come later that are now huge tentpoles for the company: Chrome, Android, Google+, and Chrome OS.

Google wasn’t hurting for successful products when it started to tout its 20 percent time: off the backs of its pre-IPO services, it earned a market cap of over $23 billion. But if it was a company that wanted to grow and diversify beyond products that were either related to search or derivative of what already existed, it needed more ideas, better ideas, as quickly as possible. Hence, liberal use of 20 percent time made a lot of sense.

Now, Google is not only an enormous company of nearly 45,000 employees with a market cap twelve times that of its first IPO ($286 billion), it has a lot of big products that it wants to make work. More than it needs more ideas, it needs to make the ideas it has great. At the same talk, Mayer stated, “turns out when we were small we launched really rough things that weren’t very good all the time. But the key is iteration.”

Google’s 20 percent time has historically been used not only to come up with and mature new products but to offer fixes to products that might not necessarily be within the user’s wheelhouse, as in the case of an engineer who suggested new keyboard shortcuts for Reader. But in that case, the Reader team responded to the engineer’s request by telling him to add it himself. A more streamlined company structure would allow for the Reader team to deal with that feedback differently, even more efficiently, by giving them the time and resources to react to it themselves.

In the Hacker News discussion of the Quartz post, some purported former Google engineers cite focus on the bottom line as the ideological, if not practical, enemy of 20 percent time. As many engineers insist that 20 percent time is not dead, just dormant for most teams.

This is not to say that the company should be sticking to its same old products instead of coming up with new stuff or iterating on what it has—there’s no better way to stagnate. But the 20 percent time served a certain business purpose to a company that was still establishing itself and its products, trying to iterate and come up with new stuff as much as possible. Google left that mode long ago.

The real enemy of 20 percent time is “more wood behind fewer arrows.” But as it tries to consolidate its services and fix what’s broken, that focus is what Google really needs.