I think your 2nd point is the primary cause. I was recently reading that our generation has grown up in a “Networked” world, so, unlike our predecessors, if we don’t know how to do something we can probably [quickly] find someone who can rather than wasting hours on end figuring it out ourselves.

Google’s concept is also interesting, a potential problem is that I find you might lose focus if you get 20% of time to essentially do “whatever you feel like”. This would explain why some of their smaller projects flounder, because some aren’t taken seriously…