Here are 3 pertinent facts related to your post:
1) When I worked there, long before Larry Page was CEO, 20% time barely existed and Google cared a heck of a lot about making money.
2) The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy.
3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page
1) 20% time still exists. I used it to write an HTML parser [1] that's had some modest success, and I have coworkers that have 20%ed on robotics, quantum computation, elementary school education, Project Loon, Flu Trends, and a variety of other interesting things. Google Now came out of a 20% project. It is something that you have to take a lot of initiative on to pull off successfully, but the opportunity is still available.