Wow, that's a real shame, because Google Cloud Print was one of those nice little services that did ONE THING amazingly. I loved that I could print stuff from anywhere and it would be sitting on my printer when I got home.
If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would be ready and printed for me when I got home. It was just a nice convenience that worked every time.
Yes there are alternatives... most printers now have an obfusticated email address that you can send to and it will print from. But this is vendor specific and unreliable and required additional steps (had to save to computer, then open an email client, send an email, etc).
But then again, how can I be surprised? We are talking about Google, the company famous for shutting down projects. I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow and they shut down google.com search engine. Right now on Hacker News (just a few spots above this post) is a another site [1], which hosts a countdown for when customers expect to shut down the Google Stadia product... a product that only launched a few days ago.
I suppose the workaround is to send all your printables to a Google drive folder, and then have an app on your devices that send those printables to the printer whenever the printer is visible on wifi. Not sure if Android offers sufficient APIs for that though.
Yeah or have that folder synced to a PC running at home, and then have a service running on that machine that prints anything that shows up in that folder.
Or just a create an e-mail account which is connected to your small server with IMAP with IDLE.
Create a white list, and if mail is coming from a white-listed mail then print the contents, otherwise discard the mail.
This is how my Deskjet 4515 is working besides GCP. It's a pretty neat solution. It even replies with a result e-mail. I hope that HP won't kill its services too. They've already killed the app side, but remote printing is still intact.
A much easier to use tool that works using inotify is incron. It's basically like cron except for inotify events. I have a one-liner that OCRs all of my incoming scans, and it's immensely helpful.
Counter-argument: Just let it sit there and keep working? Outside of security patches, if there even are any, there's always the option of "just stop touching it." After all, the whole pitch of elastic compute is you only pay for what you use. It's not like resources are being freed up for other things here.
The software industry is always on this treadmill of churn, leading to stable products continuing to have a constant maintenance burden. But that's not an intrinsic property of the area. It's a thing we do because... we can? We want to? But it's not required. Silo it off and just leave it be.
> Counter-argument: Just let it sit there and keep working? Outside of security patches, if there even are any, there's always the option of "just stop touching it."
That's not exactly possible with a monorepo that has no branches and everything has to be maintained 'in step'. Any time a library breaks API, all dependents must pass tests, and/or be fixed so that they do. Any time a runtime API breaks (think things like interfaces to runtime authentication, compute scheduling, database services, network bandwidth scheduling), updated services must be made to conform and then be rolled out. As with real life, this might mean getting a 1 or 2 year old deployment system (configuration for production, roll out code, ...) undusted, understood, probably fixed in turn, etc.
As such, some SRE/SWE team _must_ be responsible for projects that are in the "don't touch"/maintenance phase. This is very unsexy, toil-y and you don't get promoted for it - and as such barely anyone wants to do it at Google.
> As such, some SRE/SWE team _must_ be responsible for projects that are in the "don't touch"/maintenance phase. This is very unsexy, toil-y and you don't get promoted for it - and as such barely anyone wants to do it at Google.
That's Google's problem, and it's a problem they might want to look into solving if they want to turn around their reputation for killing products.
Google pays their engineers a lot and they’d need to recruit a lot more of them if they were going to keep running everything they ever killed. That, or stop launching so many new products.
I know it's beside the point, but you stepped on one of my peeves. Google doesn't have to pay their engineers "a lot". They don't have to keep sucking more and more wealthy people into a concentrated corner of California. They could open a modest office in Nebraska and pay some 5-figure salaries.
They could hire some run-of-the-mill college grads to work on a "dead" project. They could cut their teeth on low-profile stuff within Google and perhaps demonstrate abilities that move them up the ladder.
I'm not saying that Google should do this to keep everything they've ever touched alive. But spreading the talent around geographically would solve a lot of problems for Google and for California and for the world. Same for all FAANGs.
Quit earmarking $billions to solve the housing crisis in SF. Spend $1M in St. Louis and move 100 employees out of SF. Then spend $1M in Amarillo, and $1M in Sioux Falls. Shucks, maybe splurge and spend $20M here and there. $250M to build up 10 offices around the continent will do more to solve the housing crisis in CA than $1B spent in CA. And it would cut FAANG costs in half at the same time.
> Spend $1M in St. Louis and move 100 employees out of SF.
~100/100 SF Google engineers would change teams if they received a mandate that their team was relocating to St. Louis (or basically anywhere). Anyone who couldn't arrange to change teams would quit.
The fact that Google has 70 locations around the world, including 26 around the US, indicates that some Google employees are happy to work outside of SF.
Yes, but not a significant number of the ones living in SF. The parent comment was suggesting to "move 100 employees out of SF", which is clearly not happening. There are 70 locations around the world that these people could theoretically work and they have chosen SF. I'm sure pretty much every person working at each of those 70 locations was hired to work at that location. I'm am a bit appalled by the shittiness of the viewpoint expressed by the original comment, that the solution to lots of people wanting to live and work in high-demand areas is to force them out by moving their jobs somewhere they don't want to live. There are a lot of great reasons to want to live in a global hub city and work at a centralized office instead of working at a satellite office in Amarillo or Sioux Falls.
Recently Google has actually been low balling a lot of candidates and is nowhere near top of market. In many cases they are refusing to match competing offers, and are even offering people less money than what they are currently making
Exactly what happened to me. I had offers from Google, Airbnb, Lyft and Uber. In terms of numbers,
Lyft > Airbnb > Google > Uber.
Google tried to lowball me all the way through, and asked me to share screenshots of actual emails from other companies to prove my other numbers. They increased the numbers but frankly, they weren't anywhere close to Airbnb/Lyft. They did not act like a company that would beat other offers for talent. My offer was in the AI Assistant team under Google Search, so it wasn't an orphaned arbitrary product team either. Broke my heart coz I was so keen on joining Google from the start.
This. Someone has to be in OWNERS and it’s difficult to find people willing to do this because fixing breakage due to API changes isn’t going to be on anyone’s OKRs. And if it’s not on your OKRs, it’s not contributing to your promo.
How is that true? The OKR explicitly doesn't include cloud print because it is deemed not important to Google, and so cloud print is not worked on. Seems to be WAI?
Seems then like the incentive systems have a blind spot: they don't account for pissing off users relying on a service.
Why shouldn't people get promos for doing heroic acts on obscure services that actually delight users in real life? That surely has a benefit for Google. And the lack of it has a cost. Think of it like a PR budget. They'd get fewer grumpy articles about unmaintained services being dropped.
It’s a feature not a product. Not everything has to be about profit and loss if it’s part of a larger ecosystem. Google Cloud Print was a feature of Android as well as other parts of Google’s ecosystem just like AirPrint is a feature of iOS/MacOS.
But Google has always been piss poor at managing an ecosystem. Just look at the state of Android updates.
A lot of the responses to the parent are things along the lines of "well it needs to be owned by a team" and all the usual valid cost-related reasons why [x] can't be maintained, and of course that doing so is boring.
Isn't this the kind of project that should be reserved for people in explicit learning states such as (for example) novice hires, new hires, and aspiring mangers who haven't done any management before? It doesn't really have burning deadlines, it's not a frontline project but it's still something that can be referenced as work with impact, there's still the technical challenge of keeping it functional as the years go by, and eventually it will actually be old enough to be taken out back and deprecated. If any company could do something like this with their various projects as well as culture, I'm pretty sure Google could.
Of course there are probably a bunch of problems with this idea, but it seems to be more preferable in contrast to just axing a product that a not-insignificant number of people found useful and going "NEED. NEW. SHINY. TOY. MUST MAKE MONEY NOW!"
I'm frustrated at the fact that this comment, and many others elsewhere on this, are creating the false dichotomy that Google either needs to ruthlessly kill products that many users are still using (Reader, Cloud Print, ...) or alternately support Every Single Product Forever.
They can still kill their outright failures, of which there are many.
Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.
Besides the code management issues others have mentioned, services like this require a great deal of product and partner coordination and testing effort to ensure that even small security patches don't break the heterogeneous ecosystem of devices.
More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
Disclosure: Google employee but not on cloud print, though I use it on my personal printer.
> Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.
Of course it's possible. Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this. And if they were it'd be a change in the protocol. It's easy to just freeze the protocol (which already happened years ago), and if any printer manufacturer wants something new then can go fork off and do their own thing. That's very different from breaking something old which is what's happening here.
> More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part. And how widespread are driverless printing standards? Do such printers actually exist in consumer households? My Dell printer from just a few years ago certainly isn't.
> Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this
Of course things change. Security protocols get upgraded. New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed. New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration. That all requires human effort to make happen. All of that has to be worth the cost of maintaining the project.
> CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part.
Even if it needs them, the point is that it has them now, probably due in no small part ot the fact that CUPS is used on the Mac.
Except they don't. The clients are frozen in time forever. There's no change happening here. It doesn't matter if they should be changed, they aren't being changed. Printer firmware does not get updates.
> New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed.
IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable. But this is not an ongoing cost. There's no continuous change aspect to that at all.
> New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration.
That's not change, that's new features. As I said, simply tell those things to go do their own thing. That's unrelated to leaving Cloud Print on life support.
Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...
> IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable.
So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?
> But this is not an ongoing cost.
You would still require SRE support for keeping this thing up running. You would also open yourself up to a lot of risk, losing user trust and potential lawsuits if it ever was hacked.
Everything you wrote sounds like an elaborate troll but I'm assuming that you've just never worked on a large system before.
> So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?
This is true of every internet protocol. Being staffed at all does not mean the protocol or server has active security research being done on it. It usually doesn't. Taking people off of the work of constant churn from refractors and internal tail chasing doesn't actually change much.
> Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...
Sounds like you're just trolling but I'm going to assume you've just never seen a printer or worked on a stable system before.
The problem I had that cloudprint solved was printing from a Linux machine to a local non-Linux-compatible printer. With CUPS and driverless printers, this is no longer a problem. I don't generally need to print remotely to my printer.
> You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork
I'm guessing you are referring to a scenario where you have configured an elderly person's printer to allow you to print directly to it, sort of like a one way fax machine? I can see how that could be useful for some people, but it's a very rare use case, and hard to argue for maintaining the cloud print service based on that.
There appear to be alternatives for this specific use case, like HP ePrint, or you could set up a VPN to use in these situations. You could also just use printer that hooks up directly to eFax: https://www.faxcompare.com/blog/signing-up-for-efax-with-you...
More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
Apple owns the copyright to the CUPS software that runs on Linux and Macs.
But the point being that unlike Google, Apple has supported CUPS and actively developed the software for well over a decade even though it doesn’t profit directly from it.
Having customer data is a liability. If someone hacks this service and gets the ability to read every customer's printout, it would be a disaster for Google's reputation. If it doesn't make enough money directly or indirectly to compensate for the liability it presents, it is actually a VERY expensive service to continue operating.
E.g. it might be written in Python 2 for all we know. Should they leave it on Python 2 with zero security updates, or invest lots of time porting to python 3?
Obviously there will likely be a million other internal examples of the python 2 to 3 migration that we don't know about.
> Should they leave it on Python 2 with zero security updates, or invest lots of time porting to python 3?
Leave it, of course. The only meaningful security risk at this point is something like heartbleed. We're talking security issue in 10 year battle hardened protocol. This is a fantastically rare case. Not something you need headcount on a constant basis to deal with.
"250M printers compromised by Google Cloud Print" is an ugly look. It won't matter at that time that Google rescued a beloved product from being Deep-Sixed.
So this works in theory until there is a really bad bug in some part of the code base and there is no one who knows how to fix it. Or it breaks some kind of migration plan. Or it is embedded somewhere on some architecture that slows down an important projects development. or makes an application incompatible with a future OS
If they’re not going to keep a team dedicated to keeping it alive, then you get into a situation where an emergency fix needs to be deployed or it needs to be abruptly cancelled
It’s possible this already happened once or twice which is why they had to sunset it
> So this works in theory until there is a really bad bug in some part of the code base and there is no one who knows how to fix it.
10 years of production usage tends to have hammered out all the "really bad bugs." Sure it's possible that something goes wrong, but it's also extremely unlikely that it does unless something in it changes. Which, if you freeze it & silo it off, doesn't really happen.
A huge amount of software not made in silicon valley operates exactly like this. It just sits there, running for decades, doing its thing.
I don't know. I'd bet anything that has been production for 10 years with no feature added means anybody who knows anything about it left ages ago.
Its a cloud service that was started pre-Google Cloud. There is no way that it can sit in perpetuity and not be worried about old versions of Java, old OS, HTTPS bugs, large deprecation plans
Yes, of course, but the point is it's a very, very small cost. It's basically zero for a company with Google's resources. Meanwhile killing it is actually costly. Not to engineering, but to PR and reputation.
> Outside of security patches, if there even are any
On the fundamentals, a service the whole point of which is to let untrusted computers from the internet connect to your home network and talk to your devices is pretty likely to need continuous security updates.
> It's not free to run and it is not generating revenues.
If there's only a few users then it's cheap to run. If there's a lot of users then this is a mountain of bad PR right at the time they are trying to get users to adopt new products (like, say, Stadia). Since all it does is shuffle PDFs & images between endpoints I'm gonna guess this is on the order of basically free to run.
But either way canceling it isn't free, either. I'm arguing the cost of canceling this is far larger than the cost of keeping it running.
I saw it as a counterpoint to AirPrint. I'd like to know what changed that made Google think they don't really need this anymore. Maybe they think WiFi Direct is going to be the future?
Google is a large company. Surely the goodwill of keeping it around must mean something? Can’t they take a small loss on one of their “nice-to-have” products?
Others have pointed out how this is hard with the Google code base (internal API changes, etc).
But it's more than that. Consider how something like GDPR impacts this. It requires at least some work from Legal, Product, Eng, etc. And these things happen fairly often. Even without a monorepo it takes work to stand still.
Isn't Google Cloud Print built into some printers? So some people may have had a purchase decision based on a feature thats going away in a year. Seems like a reason to be upset even with a year's notice.
I'm not a big proponent of Google but I agree. Most companies jettison under-performing projects but since Google is a juggernaut, I think they get extra flack for it.
What does underperforming mean? Cloud Print isn't a standalone product, it's part of the overall Google account service, which the company is deeply invested in.
I am waiting for the day they kill Chromebook or Gsuites - its sometimes difficult to follow why they do terminate certain products. In this case it will hurt enterprises, a market Google desperately tries to enter...
It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run.
Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1]
Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, I have to go find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the replies to the surviving copy. That takes quite a lot of REPL work.
Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email hn@ycombinator.com and get us to merge them. Then your comment will get moved to the winning branch, and you've benefited the whole community with an un-split discussion.
(I appreciate your mentioning the duplicates, though, because otherwise we wouldn't have known about them. Maybe there's a software idea in there.)
Would it be possible for you to preserve the highest-scoring dupe when you do this? I was reading through one of them with around 350-400 points, and now I can't find it but this has around 100. It makes it unclear that it's the same original discussion moved, and I doubt this was your intention, but it could come across like you're trying to downplay the significance of a topic when the main discussion loses points and frontpage ranking.
I'm not sure what you mean by "preserve"? I don't think it's fair to leave the highest-scoring story as the winner; we usually try to privilege the one who posted first, i.e. the true original discussion. I think the community prefers that and it provides a better incentive.
The story didn't lose front page ranking because I rolled back the clock on the original submission (the one we're currently commenting on) to put it more or less where the other submission had been.
This seems pretty plausible considering Hangouts, aka Talk 2, is being shut down the same month. So weird that presumably they glommed their print service on top of chat.
The Google Talk connection appears to only be used to receive print job notifications on the print server. I guess it made sense in 2010 when Cloud Print was launched.
I am quick to complain when Google kills a useful project - but I am not mad about this.
It was originally created because Chromebooks couldn't print. Chromebooks have been able to print natively for a while now so that is no longer needed.
They are also giving over a year of warning. That's plenty of time for people to migrate to a new service or figure out how to implement an alternative.
Again I know the Google Graveyard folks will have a field day with this, especially hot on the heals of the Stadia launch and the speculation around when that will die - but I think it's OK to send this ship into the sunset. It served its purpose - there are better solutions now - it's OK to move on.
> They are also giving over a year of warning. That's plenty of time for people to migrate to a new service or figure out how to implement an alternative.
Except Python is a widely used language, and this is a simple service for end-users. You don't need to rewrite an app because they're shutting down cloud print.
The main reason I used Cloud Print was the ability to print remotely and securely to my home printer without having to worry much about the security implication. I don't really need it that much I guess..
plus, not having to worry about drivers. I had it running on a raspberry pi connected to a Brother 3 in 1 printer for couple of years. it worked and worked well from every single device I printed from.
SMS was originally set to pass service messages between phone equipment. The internet was originally used for military communication.
The original purpose should not be the lens to look through for judging something once it’s out, in particular after 10 years where people found countless other uses of it.
Of all the free services to kill, this one really hurts. I just got my parents migrated to using Cloud Print with their Chromebooks and iStuff. As I am providing the usual family-plan IT advice from several timezones away, Cloud Print solved the biggest headache of getting their current project printed to their house or office from wherever they are (or me, if I am helping them). Supporting local printers was a time sink, and remote printing is the logical complement to cloud applications. It seems shortsighted to give it up when there is no real competition in this space AFAICT.
I know Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their historical support of legacy systems, but on the flip-side it means that as an enterprise you trust that they won't abruptly deprecate something you use.
Flak? You mean, respect from people who were around for a few years (or decades) and saw the sexy new thing change from under them in incompatible ways?
I've seen some reprieve towards MS for their new things not being nice enough, but never for their old thing continuing to work mostly without a hitch.
I think everyone had higher expectations for Google, but Microsoft doesn't get the same level of scrutiny for things like running a fully CCP approved version of Bing in China.
Another example of this double standard is their Health care cloud work, covered by HIPAA, a deal that‘s extremely common in this sector. Also facial recognition tech. While Google is actively limiting its use, Amazon is happily selling it to everyone who‘d have it.
It might have something to do with the fact that most media outlets have a vested interest in weakening Google in the public eye. Other than that, What HN/ars is concerned, Google basically seems worse than the military industrial complex and big oil combined.
They certainly do annoying shit. But in this specific case, cloud print was a product that was in beta for almost a decade. It was very unreliable and didn‘t work correctly half of the time. But of course killing it counts as ADHD. A 10-year old non-enterprise niche product is ancient in tech years.
My 13 year old son can no longer play a large part of our Steam library because many of the games he enjoys are 32-bit only (Geometry Dash, for one) and we've upgraded to MacOS Catalina.
My old copy of Adobe Photoshop CS6 also cannot be installed because the installer is 32-bit, although there's reports if you had it installed before upgrading you can force it to run.
I can rollback my son's laptop, but I am on the new 16" MBP which ships with Catalina. Annoyed is putting it mildly.
Not sure how this is a response to the comment about MS supporting things forever, other than that all those things probably still work on Windows 10. Office 97 probably still works on Windows 10.
VMs do not have direct access to the physical GPU. Worse even is that the virtual GPUs on macOS are not accelerated. So for a VM your rendering will fall back on software based (CPU based) rendering.
Apple does not expose the APIs which are needed to be able to write a GPU accelerated driver for VMs.
IOW a VM is no good for playing games when using macOS.
You should probably let Parallels [1] know this, so they can stop wasting their time advertising Parallel Desktop’s support for DirectX and OpenGL (via Metal) as a way to play Windows games on the Mac.
(Disclaimer: I don’t actually use it for this purpose. And while it may be true that macOS guests can’t use accelerated graphics, someone looking to play older Steam games presumably has access to the Windows versions.)
Ah - I was of the impression that the 16-inch MBP initially ran Mojave, even though you buy them with Catalina installed. Probably from the crop of rumours last month?
In that case yeah, a partition with Linux might be your best bet if you want to use 32-bit apps, unfortunately.
Sorry for the useless comment, but I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment.
I don't think it really matters, of course. Android phones have a full set of manufacturer-specific printing drivers which work fine over the local network, and geofft noted upthread that ChromeOS has CUPS now. Internet printing is gone now, I suppose, but who used that?!
> I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment
I would imagine very few, or else Google would be keeping it around. I would guess that Cloud Print basically didn't take with either consumers or enterprises, and as a result Google no longer wants to keep doing it.
Try out the "Mopria print service" (mobile printing alliance), most big manufacturers are part of it. They provide a generic driver app for Android that works for mobile printing with models from multiple manufacturers.
I feel the opposite. My printer supports cloud print, OR an awful app, or just a normal print server thing (idk how printers work)
I've always had trouble using the printer except when using cloud print. Cloud print at least works every time, if i try to print another way it often fails silently.
Nothing about Google killing products is quiet anymore. People have noticed, and I wonder if Google is really aware of the extent of the brand damage that headlines like this cause.
Printing is the most corporate thing I can imagine, and even though it is not directly related, as a G Suite customer, this would make me extremely nervous.
Hah! Same with us! We had a meeting where we talked about should we move to Google Cloud, AWS or Azure. Google Cloud was crossed out within 5 minutes of the meeting starting because we have absolutely no confidence that it won't be killed. I don't care how much Google says it won't be. I don't believe them.
Google Cloud Print was a disaster. I could get it to work properly maybe 20% of the time, even with Android devices using the app and Chromebooks. A favorite bug involved a simple print job from one of my kid's Chromebook causing a Brother printer to "print" a blank piece of paper for every sheet remaining in the main tray.
By comparison, AirPrint just worked, quickly recognizing new printers from new devices and running jobs pretty much flawlessly.
To print to an AirPrint printer over LAN from Android, one needs to install the Google Cloud Print apk from Play Store. (I witnessed just this week that it didn't work on a newly set up Android One device running Android 9 before installing Cloud Print from Play Store.)
With the cloud part of Cloud Print gone, will Google continue to provide the AirPrint-compatible Android software so that Android users won't have to install software from printer vendors like Windows users have to?
I'm glad to see this one go. When you want to print from one device in a room to another, sharing a copy of the data with Google's servers halfway across the country seems like an odd and privacy-concerning way to accomplish that.
I support relatives using Chromebooks and the old fashioned model is printing is much easier to explain and deal with! The wifi printers in my life never seem to maintain reliable connections over long time spans so we resort to using them as USB printers anyway.
I bought a cloud enabled printer for my Dad, who uses a Chromebook. The only way I could get it to print reliably was to connect it to my Windows machine via a cable and have my dad email me whatever he wants to print.
In other words, I now have two printers in my office to do what I was doing already with one.
Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one.
The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where people can take ownership of products and grow them over time. Perhaps people could be judged by their market traction, making them sort-of internal entrepreneurs who over a decade or more, get to share the benefits of shepherding their project.
My guess is these things are generally unprofitable because their internal costs are so used to operating as a near monopoly they simply can’t do anything on the cheap. Which ends up killing off seemingly viable products.
It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
They might not be wrong. Engineers who could be maintaining mildly profitable products could be invented new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable. If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products. Bad for PR and for getting folks to trust you on new projects, and you'd need to bake that cost into the calculation, but still potentially the right call.
What's the expected value of not having your brand known for routinely canceling products without much notice? It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important - and that's bad for Google.
90s and 00s Microsoft was successful in part because they were an incredibly stable platform to develop against.
10 year support goes a long way, and if you paid enough money you could email in your bugs and get custom hot fixes made for issues that annoyed you.
Even their /bad/ technologies had long term support. If you built on top of shiny new thing and Microsoft dropped it in the next release, it was still going to get patches, bug fixes, and the documentation for it wasn't going to vanish from the world as if it never existed.
Of course this was all before cloud services existed. Back then you'd pay for a product and you got software on a disk/CD and there was an expectation that it'd keep working.
One thing that gets overlooked so frequently, by all companies, is that ongoing costs are ongoing. Whenever I see a new fitness tracker kickstarter advertising amazing cloud services for free, my first thought is that the costs from cloud services will eventually exceed the tiny profit that comes from selling physical consumer hardware.
And a few years later another "It's been a great journey" message goes out as the company runs out of money.
Obviously Google won't run out of $, but costs do add up.
Doing the math on how to distribute funding to bundled cloud services is actually rather hard. You have to figure out for a given product / subscription, how much of that purchase price needs to be distributed to the various teams. That sort of attribution is not easy, and not properly allocating those funds to development resources can kill a product. e.g. someone buys a Chromebook, of course the OS team gets money, but the team making Google docs can argue they deserve a split, after all without them the Chromebooks would be somewhat useless. Analytics helps, but only to an extent.
Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run).
Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.
Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point. Microsoft maintained backwards compatibility because of a new operating system broke old code, companies wouldn’t upgrade and it made its money from operating systems.
Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.
> Microsoft didn’t care about developers that was always a talking point.
Microsoft put an insane amount of effort into documentation[1] and sample code. They ran developer training programs around the world and published an actual magazine.
They funded the writing and publishing of countless[2] books for developers. They still run Channel 9, where they produce/publish long and short form technical content.
If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from.
[1] Each product team targeted at developers had a dedicated, non-trivial in size, full time documentation team. On top of that Microsoft would hire 3rd party software companies to start using early versions of new APIs and write large scale sample apps using those APIs. I worked on one of these samples apps, it was a complete end to end ordering system for a furniture store that included everything from a tablet pc app for the sales staff to use inputting customer orders, syncing to a database in the warehouse to get the order loaded on a truck, and the delivery driver had an application running to get a signature on delivery of the order. Since this was pre-cellphones everywhere, the truck driver's laptop stored data offline and when brought back to the warehouse it synchronized itself with SQL server using some features new to SQL server at the time.
That was one of thousands of sample apps Microsoft made to show off its APIs. Compare this to the modern world where the cloud database provider billing you by the hour is going to throw out a couple basic hello world examples and that is about it.
If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from.
There were no other platforms seriously in contention in the mid 90s and early 2000s. There was Apple circling the drain and Unix vendors were all over the place.
In today’s world, if you are a major corporation that needs help you have all sorts of “partners” that will help you with your chosen platform, information on any API usage is all online.
In the classic MacOS days in the 80s and early 90s, Apple had the multivolume “Inside Macintosh” series.
> It seems like any company would have to be crazy to want to depend on any new Google service for anything important.
Companies depend heavily on AdWords, gSuite, and Cloud and all three continue to grow.
The reputation for canceling projects which aren't working may matter to consumers, but I haven't seen anyone in business mention it in their purchasing decisions.
While I can believe that, there's an obvious distinction between GSuite and most of the services Google kills with abandon: businesses actually pay to use GSuite, which means that unlike Google Reader, Cloud Print, Inbox, and many others, it's a direct revenue generator and it's immensely popular. I don't know that that guarantees its continued existence, but I think it does offer a pretty serious shield.
Then make me pay for Cloud Print. I'm already paying for Drive and GSuite, I think I can handle $1/year more.
Heck, add features like secure job release, integration with enterprise directory services, and services for brochure printing and online photo printing/albums. Document management and printing services is a huge industry.
Companies and universities hate doing printer driver and device management, and hence all the outsourcing of printers. But the outsourcing companies have to bolt an extra box on many printers to enable printing, or write special printer GUI firmware, makes it expensive. Could all be on your phone instead. Cf https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart...
I have yes - at our office I just bought some cloud print enabled printers so that I could print without some quirks in the AD deployment and remotely. That said, I'm sure traction was low - I saw VERY few others using it. Still very annoying.
The more relevant question is: for a new service by Google for which you are a target market would you have any reluctance to use it based on your perceived likelihood that Google will kill in the future?
I've never used Cloud Print, but I have used Reader and Hangouts that were shut down. The perception that Google has no commitment to their products is very strong and transfers to other areas. I'd rather use AWS or Azure than GCP, because I don't trust Google to continue their services offerings or API contracts.
> Engineers...could be invent[ing] new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable
Doubtful. The successful products to come out of Google are Search, GMail, and GCP. They bought Adwords, Doubleclick, Android, Youtube, and Nest and Fitbit, I suppose. GCP is their only recent win, but it's a me-too late entrant in a market Google should have invented.
Also, many of the acquisitions you mention were tiny when bought, and Google has a much better track record of growing and improving them than, say, Yahoo.
> If someone did the math and said the expected value of "engineer working on new projects" was bigger than the expected value of of the the profits of an existing project divided by the number of engineers needed to maintain it, then it'd be logical to abandon a bunch of seemingly profitable products.
In case anyone is wondering, the math has been done. I have been told that Google even has an internal page devoted to informing engineers how much something has to be worth before it is worth their time, and it's a big number.
It's traditional software, it runs offline, client side. Which is great for low bandwidth places and the privacy concious. It has some basic ML for face recog. The money is in photo printing, which is a pretty big industry which Google has failed to capture any of.
It had a huge installed base, but of course Google would not sell user engagement in bulk, only in tiny pieces as ads. Advertising the things people take photos of is pretty straightforward too, another reason why Google killed Picasa instead of letting it free.
I strongly suspect that it would generally be a massive undertaking to decouple products from their internal ecosystem and render them able to be spun off.
Driverless printing has been "the future" for over a decade now (I remember hearing much about it back in 2006 or so), and a concept for two decades. Microsoft first filed the patent back in 1999 [0]. The only thing that's changed is the patent is now expired (as near as I can tell), thus opening the door a bit wider for adoption.
But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it."
Isn't "driverless printing" essentially a standard printing protocol + a way to describe the printers capabilities ? If so I would say that driverless printing has been a thing since Postscript was invented (early 80s, if I am not mistaken)?
Chrome OS supports “native” printing. I think it’s more or less
interoperable with AirPrint.
The problem would be mostly solved if Windows added native support and added a giant warning when anyone tries to install a printer driver saying that it’s a terrible idea.
Google Plus is the superior way of keeping up with blogs and news sites, and I am really enjoying texting with my friends over Allo ever since they discontinued Hangouts.
I bought a $200 Brother laser printer a few years ago. It supports:
>LPD
>Raw Port
>IPP
>AirPrint
>Mopria
>Google Cloud Print
and, I think, a bunch of proprietary HP/Epson protocols.
The best part is the toner cartridge that comes with it lasts long enough to totally recoup the cost difference between it and a "consumer" inkjet printer
Until there's more competition in the printer space: good luck.
Printer companies want to differentiate and upsell. The best way of doing that is via software which means first party "drivers" (which is really this huge bundle of bloat and ads at this point). If anyone has recently installed a consumer inkjet for a family member will know what I am talking about. It is basically adware.
Those of us sticking to our nice boring laser printers aren't the main market for consumer printers, it is the Epson/HP/etc sold by big box retailers.
HPs small business printers are annoying too. I bought an OfficeJet 8720 for my home and it's a pretty good printer except for the fact that they are relentless when it comes to pushing their auto-ink ordering. They also really want you to make an account at HP and put the printer on the internet.
When people ask me about home printers for very occasional use, I advise them to use Staples/Office Depot/FedEx office printers at 12-14 cents per page. Saved a lot of people from buying printers.
Printer manufacturers don’t care about up selling. They want to sell high margins ink/toner. All consumer printers support iOS and MacOS that don’t require drivers.
The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one.
Bottom line: Google is not ready for the enterprise.
I know a mid-sized travel company ($500m+ revenue) that will have its workflow seriously disrupted by this.
I know that no companies ever, ever! had to shift their core tech and workflows away from MSN Messenger to Windows Live Communicator to Skype to Teams.
Google should say: "My product is TECHNICALLY release quality, but my BUSINESS MODEL is not finished right now, so I will cancel a working product if I can get enough money out of it".
While Cloud Print may be an exception, a problem seems to be that Google has perverse incentives.
Creating new products is probably over incentivized, while the boring work of operating and maintaining existing useful products is under incentivized.
From my conversations with ex-googlers, it's exactly this. Like you and OP suggested, promotions and bonuses are heavily tied to launching new things. Being on the team that launches the next new shiny moves you up the ladder.
However, those who stay on a product and continue to grow/advance the product don't get nearly as much recognition, and don't get the incentives that a launch does.
This translates to people jumping on board an pre-launch project, riding it through launch, then moving on to the next thing, leaving the project in a post-launch slump with few people lingering to maintain and grow the project.
Their leadership has no vision. They don't know what to build, where they're going, or what problems they need to solve..
So they encourage these random projects hoping one of their employees will have a vision for them.
So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard decisions.
Agreed -- I saw Sundar give the keynote at Google I/O last year, and while it was obvious that he was really into the tech, it was equally obvious he had no overarching vision for any of the things he talked about, outside of a general sense of "wow, isn't this cool?"
Google really needs to ditch him and find a new CEO capable of providing some actual vision and direction, not just randomly lead them to chase various cool technologies.
If you look at Google's stock price over Sundar's tenure as CEO you will see why it's very unlikely they "ditch him." Same thing happened with Ballmer.
You really think Sundar is having as negative an impact on Google as Ballmer did for Microsoft? I agree Google has lost its way, but I wouldn't go that far.
How are they a really good startup builder? What have they built in house that has been a success since Gmail?
After flailing around for a decade, almost all of their profit is still based on ads. They are less diversified than any of the big tech companies besides Facebook.
Google is a startup builder but also a bureaucracy that serves as a startup killer. I have a feeling that a lot of the projects Google creates would thrive if Google had budded them off, and only end up dying because they keep them living within the company. (For example, Google Reader, if budded off, would have just been Feedly a decade earlier, which is a fine standalone company.)
I think Google's scale is a problem here. They're always talking about the "next billion users". With that mindset, nothing short of hundreds of millions of users is a success.
Android and Docs/Drive/Sheets were two acquisitions.
Google is certainly a contender in cloud computing services, but they have a market share of 4% in 2018 for a product category they were one of the first to enter on a big scale, and I don't think niche success is what they are after.
I'm not sure what I think about Chromebooks. I'd like to hope that it has an exciting, Fuchsia-coloured future.
I think it's been notable in the current hubbub about Stadia some have been pointing towards Gmail, Maps etc as proof Google doesn't kill everything.
But the thing is all the examples seem to be more than five years old, because god help me but they don't seem to have done anything in quite a while to be honest.
Google desperately needs to rethink how it moves into new areas and launches new products. "You'll get it when it arrives" seems like such a terrible attitude to take with the general public.
Good news! :) Bill Kilday, a founder at Keyhole, wrote a book about Keyhole, Where 2, and Google Earth and Maps: "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". It's not very technical, but it has a lot of interesting history about the products' development and internal Google politics.
Chrome was basically a reskinned WebKit browser earlier on and then they forked it. I doubt Chromecast (the device) is more than a break even if that. It costs the same as a Roku stick and the CEO of Roku said their hardware doesn’t make a profit. They make money from advertising.
I have had the exact same thought about Google for about 2 years now (and about the other big SV companies in general). I guess these golden cages are cheaper compared to doing acquihires further down the road.
It's unclear who would buy. Lots of companies and private organizations were benefitting from Cloud Print, but would any of them be interested in taking on the cost of operating it?
Also, would enough Googlers be willing to spin out from "the mothership" to go work for a spinoff that likely couldn't afford the same benefits package?
(And this is to say nothing of the fact that most of Google's software is written atop Google's internal software infrastructure, which generally cannot be ported out of the company. It just won't work outside the ecosystem of services it assumes exist).
>So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard decisions.
Not to be hateful, and I couldn't possibly live further from the SV area, but isn't that just a description of startup culture? Are they just being the most successful startup?
It seems pretty bold and visionary to me. They've lucked out with gmail, chrome, golang, android, maps, etc. and they still have the best search in the world.
Having a HIPPO tell everyone what to do, how to do it and when is not visionary. Letting engineers do what they want and then making money from the ideas is.
And Apple bought NeXT which is what macOS and iOS are based off of. A purity contest of "from scratch" isn't really relevant. Google clearly put, and continues to put, a lot of serious technical work into Chrome and Android which is reflected in their success.
Chrome isn’t a “success” because of any technical work. It’s a success because Google hocked it on their home page.
How is Chrome anymore of technical success than other browsers?
As far as Android, it came out in the Oracle trial that it only made about $22 billion in profit during its entire existence and the entire ecosystem is still a mess as far as security and updates compared to Windows - ie where one company controls the operating system and licenses it to other OEMs.
Not to mention that the entire Android market is a profit less race to the bottom for all of the manufacturers.
All that being said, Google still derives almost all of its profit from ads compared to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon who have had far more success in introducing diversified products.
But if Google’s failures can be attributed to a lack of leadership, most of Apple’s current success wasn’t the result of the NeXT acquisition. It was the result of bringing its founder back.
> How is Chrome anymore of technical success than other browsers?
When chrome was new it was extremely innovative with how much space it gave to websites, and also came with orders of magnitude faster javascript. The other browsers then copied Chrome so all of them are now fast and sleek, but back then the difference was huge.
Yes! As soon as wikipedia stopped being the first result for nearly everything it started going downhill. The decline in usability for me has been most notable in the last 5 years.
"Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application. After additional acquisitions of a geospatial data visualization company and a realtime traffic analyzer, Google Maps was launched in February 2005."
Though it completely goes against the grain and it's fairly tongue in cheek - sometimes I wonder if the belligerent drive to innovation is really helping anyone but the stockholders.
Of course, innovation is positive and generally drives the quality of life in the civilisation, but... if Google stayed as Search + GMail + AdWords/Sense for decades and only worked to update those services to be generally useful and offer decently modern UX, who'd blame them? Sure, that'd turn them into a sort of utility, but again - who in the general population would actually lose from that?
What’s wrong with putting ideas in public and then discontinuing them means that no one will invest time or money in your products. If you were a printer manufacturer would you support whatever Google comes up with to allow Android devices to support printing without needing to write specific drivers?
Apple released AirPrint in 2010. AirPrint compatible printer still works with an iPad 1.
Having a vision doesn’t prevent the rank and file from contributing quite the opposite. Look at Microsoft. Nadella has a strong vision for the company and great things are constantly created from every level that aligns with that vision. The new surface neo, xbox adaptive controller, gamebar,razor components, the whole .net team. All of it is about empowerment, that is what vision can do.
Except when it keeps paying off, it's not so much "hoping" as just "being big enough to throw so many things at a wall that has such a high payout, anything sticking means winning the lottery. Again. And again. And again"...
Google can literally _afford_ to kill off highly profitable ventures because something else will make them _more_ money.
(which in itself should be reason enough to judicially split this company up, but that's apparently no longer a thing we do, so here we are)
This isn't Google-specific. Based on my own first-hand experience working in a Global 500 company, I'm inclined to say that it's actually inevitable in any sufficiently large company with a sufficiently large range of business.
The fundamental problem is that there's just way too much heterogeneity for senior leadership to possibly understand all the company's lines of business. Which means that it's impossible to make thoughtful, intentional decisions about all of it at the corporate level. I'm guessing the best strategy is to focus on the bread-and-butter business, and treat all the rest with a sort of benign neglect. That seems to be what Google is doing. But you can't neglect things indefinitely - you do need to occasionally clean out the hallway closet and get rid of all the stuff you didn't even remember you had.
>The fundamental problem is that there's just way too much heterogeneity for senior leadership to possibly understand all the company's lines of business. Which means that it's impossible to make thoughtful, intentional decisions about all of it at the corporate level.
Enormous Japanese and Korean companies don't seem to have this trouble, and they're far more heterogeneous than any American company. Yamaha for instance makes boat engines and high-end pianos and audio electronics.
I don't disagree with your assertions. But I want to point out that other tech giants sunset stuff all the time too. It some ways, it's endemic to the industry. Here's a list of everything Microsoft shut down over the years. It's a big list.
As of this writing, that list contains about 270 items over about 35 years (from the first closure). The "Killed by Google" list contains 191 over 13 years.
That would be an interesting analysis. Just keep in mind that "products" are nuanced; it's not always apples to apples. Both companies have some products that are free and some that cost lots of money. Some items are full blown enterprise applications, and some are just labs-style projects. All these different types of products are weighted the same in these lists.
But I don't necessarily think they have the same weight, so to speak. For example, the majority of products Google shut down were free, and the majority of Microsoft's were not. How should that be evaluated? I don't really know! It would be interesting to look at this.
Many of those products were cut down consumer products with a clear migration path (Outlook Express, Works, Personal Webserver, etc) or products that were declining in popularity (the older languages).
They were also mostly software that you could run practically forever without MS support because MS strives for backwards compatibility. Once Google subsets a service, you can’t use it anymore.
Android is specially bad, not only we have to deal with lack of updates, half backed Java support, many libraries and best practices announced at one IO, are already forgotten the following year.
Latest example, now that ConstraintLayout is finally working properly, they come up with JetPack Composer, most likely due to Flutter marketing pressure.
They should just sell their dead products. I know they don't need money, but someone could probably maintain the Cloud Print codebase and add value to the world.
It wouldn't be practical. The great advantage of the monorepo is that it encourages teams to use libraries from almost anywhere in the company. One disadvantage is that it makes splitting out those codebases almost impossible.
Niantic was an "internal startup", more like an X project than part of Google borg. It didn't integrate with major infrastructure like GSuite. It ran on AppEngine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607874
I've heard numerous times about how everything inside Google is so tightly coupled to their infrastructure that making it work outside is extremely difficult.
It's true. Trying to isolate a specific product and deploy it independently if it's grown up "organically" inside Google's core infrastructure is like trying to take an animal from the rainforest and air-drop it into Antarctica with a "good luck" and a smile.
> The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one.
This is the entire industry. I work for a non-sexy "tech" travel company, and it's the same thing. Pay down tech debt? Good luck getting any kind of recognition. Make a react graphQL api? You're making senior.
That's funny because other than Google Street View, I can't think of any "sexy" things Google has done. It's mostly really mundane (if sometimes well executed) products and me-too style copycats of chat products. Oh and of course tons of horrible ad tech stuff.
I can't say Google's launched anything exciting in the past decade. If they're shooting for sexy, they're failing miserably.
There was a time when the YouTube “recommended” list was quite good (around 2011-2013), that’s how I discovered lots of very interesting music back then. In the meantime things have gone considerably downhill.
I've noticed this too, and not just with Google. Same with Amazon and many other big tech companies.
I've wondered why, and the only thing I can think of is that they are all jumping to machine learning, and the results are worse than the old-fashioned algorithms.
Loon, Waymo, and Stadia seem pretty sexy, for entirely new product spaces. And within the current products AR maps, digital assistant, and AI auto complete in Gmail are pretty cool but I guess that's highly dependent on what you as an individual would care about.
I think in this case, Google Cloud Print is a flawed product and doesn't present a business benefit for Google, specifically growing the ChromeOS platform and broader Chrome ecosystem.
If anything it's a barrier to any organizational adoption. You have the exfiltration of data to Google, and a weird protocol implementation that's a relic of last decade.
I mean they kept it around for 10 years before killing it. They certainly tried.
It's printing physical paper. It's 2019, does it really confuse anyone as to why they would kill a product that prints paper? Even if it was successful in the short term, which it wasn't, it seems very rational to kill Cloud Print from a business perspective in the long term.
The developed world been moving far, far away from print for a while now. I imagine if you look at the graph of overall paper usage, you'll see it going down and to the right for some time into the future until it's near zero. Definitely the wrong business to be in.
My business includes printing, signing, and mailing certain documents, so it was crucial for our efficiency to automate the process of printing.
Our first "fancy" printer included support for Google Cloud Print - except it would periodically "deauthenticate" and require manual setup, which in turn would change certain printer IDs that we needed to send jobs to the printer.
Our next "fancy" printer from Xerox also included support for Google Cloud Print. For whatever reason, we could never enable Google Cloud Print on that model.
We switched to PrintNode and have never looked back. We were able to integrate our label printers with PrintNode as well, so we could automate the process of printing shipping labels. The biggest downside is that we needed a dedicated computer (server in our case) to be connected to the printers in order to route the PrintNode jobs. Not the biggest downside in our case, but to its credit, Google Cloud Print usually connected directly from the printer.
Will tack QZ Tray (https://qz.io) onto this list. I've actually used it at my last two jobs for everything from dot matrix printers, laser printers, shipping label printers, and scales (Mettler Toledo.)
Can also state I had good experience with them and that it's worth looking into. Needed a way to print custom labels and packing slips dynamically and Google Cloud Print was pretty obtuse comparitively.
Having helped build a product based on Google cloud print I can only say I'm not sad.
At the time it had a ton of political backing, and so we were kind of compelled to use it despite the fact that 1/ it was a nightmare from an authentication perspective for our use case, 2/ it had "I've forgotten how to count that low" rate limits, and 3/ didn't map cleanly onto anything we were trying to do.
Nevertheless, we wound up shoehorning it in at the insistence of both that team and our management until it predictably failed without support, at which point it became a crisis.
May something better replace it, but I won't be shedding any tears for what I saw.
I don't think Google understand how essential product support is..
It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is extremely popular for the cloud ( I think).
Microsoft is very clear on products which aren't SLA supported. The only thing I remember is killing Silverlight. And seeing .net core thrive, it was the right decision.
But don't forget, that changing the direction of the company was made public with a new CEO, although undeniably Ballmer prepared the foundation for Azure now. Crossplatform products ( eg. office) were always ready to release, they just didn't do it.
How was it the right decision? Silverlight was cross-platform, then they made a Windows-specific fork which is WinRT XAML/WinUI (most people don't realize this but this stack originated as a repurposing of the Silverlight codebase directly, it wasn't a rewrite), now they are apparently hoping to make it cross platform again (see e.g., https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/winui_winrt_windows... )
It seems like they could have taken a less roundabout route to get there.
"Originally, CoreCLR was the runtime of Silverlight and was designed to run on multiple platforms, specifically Windows and OS X. CoreCLR is now part of .NET Core and represents a simplified version of the CLR. It's still a cross-platform runtime, now including support for many Linux distributions. CoreCLR is also a virtual machine with JIT and code execution capabilities."
At that link, we're told to select "Printers" under the heading "Printing". The only item I see under that heading is "Google Cloud Print".
I sort of like this idea, of just making changes and waiting for users to complain when those changes screw them over... I do hope that someone is paying attention to those complaints.
Printers are standardizing on a thing called "driverless printing," based on having some common Page Description Languages (or having the printer have support for handling a PDF directly): https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting#Driverless_Pr...
Each printer having its own driver is sort of like ... each terminal having its own escape sequences. When printers and terminals were purpose-built electronics with limited hardware functionality, it made sense to put the smarts into the computer and have it figure out which operations were supported by the device. Nowadays everyone just uses TERM=xterm and there aren't physical terminals anymore (even the companies that used to build them will now sell you cheap general-purpose computers that run a full-screen terminal emulator). Printers have gone the same way; there's enough computational power inside the printer itself that you can just send it something like a PDF and tell it to figure things out.
Thank f--- for that. The era of "Winprinters" and manufacturers trying to differentiate on (awful) software can't end soon enough. Apple had the right idea at the dawn of the LaserWriter back in 1985.
It's not a big deal now that embedded machines with a half a gig of RAM/multicore processors and open-source postscript rendering software is common, but postscript traditionally came with a heavy price in compute resources and software licensing fees. For a long time the RIP in the printer was a more capable system than the PC driving it, and printers that handled it were correspondingly premium products.
Can you elaborate on the similarities? I don't really understand PS, CUPS, or GCP, but I think an overview of how they relate would be really interesting.
PostScript is a programming language that lets you describe how a page looks. (It's a real, Turing-complete programming language, and you can do things like print a fractal with a couple of lines of PostScript.) It was popular with high-end printers like the Apple LaserWriter, and it required a real CPU inside the printer in order to evaluate the PostScript and render it into an image of the appropriate resolution, which could then be printed. So it was completely out of the question for consumer-level printers like cheap inkjets. Today, of course, adding a real computer to a cheap inkjet is entirely doable (a $5 Pi Zero is far more powerful than the LaserWriter), but in the past you basically needed a driver that ran on your computer that converted a high-level document (e.g., a page from a word processor) to physical instructions for the printer.
CUPS is a program that implements the Internet Printing Protocol, basically a way to send, view, and cancel print jobs over an HTTP API. If you have a local printer connected with a parallel port, you can run CUPS and have other machines send to it. The other thing CUPS does is conversions: you can send a PDF to CUPS, and it will run the driver to convert it to whatever format the printer needs. So an application that talks to CUPS only needs to know how to generate PDFs. CUPS also supports talking to remote print servers, e.g., other CUPS servers, printers that natively speak IPP, or printers that speak some other protocol.
Google Cloud Print is a service which has the unusual property that printers connect to it, not vice versa. Therefore you can print a document to a Google Cloud Print printer without being on the same network, which IPP doesn't let you do. (For printers without direct GCP support, you'd need to leave a computer plugged into it and running, but some newer printers with built-in networking know how to talk to Google and let you register it to your Google account.)
To elaborate a little, "IPP Everywhere" / AirPrint, "Driverless printing" or whatever it's called, is basically having the printer run a CUPS server and broadcast itself on mdns/bonjour, and then clients can print to it directly without having to install manufacturer-specific printer drivers (the IPP protocol itself has the necessary features so that you don't even need PPD's). The only thing the client needs to be able to do is support IPP and a few file formats mandated by IPP (PWG-raster (a simple raster format) and JPEG, even PDF is optional IIRC).
(There's something called the "IPP sharing extensions" (IIRC) for supporting things like central print servers with auth, proxying and whatnot for enterprise deployments)
You're writing a bit of stuff, may all sound right..
But I'm not sure about what that hasto do with OP's statement?
How can I now tell my printer in my home network to print a document from my smartphone on the go or my work PC?
And that without installing some half-baked monster app for each printer vendor.
Driver-less printing is great if I'm in the same network, but not so if not.
It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run.
Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1]
In an industry where 80% of startups disappear, it's inevitable that they have to shut down products at a rate not much smaller than their introduction of new products. And if "Google Cloud Print" is considered significant, then that will result in frequent headlines of "Google is shutting down <x>".
Considering how annoying I find this meme even though I have absolutely no stake in it, people on the inside are probably telling their therapists about it. The better part of a decade has passed since Google Reader was shut down, and it's still the go-to reaction of people who want to seem oh so unique, rebellious, and cynical.
And Google wonders why their products don't gain momentum? Should I trust them when I buy a Chromecast, Stadia, or anything else? I mean even their probably most successful product, the Chromecast, doesn't get many updates and sometimes I wonder if they put much effort into it. It seems like they are very good at the initial launch but slowly and surely they remove resources from that product and things go downhill.
BTW CUPS on a raspberry pi make a great little print server and can extend features like AirPrint to printers that otherwise don't have them. One of the better write-ups: http://ventures.tpedersen.net/errata/raspberrypi/homepiv3
But there's lots of this out there. You can set it up on any machine you have - if you leave a desktop on all the time or have a NAS that lets you run VMs too you can put this functionality there too.
Unless you have a Brother printer. It's been a year so maybe this information is outdated, but last I looked they had absolutely no support/drivers for ARM.
What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between computer and printer (that work with many operating systems)?
Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and authorization support in actively maintained firmware?
Could Cloud Print support (with private servers and an open standard) just be merged into CUPS now?
It's very funny that the article itself calls out most people commenting here
> Regardless, Google is getting savaged by bloggers for killing yet another service, one that most of them never even tried, let alone used regularly.
I used it, not regularly, but was the only way to print from my Linux machine at my company, the printer had it built in even. I wonder what will happen to printers like that next year when the servers disappear.
I didn't see anything about the migration path for servers using the CloudPrint API. My medical records/pharmacy/invoicing software uses CloudPrint to reach printers. What are the alternatives for SAAS?
This is terrible.
I use Linux at home, and Linux has always had difficulty printing. I deliberately bought a Brother laser printer with Google Cloud Print to avoid these issues. It also makes it easy to print from my phone.
Had I known this, I might have bought an HP printer, which are known to have better Linux drivers....
Looks like IPP Everywhere could be a self-hosted alternative that has much of Google Cloud Print functionality including the ability to print securely from the public cloud
This sucks. I loved Google Cloud Print. I've never had good luck configuring CUPS on Linux, and Google Cloud Print gave me a nice way to not have to deal with it.
My experience with the opposite of the author's. Cloud Print rarely worked for me and generated more work setting up and managing relative's newly wireless printers when the old method of direct USB printing worked reliability and was largely "plug-n-play". Good riddance.
(2013-2019) Gwern did a statistical analysis predicting Google product closures. It's useful context for discussions such as this: https://www.gwern.net/Google-shutdowns
I followed this link to a SlateStarCodex article on Google Correlate. At the top of the Google Correlate page was:
"Google Correlate will shut down on December 15th 2019 as a result of low usage.
You can download your data under Manage my Correlate data in the top bar, or right from here"
Good timing! Get your correlations in while you can.
I think this again points to why google struggles with consumer products. It appears that google's strength in technology sometimes lets them leap frog competitors by bringing a better product to market, they seem to screw up getting the whole of business behind it. Sooner or later the competitors catch up with the technology and do the other things right.
I really don't understand why they didn't keep this announcement under wraps and extend the service for another year, as this is exactly the kind of story they don't need with the lackluster launch of Stadia. Google really can't bring large parts of the business together to focus on a strategic goal which seems to result in this flailing around product to product.
CUPS is exactly what Google is switching Chrome OS to, as a replacement for Cloud Print.
But the reason to have Google's (or someone's) servers involved is so that you don't need to be on the same network (e.g., you can print to your home printer, behind a firewall/NAT, while you're at a coffeeshop, also behind a firewall/NAT).
Buuuuut, is that really a valid use case? how many people do actually want to remotely print from another network to a printer, beside print shops without dedicated WiFi networks? How many people do actually want to use it as some sort of fax-machine replacement?
It's like sort of useful. In the old days, I would print my lab reports to the college printer from home (using smb based print spooling, which dates me, because smb over the internet was allowed then). You could also use cloudprint to send a document to a print shop before you got there; not the worst way to print things if you don't have a printer at home.
Most of the people I know who tried that in college seemed to always send the first copy to the wrong printer. So you print you report on the physics printer. Walk over. Nothing here. Walk back to dorm. Realize you printed in chem building. Print again in physics lab. Walk over again.
I do this all the time, when I'm at work and my wife needs some document printed. However, I usually just ssh into a box on my home network and run lpr myfile.pdf
CUPS / IPP is just an HTTP server. Apparently HTTPS (IPPS) is reasonably well-supported, and there is also support for IPP authentication, but I still wouldn't feel totally comfortable exposing the CUPS built-in web server directly to the public internet....
We previously had one of those ol Reliable Brother printers that would last for a decade. When we last moved, we left it behind and on the rare occasions we need to print something we email the doc to a FedEx email address and pick it up from the printer at FedEx office (you enter a unique hex code to retrieve after dipping your card for payment).
It seems like the use cases of printing to your home printer from anywhere is few and far between.
> Whatever happened to good old CUPS? Why did they have to introduce so many layers including Google's servers between the user and the printer?
As the support document states, as far as Chrome OS goes, the removal was made possible precisely because its CUPS support became good enough to supplant Cloud Print.
I am really curious how they will make CUPS printer management on Chrome OS happen. I guess they bet on wide support on printers supporting some protocol native.
As you can see, it was really valuable to just set up a printer once, and everything internet-enabled could just print to it. When this goes away, everyone in the world who relied on this setup will need to dig out manuals and figure out a custom solution for every device and user, because nothing replaces the Cloud Print functionality. (DNS-SD discovered Driverless Printing isn't even necessarily supported on such printers, and is local-only)
Search the App Store for "Print Service Plugin". These are the printer drivers put out by all printer makers. They seem to install themselves automatically on your device when Android detects a manufacturer's printer.
I have an HP LaserJet and a Canon photo printer, and both vendor's Service Plugins magically showed up on my phone.
To your own printer? Bluetooth or Wifi. I've got a Canon TS9150 printer and I can connect to it from my phone via wifi, either directly - phone to printer - or if the printer is on your wifi network, that way. Canon have an app for android phones that help you connect to your printer which works quite well.
On a Mac or any iOS device you just connect to a network and all of the printers just show up. You don’t need an app. I have a newer iPad but even my old first generation iPad that hasn’t seen an operating system update since 2011 will print to any of my three AirPrint printers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time I had an Android device in my house (my son’s) don’t you still have to install separate printer drivers for printers if they don’t support Google Cloud Print?
I have an Android and have never, as far as I can remember, tried to print from it. For you, I opened a random web page and chose "print" and it somehow detected the HP printer on my home WiFi. No required apps, nothing special. It's just there.
Generally, Googles infrastructure is so unlike existing opensource systems that even if you had the sourcecode in-hand, the effort required to get it compiling and running while re-implementing all dependencies would be almost as much as starting from scratch.
The opensourcing of Bazel and absl:: is a big start - but there are a lot of core Java libraries you'd be missing, and all the loadbalancing, identity, config and storage systems would all need shims to slightly-incompatible opensource solutions.
I'm reading a lot of commenters above chime in with explanations for why it's logistically hard for GOOG to maintain these scut-work keep-lights-on projects because they are so unappealing to their engineers and often involves e.g. boring, non-promotable work. This gave me a Radical idea.
So, I'm one of the lucky few trans folks who have managed to survive and flourish. I'm vividly aware of at least one reservoir of brilliant people who don't get a crack to show the world what they can do.
Instead of just shuttering projects that aren't sexy enough, or are too difficult to maintain, or don't contribute to your OKRs or promotions. Why not give them away? Why not give them to a team of folks with: disabilities, barriers to professional advancement; etc. Google could quality-ensure and knowledge-transfer, meanwhile doing social good, and getting ongoing support for a product that they would otherwise have to add to the increasingly embarrassing pile of abandonware?
I'm not saying it would be easy -- I can think of any number of places where this could go horribly wrong -- but it is quite obviously a step in the right direction to try.
There are lots of great minds that would kill for a chance to do something boring for a change, because financial (and then food, and then shelter) instability is anything but.
Everyone is criticizing Google for ending many of their services lately. However, are we being biased? Considering a very high amount of various different services Google is offering (much more than any other typical company), it would make sense that their discontinuing rate would be higher than others as well. Someone should do a statistics check or comparison vs. other big companies for a more accurate assessment. The fact that Google gets reported on the news more often may make their service cancellation rate appear with a higher frequency as well.
It's fashionable to blame Google for most things these days, but in honesty, if Google were truly evil they could have done much worse things. Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to.
For example, throughout all these years I could never understand how Google allowed Yelp to become what they are today. Google own all the core technologies in that space: search, map, mobile OS. They literally have all the home fied advantages, yet Google decided to take a step back and allowed Yelp to take the lead. They could have easily destroyed Yelp anytime they wanted to but they never did that.
To me personally, Google is probably the most reasonable and undervalued company out there. With similar power in their hands, other companies would have just gone all out and probably be extremely evil for a crazy amount of profits in return, but for Google they have always refrained themselves from doing exactly that. Too bad most people just never considered this angle.
> Everyone is criticizing Google for ending many of their services lately. However, are we being biased?
I dunno; I don't really care about any of it; I've never trusted them enough to use any of their products I wasn't actually giving them money for.
>Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to.
Lolwut? No, actually, they don't. They didn't beat Yelp in the early days because they weren't in the game. They may eventually do so, as Yelp degenerates into a stupid protection racket, but hopefully this entire idea goes away, as until they solve the sibyl problem, its a horse shit idea.
And if they started doing crap like this (for no reason, mind you: google is an ad company), they'd very likely end up lots of little baby googles the way ATT did. They probably will anyway. And good riddance to bad rubbish.
Of course they've long since jumped the shark, and even removed the "don't be evil" part of their corporate motto.
Sure, they can spin up and shut down any service they want any time and that's their right. But the price they pay is that many no longer trust their services to be around long term and make purchasing/adoption decisions accordingly. This feeds back into what are likely less impressive uptake numbers. At some point, their lack of commitment to their own products/services becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That's relatively annoying. I just got a new HP printer that uses cloud print, and I was enjoying using it to make printing from anywhere/my phone easier. Oh well.
Does this work on older Chromebooks? The only way I was able to get a two-year-old Asus chromebook to print was to share the printer via cloud print from a raspberry pi.
Apparently ChromeOS already has "native printing" – so try that maybe? Would it support regular network printer drivers or iPrint or AirPrint or something?
This would be a great time for someone to implement a version of this that's paid and has other SaaS features (print-to-mailed-letter, etc). I bet if you streamlined it you could get some customers pretty easily.
Network protocols for printing on a LAN are quite old. LPD and SMB are two that I use at home. I know I am an advanced user and this won't solve it for the masses, but if I combine that with ssh I can already print anywhere.
So I don't completely understand why you need a proprietary Google "cloud" service that they can sunset some years later and break. When I heard about this I wondered why someone can't build a consumer-friendly solution on these older protocols.
Of course, printing itself is less relevant than it was 20 years ago, so it's not exactly a booming industry.
I'm confused on what the replacement is. Historically, ChromeOS hasn't been able to print at all unless using Google Cloud Print in some form. To my knowledge there are two existing forms:
* a Google Cloud Print-ready printer, or
* a computer that can run Chrome and bridge non-Google Cloud Print-ready printers to Google Cloud Print.[0]
So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and registering a "classic printer". To combat this, I made a simple Python script that runs an HTTP server, accepts file uploads, assumes cupsd is running on the same host, and throws jobs at my printer. This has worked nicely, and over time I've added additional features, such as the ability to specify double-sided printing or number of copies.
The wording in this link is the source of my confusion. The first paragraph states (somewhat brusquely) that users should "identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy" without giving any suggestions on how this might best be accomplished. What's more, the first link[1] on the page claims "native printing" is getting better, but upon clicking this link I'm directed to a page about Chrome Enterprise.
So... what am I supposed to make of this? I have to pay for an enterprise edition of ChromeOS to use printers now? Google's own infographics[2] seem to suggest so. How is this an improvement? The article goes on to bullet-point several of the specific features that will be available by end-of-year. It's not clear if these apply to everybody, or to only those persons who are paying for Chrome Enterprise.
Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS? What is Google angling for by intentionally crippling software and systems that work _perfectly fine_ elsewhere?
I will keep on trucking with my tiny "print proxy" script, while continuing to not give a shit about Google's inane antics regarding printers.
The only saving grace for this article is the very last link[3] which appears to detail a _suspiciously_ simple process for adding a networked printer. I'll have to commandeer my wife's Chromebook the next time I get a chance, and test this process out. I've never seen this particular article before, and to my knowledge adding a printer like this was previously not a supported operation on ChromeOS.
Hang on, though. We're not out of the woods yet. Because of course, the only helpful page I've found so far links[4] to _yet more instructions_ for adding a native printer. The first step is "sign into some Google service" and the steps seem geared towards an "organizational unit". No. Not happening. What the hell is all this? I just want to add a local printer. I'm not sending print jobs to Google first, and I don't want support articles that assume I'm administering an organization.
> So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and registering a "classic printer"
I think the support text is wrong—you could do this on Linux as well. It'll be a moot point though when Cloud Print shuts down.
> Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS?
Have you tried recently? I don't think it is anymore. Yesterday my Chromebook seemed to just see my printer on my local LAN (via Rendezvous, I assume).
I agree these product/support docs you linked are pretty alarming. But I think the actual situation is (or if not is, will be) much better for basic ChromeOS in simple situations:
* auto-discovered network-connected printer on the same LAN as the Chromebook
* network-connected printer where you know the hostname and it's reachable from the Chromebook
* USB printer connected directly to the Chromebook
Hopefully those docs will improve soon...
Note that while I work for Google, I don't have any inside knowledge of this.
I have not tried recently. The new support articles I've uncovered seem to suggest that the situation has vastly improved. I'm still salty though, and I've put too much work into my Python script to really be concerned about switching to the more "correct" process that was previously denied to me.
The sad fact is that once a consumer realizes the device they've bought is encumbered with artificial limitations, they might not trust it even when (if!) these limitations are lifted later.
The article link takes you to the "Google Chrome Enterprise Help" section of their support site, so all the help articles linked in there are going to be geared towards Chrome Enterprise. Maybe you'll have better luck finding answers in the "Chromebook Help" area? https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&r...
I would understand the need for a "Cloud" print if you'd need to print in another country that you never visit, but what does someone need a cloud print for otherwise ?
This is as easy as it can be without needing cloud print though
> - Printing from Chromebooks
> - Printing from your phone
This is an artificial restriction created by google. There is already a network printing protocol that works without the "cloud". You just have to support it.
This is just such a convenient feature: you can remotely print something on the go from your phone and your parents/spouse/kids at home can pick it up.
PrintNode is a great alternative and a well refined product - definitely recommended. However, it has one major drawback as compared with Google's Cloud Print and that's its lack of iOS & Android printing support.
I wonder if they gave any of the hardware vendors who proudly advertised, "Google Cloud-Print Ready" on the side of the box more advanced notice than this.
For a device you already bought? Not really. How often do you replace your printer?
If you rely on GCP for your home/home-office/small business, you might be a little peeved to discover that your several-hundred-dollar printer might be reduced to a "dumb"/local-only printer next year because the manufacturer decided to rely on a closed-source third-party service for what you consider core functionality of your printer.
So is there any REAL alternative out there? Yeah yeah, ChromeOS supports CUPS now, which is great if your printer connects to the network, but what about those of us who have an older printer that's USB-only?
Moreover, how do you print from Android now? Go ahead and search for instructions how to do that which don't involve either A) Google Cloud Print or B) a vendor-specific app (which probably only works with network-connected printers).
We are also adding off-network printing support early 2020, also 100% free. Our gift to you. With Mobility Print you can print from BYO Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iOS and Android. devices.
What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between computer and printer?
Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and authorization support in actively maintained firmware?
Could Cloud Print support (with private servers) just be merged into CUPS now?
Cloud Print was THE main reason why I never fully switched away from Chrome. It was more reliable than even the "native" printing capabilities of my printer, which would randomly refuse to print, but over Cloud Print it worked every time.
It was also very convenient to send print jobs even while not at home.
Well, thanks for allowing me to get rid of Chrome entirely, I guess.
People rely on a lot of "free" Google services, but don't realize that it takes an enormous amount of people to keep things running without security issues. Another point is that, it takes hundreds of thousands of paying customers to get something to a point it is self sustainable. Just because a few random users are ready to pay $50 for the service, if at all, does not make it successful for Google or any other company.
Short of "regulating" these companies to open-source or sell the infra to a caretaker entity when services are shutdown, there is no other option. Even then, it is a massive ask of Google (that every service be separable from anything proprietary Google infra provides), and it also unrealistic to expect another company / governing body to run it without issues.
At this point, it is what it is. If you use a free service, expect it to die at some point in the future. This happens to many services where the entire company disappears. The fact that Google survived 20 years shouldn't be held against them if products went down and the company didn't. Numbers are enough to sway the stats and make Google the bad company that shuts-down services too often.
I wonder if they'll replace it with IPP Everywhere support? Totally dropping the ability to print out of the box would be disappointing, but I suppose someone could package up an app that enables IPP Everywhere printing. Google Cloud Print might have had more sophisticated discovery.
Well it seems like it's more or less being replaced by Mopria printing, which is a platform agnostic wireless printing service and already incorporated into recent versions of Android. Not a bad thing IMO, replacing Google services with new industry standard services.
I find the service to be very convenient when I have something my parents need to see. It's so much easier to just print the damn thing on their printer, than to walk them through the process of navigating to a particular site, opening a particular attachment on a particular email, etc. That's often when I'm using a chromebook, but not necessarily. All you need is a browser to use this service.
I'm glad to see Google is dropping their closed-source, "share a copy of everything you print with Google" service. Instead, they are doubling down on supporting open source printing standards and projects like CUPS. That's a win.
I loved Google Cloud Print. It made printing from various computers I have a lot easier, since I didn't have to install drivers on each one. It's the only reason I have Chrome installed still. Why does Google always kill useful products?
Why doesn't Google just charge for this?
This is the only thing that makes printing off of an Android phone even ok. I have a Pixel and for the life of me I cannot print easily from it, and I have tried multiple different printer manufacturers.
Revenue generated from charging for products such as this would be probably chump change for Google.
Google is a mass market company thus chump change is irrelevant to them.
Plus they are used to operating at a scale by providing products for free. Consumers are used to Google providing products for free. Thus it’s jarring for a lot of users to suddenly pay for basic functionality. Enterprises probably don’t need this because they’ve already figured out network printing decades ago.
Plus when you start charging people “money,” you’re expected to provide “human” support. Google won’t come near products where “human” support is necessary even with a 10ft pole unless you’re spending gajillion dollars with them.
In a strategic sense it makes sense for “Google” to shut it down. Companies like Readdle will probably fill in the spots
But Google isn’t Google anymore. They’re Google, an Alphabet Company. So there should be more space for this.
The problem is that Page and Brin, the authors of the perverse incentives at Google, are still in charge. Alphabet would have been a great place to bring in some people who are good at maintaining projects. Hell Google could learn a thing or two via osmosis about efficiency from them. Maybe cut the ageist bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come with experience instead of making the same mistakes over and over.
Fairly sure that was sarcasm, in which case I approve.
One of the things that people learn in college is that college is way harder than high school and a bunch of things that didn’t matter much in high school are super important. Same thing happens when you leave college.
College teaches a bunch of skill that will absolutely save your ass once a month, maybe once a week at first. Then you have to learn a bunch of skills that save your ass every single day.
It is rare that I compliment Microsoft, but somehow they managed to hire people right out of college and not give them Peter Pan syndrome, while Google has failed at this. And I think it starts with the interview process. MS looked for improvisation. Google focuses on book learning.
I will try to defend their decision. In era of avaliablity of cheap screens, paper is used mostly as a temporary storage eg. tickets. If we could encourage using more eco solutions this would be one of the steps forward.
I had never heard of this product before this HN post. While I agree Google kills off many useful products, perhaps there is a deeper reason that many products were birthed without any real long-term plan or ownership?
Just another day that ends in Y. Meanwhile, game developers have lost faith in Stadia and it's been out for a week at best. The reason? Google kills its own products.
It's time for a management change at Google and Alphabet.
I'd like the Unicode Consortium to add a surprised (but not really surprised) emoji that we only use when Google kills a product. I think this will be okay since we will be using it constantly.
99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud Print before seeing this headline.
Look, I too got annoyed when Google killed Reader. It sucked for a couple days. I moved on.
This doesn't even register as a product. It was an experiment that wasn't needed, so they killed it.
Holding onto every silly project you ever worked on doesn't make you responsible, it makes you a directionless hoarder. Even Google doesn't have infinite bandwidth (heh) to work on pointless side-projects.
They aren't killing Gmail. Or GCP. Or Maps. Or anything else you ever used. Let it die. Don't upvote this post just to use it for ammunition on some overly-generic tirade against Google product management. You are just adding noise to the world.
I imagine everyone has heard of cloud print -- it's emblazoned on the marketing materials of a bunch of printers. It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time, though it was pretty lame having to send a print job to Google so it can be printed on the device you're standing beside. Android 9 added Wi-Fi direct printing which is much more rational -- on a small minority of devices thus far -- but why not just sunset GCP as deprecated (countless GCP printers and devices that only supported out there) instead of outright killing? Because Google doesn't care.
So yeah, a lot of people think "Oh damn they are shutting down GCP" because it legitimately impacts them. This bizarre notion throughout this discussion that it was some weird fringe service is not supported by reality.
And Google has a poor product record for good reason, so the criticism is very well deserved. They made their bed and now they lie in it. Someone would be incredibly foolhardy to seriously "buy" games on Stadia, for instance, which is a service that has an incredibly high probability of being Googled.
> It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time
Cloud print was added to Android at the same time Android added support for generic printer drivers. Cloud Print is, in fact, just a generic printer driver as far as the OS is concerned. There are, and have been, native print drivers, though. HP, for example, has Android drivers: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04024231
Google Cloud Print was released in 2010, and was the way of printing on Android as of 2011. Native print drivers were added to Android in 2017. A print "framework" was added in 2014, where manufacturers could build hacked-out targets, which a couple did, although most are relatively newer.
This is a far cry from "same time". Indeed, most manufacturers STILL pitch Google Cloud Printer up front, most electronics store put it as a primary selection criteria, and it's always a feature on the box.
I'm not defending Google Cloud Print. It was always a terrible solution that was poorly thought out from the outset. But it's classic Google that so many are put in this situation.
> 99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud Print before seeing this headline.
[citation needed]
I use google cloud print a lot. And so to other people I know, so in my closer circles it's ~ 30% who do not use it at all (but still print occasionally).
For sure, it's not the biggest thing, but it really wasn't unknown either.
And just because something is not as popular it still continues to shows googles product graveyard policy..
The point isn't that we care about this product. The point is that the company's reputation is important because it's into so many things, and this news is a relevant signal about it. Hearing about this can inform your decision to stay off the next Google product and later have to deal with the inevitable hassle of losing it.
Hi, founder of Breezy here (www.breezy.com), a secure cloud / mobile print infrastructure that actually is "enterprise-ready". (For example: we have tens of thousands of active users across thousands of retail branches for one of the top 3 banks in the US, plus thousands more across dozens of countries around the world.)
I started Breezy in 2009 because, as a corporate lawyer at the time, I needed a way to print from my BlackBerry and couldn't find one. I applied to the 2010 YC batch with Breezy, got rejected, went through Founder Institute instead, raised a 750k seed round in 2011, almost ran out of money, pivoted to an enterprise focus, raised a bit more money, barely survived a BS patent lawsuit from a Canadian competitor now owned by HP, went through lots of other ups and downs, and here we are.
We're never going to be a unicorn, but it's a neat little business in a niche that while "nice to have" for most companies, is critical to some. If you need quality cloud print infrastructure, hit me up.
---
Meanwhile, a few thoughts from a 10-year industry veteran:
- GCP was never enterprise-class in any way. "Utterly unreliable" was the most common complaint we heard from customers.
- The core problem for a lot of enterprise use cases isn't driver incompatibility; it's network routing. Your MFPs are on this network segment over here, but your users (especially mobile devices) are on that one over there. Cloud printing can save you a lot of network headaches.
- "Driverless printing" doesn't work very well, and never has. This goes double for Mopria, which while by far the most successful of attempts, is pretty shaky in real-life usage, and lacks most basic capabilities around security, audits, encryption etc etc.
- AirPrint is pretty good and is consistently getting better, but it's always been very consumer-focused and remains so today as far as I can tell. One of the really great features they could add to simplify enterprise adoption would be to enable querying "Print Servers" (which the AirPrint spec does recognize) for lists of printers served by them. Right now there's no way to do this, so in order to reach an AirPrint print queue that's not bonjour-routable from your current IP, you have to have a config profile that points you to that specific queue, rather than to a server that returns a group of queues.
- The other major improvement opportunity there would be the ability to use certs to completely identify the user, thereby enabling (say) an Intune-provisioned iPad to print natively to a Xerox-managed enterprise pull-print / badge-release system, so that users get a native experience of printing via one queue, to any printer in the org. This is possible with Breezy today but there are a number of hoops to jump through on the admin side.
Anybody have any good recommendations for alternatives? We use Cloud Print as a printing solution to allow users in our app to authorize us to send print jobs programmatically to their printers.
I've seen QZ Tray used for this sort of thing to great effect. It entails installing both Java and QZ Tray itself, though.
Most companies just roll their own "print client" programs, in my observation. Not that difficult to do (the hardest part is actually sending the document to the printer, which is relatively trivial for macOS/Linux/anything-else-with-CUPS and not-trivial but reasonably-documented to do with Windows; those two should cover your bases).
Not sorry to hear this. GCP never worked reliably and was absolute hell to support for the several months I had to do. Rood giddace to rad bubbish, see ya never Cloud Print!
I do believe that right after the event of the first google pixel, all google products were “failure” by their standards. they haven’t created anything big ever since. Same goes to Microsoft and their latest product kills.
At least their new products are getting better now.
Google never created anything significant. That’s why I wouldn’t trust their new products.
They really need to stop publishing products that feels like beta.
Their plans always seem like:
Beta-final release > take long time to finalize it > kill stage
I think they should opensource it in a non-compiling, non-working state, as a gesture of openness.
I bet someone would go to the effort of patching it up and getting it to run.
Only disadvantage is probably that "cloudprint.google.com" is probably hardcoded into millions of printers worldwide, so even if you could run it on your own server, your printer will never work with it.
Crazy thought, what if Android and/or ChromeOS is next? Android always seemed like another "charity" project that didn't directly generate profit (before Nexus/Pixel phones). Most of the value from Android is captured by Chinese phone manufacturers and carriers, not Alphabet.
Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.
Android is the largest OS on the planet. Google would only ever give that up if they were going bankrupt, and you know there are companies that would buy that up in an instant and keep it running. Such as, say, Microsoft. Or Amazon.
The main goal of Android is to have billions of users using Chrome (which is as of now the only major browser without tracking/ad blocking enabled by default), in order to track you across the web and sell the ads, which is the Google's raison d'etre and main profit center. So, nope.
> We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy.
Something enterprise customers love hearing. Ooof imagine being assigned to sunsetting the service and explaining to what enterprise customers it still has.
Enterprise customers need to figure out that if you're paying $0 for something, you get $0 in support.... if you want something that works, either pay someone enough money to support it, or find an open option and pay your employees enough money to support it in-house.
That leads to warped thinking though. When I worked at ebay we weren’t allowed to use open source software for this exact reason. If we wanted open source software we had to find a vendor we could pay for support.
For that reason we could only run RedHat or Solaris and whatever they supported.
Having to find an external vendor is definitely warped thinking. Saying "You can't depend on open-source software in production unless you have budgeted for internal support for that software or there's an external vendor" seems entirely fair to me, though. If you find a critical bug, having a $10B company with ten thousand employees sit around waiting for some hobbyist (possibly not available until the weekend because they have a day job with a competing $10B company) to investigate some issue on GitHub is a bit unreasonable both for the company and for the hobbyist.
For lots of software, you can either trust that it's well-supported upstream and such bugs are likely to be rare, or you can say that your internal use is something you can work around (e.g., if you want to use an open-source IDE, knock yourself out, if it breaks you can find another text editor). But you should explicitly consider that.
Also, the only reason open-source software works as well as it does is that someone else is investing in making it work. Oftentimes that's Red Hat and Oracle. If you're a $10B company and you're expecting open source to magically work with no investment, besides being a jerk, you're also the reason people keep saying "how do we solve the open source sustainability problem" - it's your own fault that support resources for your critical software don't exist.
But this is not an unreasonable viewpoint for a larger organization that has attrition, especially with more important applications.
You may install a particular library and then leave, and the new person has no idea what that thing does. If there's some kind of support contract in place, the new person has the means to at least have that thing supported.
If you click on the article above, the marketing material very clearly stated "Enterprise-Ready". It seems likely some people may have bought-in due to the Google brand, but your right I don't have any sales numbers.
Chrome OS now has basically full-featured support for CUPS like a normal Linux machine, so you no longer need Cloud Print to print to local printers, and they're adding features to let you use a remote CUPS server.
Since the post says they're gonna finish things by the end of this year and there are already plenty of Chromebooks that they stopped updating... my big unanswered question is, of the Chromebooks they stopped updating, how many of them have a usable enough version of CUPS to still be able to print.
Ignoring, of course, those users that were using Cloud Print to network enable their printer.
It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run.
Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1]
Has anyone tried buying these sunsetting projects from Google? I'd definitely pay like $3-$5/mo to have this service, and the implementation is involved enough that it'd be a hassle to duplicate.
Im guessing there are still lots of people that require physical printing that use Chromebooks and the like. Is there a built in printing solution for them now? Because when the Cr48 was out the Chrome team recommended using Cloud Print.
I can see why people will miss it, but cloud print is always on my short list of things I remove/disable when setting up a phone. How many average people still own/need a printer often enough to not just go use one at the library/kinkos?
If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would be ready and printed for me when I got home. It was just a nice convenience that worked every time.
Yes there are alternatives... most printers now have an obfusticated email address that you can send to and it will print from. But this is vendor specific and unreliable and required additional steps (had to save to computer, then open an email client, send an email, etc).
But then again, how can I be surprised? We are talking about Google, the company famous for shutting down projects. I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow and they shut down google.com search engine. Right now on Hacker News (just a few spots above this post) is a another site [1], which hosts a countdown for when customers expect to shut down the Google Stadia product... a product that only launched a few days ago.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003