221–230 of 567 posts
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This is the right move though because moving towards "Driverless printing" will solve the overall problem in a simpler way: https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/ Google is pro-adapting to change. And it is painful but it is usually the right thing.
Absolutely! 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.
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> 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.
The product has been around 10 years, and they're giving over a year notice before killing it. Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.
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 co…
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 pe…
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.
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 hoa…
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 sm…
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 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 pe…
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.
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.
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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…
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.
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.