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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#331

Post by derefr »

scarface74 wrote: post #301
konschubert wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is basically a startup builder. And a really good one. How many companies manage to stay so innovative after having found their rainmaker product? However, they should probably sell their successful startups instead of killing them. But I guess they don’t need the money.

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.)

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#332

Post by danans »

kllrnohj wrote: post #220
davidwparker wrote: post #102

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…

> Silo it off and just leave it be.

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#333

Post by cuban-frisbee »

gowld wrote: post #255
rgbrenner wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's wrong with tapping the wisdom of the rank and file? Why bottleneck 10K+ smart creative people by a few power-hoarding learders? That's usually regarded as the great "bazaar" / "free market" style of getting the best ideas out of the community. The failure is in not well supporting the good ideas that come up.

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#334

Post by dmix »

> 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’ve got to agree here, this feature got replaced by a native ChromeOS printing feature and probably wasn’t being used much.

It’s not as bad as others.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#335

Post by remus »

q3k wrote: post #242
kllrnohj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 li…

> 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.

I don't think this is google specific. Keeping a dead product on life support is going to get boring for most people after a while.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#336

Post by dmix »

tyingq wrote: post #158
davidwparker wrote: post #102

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.

Count up the collective hours spent figuring out why your printer no longer works and finding a new solution. The vast majority of people using it won't see this news. If Google doesn't make the Chromebook transition seamless and invisible, it'll be even worse.

Native print was originally offered in 2017 and they’ll have until 2021 to migrate to it.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#338

Post by netwanderer3 »

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#339

Post by magduf »

mumblemumble wrote: post #272
areoform wrote: post #62

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…

> Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. 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 b…

>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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#340

Post by airstrike »

amluto wrote: post #288
_wldu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 they still have the best search in the world. Which is disappointing, since Google of ten years ago had a distinctly better search.

Better for users, but not for investors.
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