Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Kills Cloud Print

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 567 posts

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#351

Post by paggle »

FreakyT wrote: post #278
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.

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…

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#352

Post by scottlocklin »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #338

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.…

> 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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#353

Post by brentonator »

ianhawes wrote: post #60

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 inc…

+1 for printnode, except the last two months where a botched upgrade and some redundancy issues they had internally resorted in outages.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#354

Post by treebornfrog »

rgbrenner wrote: post #228
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…

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.

Couldn't articulate it better.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#355

Post by OnlineGladiator »

paggle wrote: post #351
FreakyT wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#356

Post by MR4D »

paggle wrote: post #351
FreakyT wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That’s not the right comparison. He should be compared to the S&P 500. Maybe even compared to large growth firms.

When compared to both, he’s done about average or less, depending on which benchmark you use. [0]

[0] - https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#357

Post by paganel »

cpeterso wrote: post #345
chalst wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maps counts, I think. But that's going back awhile.

Google Maps was not an in-house project. Google assembled it by acquiring mapping companies Where 2 Technologies and Keyhole.

Which is the reason why import and export files for Gmaps/Google Earth are called .kml [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#358

Post by blihp »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #338

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.…

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#359

Post by pjmlp »

datguacdoh wrote: post #297
malvosenior wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Stadia you say?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#360

Post by cwyers »

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…

> 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.

Post reply on HN