On the bright side, for me, this is a product I never used. Not even once.
Google Kills Cloud Print
361–370 of 567 posts
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#362I 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.
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 n…
You can install a VM and run an older copy of the OS on your Mac for games.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#363Earlier 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.
I almost think they let their engineers launch products just so they can’t quit and go to another company.
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.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 if they just sold their low-margin-yet-profitable businesses instead of killing them? There are several tech PE firms that specialize in that niche. KKR bought Corel (of WordPerfect fame) recently. I'm also confident someone at Google already had this obvious idea. Any ex-googlers know why they chose not to / cannot do this?
The only reason that Google can throw stuff against the wall and scale it immediately is because they have the infrastructure in place.
I can’t imagine you can decouple Googke’s products from their infrastructure.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#365Google 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…
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.
Gmail was the sexiest thing when it launched. I remember I was so desperate for the Beta invite.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#366Well, it finally happened: we outlasted Google!
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.
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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.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
The status was always beta. If a company says their product is beta then you should believe them.
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".
Yeah, this is like the "early access" video games that never end up being released.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It might be your vantage point. For several companies I personally engage with this has absolutely been a point of discussion for Gsuite vs O365.
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.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#369Google 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…
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.
Re: Google Kills Cloud Print
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Chrome? Chromecast? Chromebook?
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.
The Chromebook sells are minuscule.