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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#371

Post by shadowgovt »

konschubert wrote: post #266
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.

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.

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).

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#372

Post by freefal »

skykooler wrote: post #153
efficax wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChromeOS has native print capabilities: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en I use it all the time.

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.

I'm interested in any responses as I had to do the exact same thing.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#373

Post by Enginerrrd »

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.

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#374

Post by scarface74 »

chalst wrote: post #344
iamaelephant wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android, Chromebook, the Home series, Maps, Drive, Google Cloud, Docs/Sheets and many more. A lot has happened since Gmail.

Maps is a clear in-house 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-col…

Isn’t it telling that a former bookseller was able to execute better in the cloud market than Google?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#375

Post by Majromax »

tech-historian wrote: post #275
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…

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. https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#376

Post by pishpash »

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…

When you can print money every project looks good. It's the same thing as government waste or academic faffing.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#377

Post by shadowgovt »

com2kid wrote: post #303
thfuran wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You've hit the nail on the head.

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#378

Post by thrillgore »

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#379

Post by ivoras »

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.

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?

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