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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#411

Post by dang »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #397
dang wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, I have to go find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the replies to the surviving copy. That takes quite a lot of REPL work. Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch,…

Would it be possible for you to preserve the highest-scoring dupe when you do this? I was reading through one of them with around 350-400 points, and now I can't find it but this has around 100. It makes it unclear that it's the same original discussion moved, and I doubt this was your intention, but it could come across like you're trying to downplay the significance of a topic when the main discussion loses points…

I'm not sure what you mean by "preserve"? I don't think it's fair to leave the highest-scoring story as the winner; we usually try to privilege the one who posted first, i.e. the true original discussion. I think the community prefers that and it provides a better incentive.

The story didn't lose front page ranking because I rolled back the clock on the original submission (the one we're currently commenting on) to put it more or less where the other submission had been.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#412

Post by asdff »

remus wrote: post #335
q3k wrote: post #242

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." 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.

There is an infinite supply of cheap intern labor at every college in the U.S. chomping at the bit to mop the floor at google hq.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#413

Post by LeoPanthera »

filleduchaos wrote: post #342
jtreminio wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an aside, you can install both Mojave (or High Sierra) and Catalina on a single laptop with minimal friction.

Not on the 16" MBP, or any Mac which comes delivered with Catalina. You can't downgrade a Mac to a version before whatever it was delivered with.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#414

Post by JAlexoid »

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…

It's not free to run and it is not generating revenues.

Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable argument for jut keeping it up.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#415

Post by sujNansnam »

cwyers wrote: post #360
q3k wrote: post #242

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." 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.

Google pays their engineers a lot and they’d need to recruit a lot more of them if they were going to keep running everything they ever killed. That, or stop launching so many new products.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#416

Post by JAlexoid »

danans wrote: post #406
irq-1 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you going to use after this? A internet available print server? VPN?

The problem I had that cloudprint solved was printing from a Linux machine to a local non-Linux-compatible printer. With CUPS and driverless printers, this is no longer a problem. I don't generally need to print remotely to my printer.

Well... I do and I choose my printers based on availability for remote printing.

You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#417

Post by saagarjha »

JAlexoid wrote: post #414
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…

It's not free to run and it is not generating revenues. Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable argument for jut keeping it up.

Google is a large company. Surely the goodwill of keeping it around must mean something? Can’t they take a small loss on one of their “nice-to-have” products?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#419

Post by wetpaws »

Majromax wrote: post #375
tech-historian wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be interesting to know total lunched products to closed products ratio, pretty sure MS looks better in this aspect as well
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