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Google Kills Cloud Print

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421–430 of 567 posts

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#421

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.

If you think the comments here are silly take a look at what /r/android thinks

https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/dzqr2d/google_clou...

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#423
Well it seems like it's more or less being replaced by Mopria printing, which is a platform agnostic wireless printing service and already incorporated into recent versions of Android. Not a bad thing IMO, replacing Google services with new industry standard services.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#424
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Gee, then I hope they figure out a viable biz model to fund all that producting.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the workaround is to send all your printables to a Google drive folder, and then have an app on your devices that send those printables to the printer whenever the printer is visible on wifi. Not sure if Android offers sufficient APIs for that though.

Yeah or have that folder synced to a PC running at home, and then have a service running on that machine that prints anything that shows up in that folder.

Probably easy enough to throw this together in python and host it on your choice of cheap, lower power hardware (Raspberry pi, etc).

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#426

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.

perhaps even charge people for it? like... it's part of a google business accounts?

unless it's going to bring in multiples of billions of $ per year - and accelerate that growth - they're probably not interested in doing that though.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#427
post #180
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driverless printing has been "the future" for over a decade now (I remember hearing much about it back in 2006 or so), and a concept for two decades. Microsoft first filed the patent back in 1999 [0]. The only thing that's changed is the patent is now expired (as near as I can tell), thus opening the door a bit wider for adoption. But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it." [0] https://patents.google.c…

Ridiculous that a patent for such a thing should ever have been granted. "Driver" is merely the word we use for "protocol", when the protocol is ad-hoc, non-standard, or badly documented.

On what grounds should that patent not have been granted?

Seems like a pretty normal patent to me. Technology doesn't have to be likable, a good design, or even functional to be patented.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#428

I didn't see anything about the migration path for servers using the CloudPrint API. My medical records/pharmacy/invoicing software uses CloudPrint to reach printers. What are the alternatives for SAAS?

PrintNode, only had good experience with them, migrated from cloud print after I could not get some thermal printers working properly

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said install both, not downgrade. Admittedly I presumed (perhaps wrongly) that most people here know what dual booting is.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#430

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.

I saw it as a counterpoint to AirPrint. I'd like to know what changed that made Google think they don't really need this anymore. Maybe they think WiFi Direct is going to be the future?
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