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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#521

Post by dehrmann »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #485
dehrmann wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Engineers...could be invent[ing] new products that have some percentage chance of being much more profitable Doubtful. The successful products to come out of Google are Search, GMail, and GCP. They bought Adwords, Doubleclick, Android, Youtube, and Nest and Fitbit, I suppose. GCP is their only recent win, but it's a me-too late entrant in a market Google should have invented .

You're forgetting Maps, Earth, Docs, Translate, Drive... Also, many of the acquisitions you mention were tiny when bought, and Google has a much better track record of growing and improving them than, say, Yahoo.

Docs and Drive were also acquisitions. I'll give you Maps and Translate.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#522

Post by glangdale »

kristianc wrote: post #467
rc-1140 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the responses to the parent are things along the lines of "well it needs to be owned by a team" and all the usual valid cost-related reasons why [x] can't be maintained, and of course that doing so is boring. Isn't this the kind of project that should be reserved for people in explicit learning states such as (for example) novice hires, new hires, and aspiring mangers who haven't done any management before?…

Over time, if the cost of creating a new thing for a company is maintaining it forever, a lot less new things will get made.

I'm frustrated at the fact that this comment, and many others elsewhere on this, are creating the false dichotomy that Google either needs to ruthlessly kill products that many users are still using (Reader, Cloud Print, ...) or alternately support Every Single Product Forever.

They can still kill their outright failures, of which there are many.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#523

Post by willemgroen »

PaperCut made Mobility Print free this week: https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-pri...

We are also adding off-network printing support early 2020, also 100% free. Our gift to you. With Mobility Print you can print from BYO Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iOS and Android. devices.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#524

Post by [deleted] »

jacurtis wrote: post #4

Wow, that's a real shame, because Google Cloud Print was one of those nice little services that did ONE THING amazingly. I loved that I could print stuff from anywhere and it would be sitting on my printer when I got home. If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would b…

[deleted]

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#525

Post by rsfinn »

wila wrote: post #499
ec109685 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can install a VM and run an older copy of the OS on your Mac for games.

VMs do not have direct access to the physical GPU. Worse even is that the virtual GPUs on macOS are not accelerated. So for a VM your rendering will fall back on software based (CPU based) rendering. Apple does not expose the APIs which are needed to be able to write a GPU accelerated driver for VMs. IOW a VM is no good for playing games when using macOS.

You should probably let Parallels [1] know this, so they can stop wasting their time advertising Parallel Desktop’s support for DirectX and OpenGL (via Metal) as a way to play Windows games on the Mac.

(Disclaimer: I don’t actually use it for this purpose. And while it may be true that macOS guests can’t use accelerated graphics, someone looking to play older Steam games presumably has access to the Windows versions.)

[1] https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#526

Post by philliphaydon »

macintux wrote: post #483
corporateslave5 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently Google has actually been low balling a lot of candidates and is nowhere near top of market. In many cases they are refusing to match competing offers, and are even offering people less money than what they are currently making

Heck, they just reached out to me, which means they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Not true. I haven’t been contacted yet so they definitely haven’t reached the bottom. :)

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#528

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> Outside of security patches, if there even are any

On the fundamentals, a service the whole point of which is to let untrusted computers from the internet connect to your home network and talk to your devices is pretty likely to need continuous security updates.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#529

Post by ce4 »

jeen02 wrote: post #513
kllrnohj wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course things change. Except they don't. The clients are frozen in time forever. There's no change happening here. It doesn't matter if they should be changed, they aren't being changed. Printer firmware does not get updates. > New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed. IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable. But this is not an…

> Printer firmware does not get updates. Sounds like you've never owned a printer before... > IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable. So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down? > But this is not an ongoing cost. You would still require SRE support for keeping this thing up running.…

https://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/printers/

Yep, to highlight some problems on the printer firmware side:

- outdated RootCA list, forcing Googles endpoint to stay on old CAs

- devices not supporting newer TLS versions like TLS1.2, TLS1.3 etc

- ossification of auth mechanism

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#530

Post by TMWNN »

birdyrooster wrote: post #279
konschubert wrote: post #266

Earlier 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 read recently here that FAANGs hire people not because they need them, but to keep them away from rivals.
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