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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#541

Post by angry_octet »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #368
foobiekr wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then make me pay for Cloud Print. I'm already paying for Drive and GSuite, I think I can handle $1/year more.

Heck, add features like secure job release, integration with enterprise directory services, and services for brochure printing and online photo printing/albums. Document management and printing services is a huge industry.

Companies and universities hate doing printer driver and device management, and hence all the outsourcing of printers. But the outsourcing companies have to bolt an extra box on many printers to enable printing, or write special printer GUI firmware, makes it expensive. Could all be on your phone instead. Cf https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart...

https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workpl...

Once again, Google has screwed itself and it's users.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#542

Post by angry_octet »

scarface74 wrote: post #364
mushufasa wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Picassa? Could have open sourced it. There are a few others in the graveyard that were easily able to live on any infrastructure.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#543

Post by lonelappde »

scarface74 wrote: post #491
exikyut wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they just achieve runaway success on mass scale. From Google's perspective the flypaper is just bigger; its contents are no less needle-moving.

Contrast with Apple. AirPrint was introduced in 2010 and is still going strong.

AirPrint is a local service; it doesn't do what Cloud Print does. (The name is a clue.)

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#544

Post by lonelappde »

dmix wrote: post #336
tyingq wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count up the collective hours spent figuring out why your printer no longer works and finding a new solution. The vast majority of people using it won't see this news. If Google doesn't make the Chromebook transition seamless and invisible, it'll be even worse.

Native print was originally offered in 2017 and they’ll have until 2021 to migrate to it.

Does Native Print work over the Internet? That's what Cloud Print did

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#545

Post by lonelappde »

president wrote: post #347
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.

I'm not a big proponent of Google but I agree. Most companies jettison under-performing projects but since Google is a juggernaut, I think they get extra flack for it.

What does underperforming mean? Cloud Print isn't a standalone product, it's part of the overall Google account service, which the company is deeply invested in.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#546

Post by kllrnohj »

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.…

> So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?

This is true of every internet protocol. Being staffed at all does not mean the protocol or server has active security research being done on it. It usually doesn't. Taking people off of the work of constant churn from refractors and internal tail chasing doesn't actually change much.

> Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...

Sounds like you're just trolling but I'm going to assume you've just never seen a printer or worked on a stable system before.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#547

Post by wila »

rsfinn wrote: post #525
wila wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I am talking about macOS guests, you are talking about Windows guests. It is not exactly the same thing.

Yes, you can have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your Windows guests on your macOS host.

No, you cannot have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your macOS guests on your macOS host.

It is true that I could have worded that a bit better.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#548

Post by scarface74 »

angry_octet wrote: post #542
scarface74 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Picassa? Could have open sourced it. There are a few others in the graveyard that were easily able to live on any infrastructure.

How do you know how much of Picasa’s code was intertwined with Google’s? Could it have been a profitable in going concern by itself? How?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#549

Post by bobongo »

dewey wrote: post #208
bobongo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would mean selling all documents ever printed using their product.

How did you make the connection from "Cloud Print codebase" to selling the database of all users with it?

Because why would anyone buy what basically is a CUPS implementation if not for the user data?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#550

Post by dewey »

bobongo wrote: post #549
dewey wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you make the connection from "Cloud Print codebase" to selling the database of all users with it?

Because why would anyone buy what basically is a CUPS implementation if not for the user data?

Sometimes companies that are doing "basically a X implementation" are still worth a lot.
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