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Google Kills Cloud Print

support.google.com

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#211
post #202

Crazy thought, what if Android and/or ChromeOS is next? Android always seemed like another "charity" project that didn't directly generate profit (before Nexus/Pixel phones). Most of the value from Android is captured by Chinese phone manufacturers and carriers, not Alphabet. Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.

Google makes a crap ton of money from Android, both directly and indirectly. It's not going anywhere. ChromeOS I'm less sure about.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#212
Here is an Epson page on setting up Google Cloud Print with their printers: https://epson.com/Support/wa00605b

As you can see, it was really valuable to just set up a printer once, and everything internet-enabled could just print to it. When this goes away, everyone in the world who relied on this setup will need to dig out manuals and figure out a custom solution for every device and user, because nothing replaces the Cloud Print functionality. (DNS-SD discovered Driverless Printing isn't even necessarily supported on such printers, and is local-only)

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#213
I loved Google Cloud Print. It made printing from various computers I have a lot easier, since I didn't have to install drivers on each one. It's the only reason I have Chrome installed still. Why does Google always kill useful products?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#214
post #92

(2013-2019) Gwern did a statistical analysis predicting Google product closures. It's useful context for discussions such as this: https://www.gwern.net/Google-shutdowns

I followed this link to a SlateStarCodex article on Google Correlate. At the top of the Google Correlate page was:

"Google Correlate will shut down on December 15th 2019 as a result of low usage. You can download your data under Manage my Correlate data in the top bar, or right from here"

Good timing! Get your correlations in while you can.

https://www.google.com/trends/correlate

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/16/google-correlate-does-...

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#215
post #202

Crazy thought, what if Android and/or ChromeOS is next? Android always seemed like another "charity" project that didn't directly generate profit (before Nexus/Pixel phones). Most of the value from Android is captured by Chinese phone manufacturers and carriers, not Alphabet. Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.

The main goal of Android is to have billions of users using Chrome (which is as of now the only major browser without tracking/ad blocking enabled by default), in order to track you across the web and sell the ads, which is the Google's raison d'etre and main profit center. So, nope.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#216

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.

Do you use cloud print?

The more relevant question is: for a new service by Google for which you are a target market would you have any reluctance to use it based on your perceived likelihood that Google will kill in the future?

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#217

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…

Android is specially bad, not only we have to deal with lack of updates, half backed Java support, many libraries and best practices announced at one IO, are already forgotten the following year.

Latest example, now that ConstraintLayout is finally working properly, they come up with JetPack Composer, most likely due to Flutter marketing pressure.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#218
My experience with the opposite of the author's. Cloud Print rarely worked for me and generated more work setting up and managing relative's newly wireless printers when the old method of direct USB printing worked reliability and was largely "plug-n-play". Good riddance.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#219
post #59

I wonder what this means for the Google Chrome hardware ecosystem...

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 Chrome OS now has basically full-featured support for CUPS like a normal Linux machine, so you no longer need Cloud Print to print to local printers, and they're adding features to let you use a remote CUPS server.

Since the post says they're gonna finish things by the end of this year and there are already plenty of Chromebooks that they stopped updating... my big unanswered question is, of the Chromebooks they stopped updating, how many of them have a usable enough version of CUPS to still be able to print.

Ignoring, of course, those users that were using Cloud Print to network enable their printer.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#220

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 constant maintenance burden. But that's not an intrinsic property of the area. It's a thing we do because... we can? We want to? But it's not required. Silo it off and just leave it be.

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