Google Kills Cloud Print • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#241

Post by tech234a » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run.

Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1]

[1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170

(Note: I also posted this comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815)

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#242

Post by q3k » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

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…

> 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 like interfaces to runtime authentication, compute scheduling, database services, network bandwidth scheduling), updated services must be made to conform and then be rolled out. As with real life, this might mean getting a 1 or 2 year old deployment system (configuration for production, roll out code, ...) undusted, understood, probably fixed in turn, etc.

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#243

Post by dbdjfjrjvebd » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #224

areoform wrote: post #62

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…

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. Bottom line: Google is not ready for the enterprise. I know a mid-sized travel company ($500m+ revenue) that will have its workflow seriously disrupted by this.

Why would someone plan important workflows around a BETA product????

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#244

Post by julianozen » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

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…

So this works in theory until there is a really bad bug in some part of the code base and there is no one who knows how to fix it. Or it breaks some kind of migration plan. Or it is embedded somewhere on some architecture that slows down an important projects development. or makes an application incompatible with a future OS

If they’re not going to keep a team dedicated to keeping it alive, then you get into a situation where an emergency fix needs to be deployed or it needs to be abruptly cancelled

It’s possible this already happened once or twice which is why they had to sunset it

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#245

Post by debt » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

areoform wrote: post #62

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…

I mean they kept it around for 10 years before killing it. They certainly tried.

It's printing physical paper. It's 2019, does it really confuse anyone as to why they would kill a product that prints paper? Even if it was successful in the short term, which it wasn't, it seems very rational to kill Cloud Print from a business perspective in the long term.

The developed world been moving far, far away from print for a while now. I imagine if you look at the graph of overall paper usage, you'll see it going down and to the right for some time into the future until it's near zero. Definitely the wrong business to be in.

It has no long-term prospects.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#246

Post by gowld » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

"quietly".

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#247

Post by novaRom » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #157

Nothing about Google killing products is quiet anymore. People have noticed, and I wonder if Google is really aware of the extent of the brand damage that headlines like this cause. Printing is the most corporate thing I can imagine, and even though it is not directly related, as a G Suite customer, this would make me extremely nervous.

The damage is real. It was one of the arguments against Google Cloud in my company.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#248

Post by dehrmann » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

jtreminio wrote: post #193

lordleft wrote: post #86

I know Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their historical support of legacy systems, but on the flip-side it means that as an enterprise you trust that they won't abruptly deprecate something you use.

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…

Not sure how this is a response to the comment about MS supporting things forever, other than that all those things probably still work on Windows 10. Office 97 probably still works on Windows 10.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#249

Post by endorphone » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #227

endorphone wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine everyone has heard of cloud print -- it's emblazoned on the marketing materials of a bunch of printers. It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time, though it was pretty lame having to send a print job to Google so it can be printed on the device you're standing beside. Android 9 added Wi-Fi direct printing which is much more rational -- on a sm…

> It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time Cloud print was added to Android at the same time Android added support for generic printer drivers. Cloud Print is, in fact, just a generic printer driver as far as the OS is concerned. There are, and have been, native print drivers, though. HP, for example, has Android drivers: https://support.hp.com/us-en/d…

Google Cloud Print was released in 2010, and was the way of printing on Android as of 2011. Native print drivers were added to Android in 2017. A print "framework" was added in 2014, where manufacturers could build hacked-out targets, which a couple did, although most are relatively newer.

This is a far cry from "same time". Indeed, most manufacturers STILL pitch Google Cloud Printer up front, most electronics store put it as a primary selection criteria, and it's always a feature on the box.

I'm not defending Google Cloud Print. It was always a terrible solution that was poorly thought out from the outset. But it's classic Google that so many are put in this situation.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#250

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Nov 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

areoform wrote: post #62

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…

I think in this case, Google Cloud Print is a flawed product and doesn't present a business benefit for Google, specifically growing the ChromeOS platform and broader Chrome ecosystem.

If anything it's a barrier to any organizational adoption. You have the exfiltration of data to Google, and a weird protocol implementation that's a relic of last decade.