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Google Ending Support for Jamboard

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

251–260 of 289 posts

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#251
I would like to see some law in the EU along the lines: if you stop supporting any HW, you have to open source all, so that the HW has a chance of not ending in a dump.

I think should not be a lot of trouble, because like in this case for google, they will ahut down everything, and will not be making any more money with it.

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#252
I won’t comment on the wisdom of the business decision here, but more on the fact that I don’t see a great solution to the in-person + remote whiteboarding collaboration problem on the market.

Unless your company is 100% remote and is forced into fully digital whiteboarding, my experience is there will sometimes just be a critical mass of people “in the room”, and there’s nothing the remote participants can do to stop them from drawing on a whiteboard. And once that starts happening, the remote participants become second class citizens. This fundamentally limits the remote folks from being part of ideation, design, and decision-making. It’s a handicap that would require executive buy-in to remedy, which you mostly won’t get because execs favor in-person work anyway.

People buy these smart boards thinking it’ll help - they go totally untouched. The barrier to use is too high and nobody wants to look like a fool fumbling around with some proprietary interface, eating into valuable meeting time.

Short of a major revolution in touchscreens + conferencing tech, the only way to keep the playing field even is for remote people to assert that they will do diagramming and visual notes on e.g. Lucidchart on their end, and you’d better be quick at it.

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the Jamboard service contains such top secret and critical code that it could never be open sourced in order for those devices to keep functioning with a proxy sever, no no no.

Googles backends are all proprietary solutions. So you’d need to open source a huge swath of google code. Much of which has assumptions of running in Google’s DCs.

Eh. They could just opensource the code but not its dependencies. The opensource world is remarkably good at taking something like that and getting it working again.

They won’t though, unfortunately.

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#254
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in IoT as well and definitely try to implement as much as possible locally as well. What companies seem to forget is that any part of the product that's cloud hosted becomes an ongoing cost that goes up in proportion to the number of devices sold. The less you have in the cloud (generally) the better the economics for the manufacturer.

Yeah, I think the problem is that we’ve been taught that pre-optimization is the root of all evil and that we should getting it working before improving upon it. Pre-optimization became a thing because enthusiasts liked the challenge of creating an elegant solution, but I posit that it continued because devs knew they were not going to be getting back to fixing inefficient code if it mostly worked. Usually stuff like…

What I'm thinking of isn't so much 'optimization' as basic design decisions. For a lot of IoT products that integrate machine learning/computer vision features, you've got a choice of implementing that stuff in the cloud or on device. You need a bit more compute to do the work on device, but ongoing costs are far lower and a lot more predictable. As a side effect, you also enable fully independent operation.

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what product or service has lasted indefinitely? Google will compensate those who adopted it, life goes on.

Sonos does a pretty good job still supporting there old hardware. The ZP100 came out 20 years ago and works pretty well today

Is the zp100 cloud connected though? I thought the early sonos stuff was entirely on your own network

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#257
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a IoT startup and we'd prefer to rent you the equipment as part of the service. That way there is no confusion. Having customers buy equipment they really don't own seems ridiculous to me.

How does that help someone who has built your product into their working procedures? When you decide to stop doing it they are in an even worse situation than the Jamboard users because presumably you will repossess the hardware.

They can seek a new provider and integrate new devices. It also puts more pressure on us to keep the devices viable. Our revenue model is dependent on low cost devices working in the field as long as possible.

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean because of the squeaking sound that sometimes happens? Break the chalk in half to get rid of the resonance!

Nah, dusty and gross-feeling and dries out my hands.

Yup I'm the same. I'm horrified at how my skin feels covered in chalk dust.

Chalk feels like it made sense in a time back when people didn't bathe daily and didn't know about deodorant. When the words "skin care" were decades away from being uttered for the first time. The fact that chalk is white-colored doesn't make it any less dirty or filthy.

It doesn't feel like it belongs in the twenty-first century, not in civilized places like lecture halls or meeting rooms.

(Chalking up before sweaty rock climbing, of course, is a totally different story.)

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#259
post #127

It's about time we had legislation (at least in the EU) that mandated an option to be able to use physical products in an offline mode. Features that require a connection to the Internet should only be an augmentation at most and not the core without which the product cannot work.

That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network. Honestly, people buying these products should be smarter. They bought an expensive chalkboard that they knew depends on someone else's computers (unless they didn't even bother to look into how the products work), without any guaranteed server support period anywhere to be found. Anyone who cares about their purchases sudde…

It really doesn't feel that hard to write legislation that exempts uses that are definitionally network tied. But, to continue the phone analogy, if it somehow loses network access, I expet to be able to turn it on, take photos, run local software (that isn't network dependent), etc. Losing network access should not turn the device into a brick including non-network related functions.

Re: Google Ending Support for Jamboard

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The device cost $6k and $600/yr from the article. Not free but I doubt many people are affected.

It doesn't really matter how many people were affected, the point is that people made an investment (and not a small one) and its being shut down. And it isn't like this is the first hardware that Google has abandoned, but they turn it into ewaste since it's tied to the cloud.

My project was done and Google killed the whole IoT wtf
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