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Google Kills Cloud Print

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Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#261

Post by _wldu »

rgbrenner wrote: post #228
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…

Their leadership has no vision. They don't know what to build, where they're going, or what problems they need to solve.. So they encourage these random projects hoping one of their employees will have a vision for them. So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard decisions.

It seems pretty bold and visionary to me. They've lucked out with gmail, chrome, golang, android, maps, etc. and they still have the best search in the world.

Having a HIPPO tell everyone what to do, how to do it and when is not visionary. Letting engineers do what they want and then making money from the ideas is.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#263

Post by Spooky23 »

debt wrote: post #245
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…

Print isn't growing, but it isn't dead either. Many people don't print as often as they did in 1999, but fewer people than you think never print.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#265

Post by m-p-3 »

snailmailman wrote: post #141
mathw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly not for all printers, my printer requires an awful app that does everything itself. Not acceptable! But yeah, Cloud Print doesn't seem to have been particularly widely used or supported.

I feel the opposite. My printer supports cloud print, OR an awful app, or just a normal print server thing (idk how printers work) I've always had trouble using the printer except when using cloud print. Cloud print at least works every time, if i try to print another way it often fails silently.

> or just a normal print server thing (idk how printers work)

I believe most printers nowaday expose themselves on the network using Bonjour/mDNS.

You still need the client to know how to talk with it and its drivers, but AFAIK ChromeOS gained that feature some time ago

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#266

Post by konschubert »

rgbrenner wrote: post #228
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…

Their leadership has no vision. They don't know what to build, where they're going, or what problems they need to solve.. So they encourage these random projects hoping one of their employees will have a vision for them. So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard decisions.

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.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#267

Post by gowld »

archgoon wrote: post #233
brandmeyer wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be practical. The great advantage of the monorepo is that it encourages teams to use libraries from almost anywhere in the company. One disadvantage is that it makes splitting out those codebases almost impossible.

Has happened though; Niantic for example.

Niantic was an "internal startup", more like an X project than part of Google borg. It didn't integrate with major infrastructure like GSuite. It ran on AppEngine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607874

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#268

Post by NicoJuicy »

I don't think Google understand how essential product support is..

It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is extremely popular for the cloud ( I think).

Microsoft is very clear on products which aren't SLA supported. The only thing I remember is killing Silverlight. And seeing .net core thrive, it was the right decision.

But don't forget, that changing the direction of the company was made public with a new CEO, although undeniably Ballmer prepared the foundation for Azure now. Crossplatform products ( eg. office) were always ready to release, they just didn't do it.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#269

Post by tech234a »

tech234a wrote: post #31

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/3179 (…

The reference URL [1] was cut off. The full URL should be https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170.

Re: Google Kills Cloud Print

#270

Post by jabl »

geofft wrote: post #209
appleflaxen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the similarities? I don't really understand PS, CUPS, or GCP, but I think an overview of how they relate would be really interesting.

PostScript is a programming language that lets you describe how a page looks. (It's a real, Turing-complete programming language, and you can do things like print a fractal with a couple of lines of PostScript.) It was popular with high-end printers like the Apple LaserWriter, and it required a real CPU inside the printer in order to evaluate the PostScript and render it into an image of the appropriate resolution, w…

To elaborate a little, "IPP Everywhere" / AirPrint, "Driverless printing" or whatever it's called, is basically having the printer run a CUPS server and broadcast itself on mdns/bonjour, and then clients can print to it directly without having to install manufacturer-specific printer drivers (the IPP protocol itself has the necessary features so that you don't even need PPD's). The only thing the client needs to be able to do is support IPP and a few file formats mandated by IPP (PWG-raster (a simple raster format) and JPEG, even PDF is optional IIRC).

(There's something called the "IPP sharing extensions" (IIRC) for supporting things like central print servers with auth, proxying and whatnot for enterprise deployments)

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