261–270 of 289 posts
It’s kind of ridiculous that Google is going to delete that user data with barely a year of notice.
We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I'm at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, no whiteboard is a first-cla…
Yes! Not to mention, chalk is a simple nontoxic product made from abundant natural resources, while dry erase markers are plastic waste. It's so unnecessary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My last company bought a bunch of these just before the pandemic to help facilitate working with remote offices. All the big conference rooms had one. Nobody wanted to use them, and they went completely unused to my knowledge.
This product seems like the kind of thing a company would buy, it would be tried out in a few meetings, then everyone would go back to driving the meeting room's mounted TV with a laptop.
During his visit, our CEO made sure to take time with each team to solicit feedback from us. It was something we were looking forward to -- it was a chance to have a face to face open dialogue with him where we could make asks and air our grievances. While we all got the chance to say our piece, our CEO couldn't help but be super excited about Jamboards. He filled the my team's discussion with notes about them and made lots of excited suggestions, which cut into our time with him significantly. He ultimately spoke with every single team at the office about these things and kept asking us to let him know when, not if, we wanted more of them. He never thought to ask if we liked or wanted them.
I understand our CEO's desire to remove friction between Atlanta and SF and New York and all the other offices, but this was such a peculiar choice that none of us (even leadership) were a party to.
The Jamboards ultimately went completely unused and took up entirely too much space in the office corners. They wasted electricity, too.
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…
Cell phones use globally standardized, government regulated network protocols with many providers. Not a private, locked down, super-duper encrypted, single provider SAAS.
I think the legislation should be that if you shut down a device's backend you must open up the protocol so someone else can implement it.
We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I'm at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, no whiteboard is a first-cla…
> I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that. You should check out Huddly Canvas -- it's a USB whiteboard camera designed for just this use case. https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/canvas/
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Yes! Not to mention, chalk is a simple nontoxic product made from abundant natural resources, while dry erase markers are plastic waste. It's so unnecessary.
Chalk is drying out your hands though if you use black boards alot. It was a workplace environment problem for teachers.
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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…
> That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network. I get your point but making calls is no longer the principal reason to own a smartphone. I have made no calls in the last two months and have received just one. But I have spent hours on Skype via WiFi, recorded tens of hours of video and taken hundreds of photographs, as well as read lots of books, sent and received mone…
The fact phones are barely used for calling these days only makes legislation for devices using online servers more difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Turning them into power hungry competitors for a slab of treated plastic sounds pretty bricky to me, like pushing firmware to a phone that turns it into a fancy front camera mirror. Even if Google just disables the software entirely and turns these smart panels into a big, rectangular light panel, they still serve some function.
Ideally you'd write some sort of legislation that will ensure that products like these become open so that third parties like Zoom can integrate with them so that they remain functional.
I can't think of a good way to describe that concept in legal terms, though, at least not without making it very hard to sell any connected device at all.