Google Kills Cloud Print
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If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would be ready and printed for me when I got home. It was just a nice convenience that worked every time.
Yes there are alternatives... most printers now have an obfusticated email address that you can send to and it will print from. But this is vendor specific and unreliable and required additional steps (had to save to computer, then open an email client, send an email, etc).
But then again, how can I be surprised? We are talking about Google, the company famous for shutting down projects. I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow and they shut down google.com search engine. Right now on Hacker News (just a few spots above this post) is a another site [1], which hosts a countdown for when customers expect to shut down the Google Stadia product... a product that only launched a few days ago.
Google services always find a great niche. The problem is google wants MAJOR hits or bust.
From Google's perspective the flypaper is just bigger; its contents are no less needle-moving.
And to be completely honest, CloudPrint won’t do anything in a year.....
(I wish Linux had an equivalent to Folder Actions. They’re really nifty.)
Create a white list, and if mail is coming from a white-listed mail then print the contents, otherwise discard the mail.
This is how my Deskjet 4515 is working besides GCP. It's a pretty neat solution. It even replies with a result e-mail. I hope that HP won't kill its services too. They've already killed the app side, but remote printing is still intact.
Google Print was a great way to get around these issues, but not anymore. Crazy how out-of-the-blue Google will kill off certain products.
Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.
The vast majority of people using it won't see this news.
If Google doesn't make the Chromebook transition seamless and invisible, it'll be even worse.
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.
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.
Once the metric becomes the objective, it loses any usefulness, indeed it becomes the opposite
Why shouldn't people get promos for doing heroic acts on obscure services that actually delight users in real life? That surely has a benefit for Google. And the lack of it has a cost. Think of it like a PR budget. They'd get fewer grumpy articles about unmaintained services being dropped.
I don't think this is google specific. Keeping a dead product on life support is going to get boring for most people after a while.
But Google has always been piss poor at managing an ecosystem. Just look at the state of Android updates.
That's Google's problem, and it's a problem they might want to look into solving if they want to turn around their reputation for killing products.
They could hire some run-of-the-mill college grads to work on a "dead" project. They could cut their teeth on low-profile stuff within Google and perhaps demonstrate abilities that move them up the ladder.
I'm not saying that Google should do this to keep everything they've ever touched alive. But spreading the talent around geographically would solve a lot of problems for Google and for California and for the world. Same for all FAANGs.
Quit earmarking $billions to solve the housing crisis in SF. Spend $1M in St. Louis and move 100 employees out of SF. Then spend $1M in Amarillo, and $1M in Sioux Falls. Shucks, maybe splurge and spend $20M here and there. $250M to build up 10 offices around the continent will do more to solve the housing crisis in CA than $1B spent in CA. And it would cut FAANG costs in half at the same time.
Google tried to lowball me all the way through, and asked me to share screenshots of actual emails from other companies to prove my other numbers. They increased the numbers but frankly, they weren't anywhere close to Airbnb/Lyft. They did not act like a company that would beat other offers for talent. My offer was in the AI Assistant team under Google Search, so it wasn't an orphaned arbitrary product team either. Broke my heart coz I was so keen on joining Google from the start.
Hope this helps somebody out there!
~100/100 SF Google engineers would change teams if they received a mandate that their team was relocating to St. Louis (or basically anywhere). Anyone who couldn't arrange to change teams would quit.
Small projects for maintenance don't need entire teams either and can be completely handled by 1 or 2 junior members.
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
10 years of production usage tends to have hammered out all the "really bad bugs." Sure it's possible that something goes wrong, but it's also extremely unlikely that it does unless something in it changes. Which, if you freeze it & silo it off, doesn't really happen.
A huge amount of software not made in silicon valley operates exactly like this. It just sits there, running for decades, doing its thing.
Its a cloud service that was started pre-Google Cloud. There is no way that it can sit in perpetuity and not be worried about old versions of Java, old OS, HTTPS bugs, large deprecation plans
Sounds simple but sometimes it is not so easy.
E.g. it might be written in Python 2 for all we know. Should they leave it on Python 2 with zero security updates, or invest lots of time porting to python 3?
Obviously there will likely be a million other internal examples of the python 2 to 3 migration that we don't know about.
Leave it, of course. The only meaningful security risk at this point is something like heartbleed. We're talking security issue in 10 year battle hardened protocol. This is a fantastically rare case. Not something you need headcount on a constant basis to deal with.
Not really possible. It's an internet service that talks to large number of different printers from different manufacturers.
Besides the code management issues others have mentioned, services like this require a great deal of product and partner coordination and testing effort to ensure that even small security patches don't break the heterogeneous ecosystem of devices.
More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
Disclosure: Google employee but not on cloud print, though I use it on my personal printer.
You forget that there are a lot of cases where elderly people can't print shit and need actual paperwork.
I'm guessing you are referring to a scenario where you have configured an elderly person's printer to allow you to print directly to it, sort of like a one way fax machine? I can see how that could be useful for some people, but it's a very rare use case, and hard to argue for maintaining the cloud print service based on that.
There appear to be alternatives for this specific use case, like HP ePrint, or you could set up a VPN to use in these situations. You could also just use printer that hooks up directly to eFax: https://www.faxcompare.com/blog/signing-up-for-efax-with-you...
Of course it's possible. Those printers are not getting updates, either. Nobody is changing the printer side of this. And if they were it'd be a change in the protocol. It's easy to just freeze the protocol (which already happened years ago), and if any printer manufacturer wants something new then can go fork off and do their own thing. That's very different from breaking something old which is what's happening here.
> More importantly, CUPS and driverless printing standards have solved the problem (os-specific print drivers) that cloud print was designed to work around.
CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part. And how widespread are driverless printing standards? Do such printers actually exist in consumer households? My Dell printer from just a few years ago certainly isn't.
Of course things change. Security protocols get upgraded. New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed. New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration. That all requires human effort to make happen. All of that has to be worth the cost of maintaining the project.
> CUPS still needs printer-specific drivers to do the actual printing part.
Even if it needs them, the point is that it has them now, probably due in no small part ot the fact that CUPS is used on the Mac.
Except they don't. The clients are frozen in time forever. There's no change happening here. It doesn't matter if they should be changed, they aren't being changed. Printer firmware does not get updates.
> New attack vectors are discovered in protocols and need to be fixed.
IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable. But this is not an ongoing cost. There's no continuous change aspect to that at all.
> New devices with new capabilities are created and need API integration.
That's not change, that's new features. As I said, simply tell those things to go do their own thing. That's unrelated to leaving Cloud Print on life support.
Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...
> IF that ever happens, which is super duper unlikely, then kill it since the clients are unfixable.
So have a possible security hole with no active developers until a third party finds a vulnerability, then shut it down?
> But this is not an ongoing cost.
You would still require SRE support for keeping this thing up running. You would also open yourself up to a lot of risk, losing user trust and potential lawsuits if it ever was hacked.
Everything you wrote sounds like an elaborate troll but I'm assuming that you've just never worked on a large system before.
Yep, to highlight some problems on the printer firmware side:
- outdated RootCA list, forcing Googles endpoint to stay on old CAs
- devices not supporting newer TLS versions like TLS1.2, TLS1.3 etc
- ossification of auth mechanism
This is true of every internet protocol. Being staffed at all does not mean the protocol or server has active security research being done on it. It usually doesn't. Taking people off of the work of constant churn from refractors and internal tail chasing doesn't actually change much.
> Sounds like you've never owned a printer before...
Sounds like you're just trolling but I'm going to assume you've just never seen a printer or worked on a stable system before.
Very widespread. Most consumers printers support AirPrint for iOS and MacOS.
Guess who owns CUPS?
But the point being that unlike Google, Apple has supported CUPS and actively developed the software for well over a decade even though it doesn’t profit directly from it.
Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable argument for jut keeping it up.
unless it's going to bring in multiples of billions of $ per year - and accelerate that growth - they're probably not interested in doing that though.
Also HP provides its own apps and integration for local printing from Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-chrom...
If there's only a few users then it's cheap to run. If there's a lot of users then this is a mountain of bad PR right at the time they are trying to get users to adopt new products (like, say, Stadia). Since all it does is shuffle PDFs & images between endpoints I'm gonna guess this is on the order of basically free to run.
But either way canceling it isn't free, either. I'm arguing the cost of canceling this is far larger than the cost of keeping it running.
Isn't this the kind of project that should be reserved for people in explicit learning states such as (for example) novice hires, new hires, and aspiring mangers who haven't done any management before? It doesn't really have burning deadlines, it's not a frontline project but it's still something that can be referenced as work with impact, there's still the technical challenge of keeping it functional as the years go by, and eventually it will actually be old enough to be taken out back and deprecated. If any company could do something like this with their various projects as well as culture, I'm pretty sure Google could.
Of course there are probably a bunch of problems with this idea, but it seems to be more preferable in contrast to just axing a product that a not-insignificant number of people found useful and going "NEED. NEW. SHINY. TOY. MUST MAKE MONEY NOW!"
They can still kill their outright failures, of which there are many.
But it's more than that. Consider how something like GDPR impacts this. It requires at least some work from Legal, Product, Eng, etc. And these things happen fairly often. Even without a monorepo it takes work to stand still.
On the fundamentals, a service the whole point of which is to let untrusted computers from the internet connect to your home network and talk to your devices is pretty likely to need continuous security updates.
And one Reason (of many) why I will NEVER buy a Google Stadia Game or put anything mission critical on a Google Product /. Service
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/dzqr2d/google_clou...
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)
Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email hn@ycombinator.com and get us to merge them. Then your comment will get moved to the winning branch, and you've benefited the whole community with an un-split discussion.
(I appreciate your mentioning the duplicates, though, because otherwise we wouldn't have known about them. Maybe there's a software idea in there.)
The story didn't lose front page ranking because I rolled back the clock on the original submission (the one we're currently commenting on) to put it more or less where the other submission had been.
It was originally created because Chromebooks couldn't print. Chromebooks have been able to print natively for a while now so that is no longer needed.
They are also giving over a year of warning. That's plenty of time for people to migrate to a new service or figure out how to implement an alternative.
Again I know the Google Graveyard folks will have a field day with this, especially hot on the heals of the Stadia launch and the speculation around when that will die - but I think it's OK to send this ship into the sunset. It served its purpose - there are better solutions now - it's OK to move on.
Python 2 would like a word with you.
[I for one remain convinced that we are totally going to figure out printing once and for all any decade now...]
The original purpose should not be the lens to look through for judging something once it’s out, in particular after 10 years where people found countless other uses of it.
You'd have to be a fool to trust any google service for anything.
https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebooks-make-big-strides-in-sa...
It might have something to do with the fact that most media outlets have a vested interest in weakening Google in the public eye. Other than that, What HN/ars is concerned, Google basically seems worse than the military industrial complex and big oil combined.
They certainly do annoying shit. But in this specific case, cloud print was a product that was in beta for almost a decade. It was very unreliable and didn‘t work correctly half of the time. But of course killing it counts as ADHD. A 10-year old non-enterprise niche product is ancient in tech years.
I've seen some reprieve towards MS for their new things not being nice enough, but never for their old thing continuing to work mostly without a hitch.
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 new 16" MBP which ships with Catalina. Annoyed is putting it mildly.
In that case yeah, a partition with Linux might be your best bet if you want to use 32-bit apps, unfortunately.
IOW a VM is no good for playing games when using macOS.
(Disclaimer: I don’t actually use it for this purpose. And while it may be true that macOS guests can’t use accelerated graphics, someone looking to play older Steam games presumably has access to the Windows versions.)
Yes, you can have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your Windows guests on your macOS host.
No, you cannot have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your macOS guests on your macOS host.
It is true that I could have worded that a bit better.
Hahahahahaha oh man they actually wrote that.
Sorry for the useless comment, but I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment.
I don't think it really matters, of course. Android phones have a full set of manufacturer-specific printing drivers which work fine over the local network, and geofft noted upthread that ChromeOS has CUPS now. Internet printing is gone now, I suppose, but who used that?!
But yeah, Cloud Print doesn't seem to have been particularly widely used or supported.
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.
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
"Your document may pass through multiple servers. Is that ok?"
Sigh.
And it printed simplex.
It's on the specs page for most HP and Brother networked printers, and probably most others.
I am starting to think that I need a similar saying about Google.
When Google kills off a service, it's usually pretty much impossible to solve.
I would imagine very few, or else Google would be keeping it around. I would guess that Cloud Print basically didn't take with either consumers or enterprises, and as a result Google no longer wants to keep doing it.
I use it at home and like it, but when it came up as a potential solution for a project at work this the exact reason we didn't go with it.
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.
By comparison, AirPrint just worked, quickly recognizing new printers from new devices and running jobs pretty much flawlessly.
It uses IPP so no extra software or intermediary needed - the print jobs are sent directly to the printer.
With the cloud part of Cloud Print gone, will Google continue to provide the AirPrint-compatible Android software so that Android users won't have to install software from printer vendors like Windows users have to?
I support relatives using Chromebooks and the old fashioned model is printing is much easier to explain and deal with! The wifi printers in my life never seem to maintain reliable connections over long time spans so we resort to using them as USB printers anyway.
In other words, I now have two printers in my office to do what I was doing already with one.
The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where people can take ownership of products and grow them over time. Perhaps people could be judged by their market traction, making them sort-of internal entrepreneurs who over a decade or more, get to share the benefits of shepherding their project.
Creating new products is probably over incentivized, while the boring work of operating and maintaining existing useful products is under incentivized.
However, those who stay on a product and continue to grow/advance the product don't get nearly as much recognition, and don't get the incentives that a launch does.
This translates to people jumping on board an pre-launch project, riding it through launch, then moving on to the next thing, leaving the project in a post-launch slump with few people lingering to maintain and grow the project.
It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
Companies depend heavily on AdWords, gSuite, and Cloud and all three continue to grow.
The reputation for canceling projects which aren't working may matter to consumers, but I haven't seen anyone in business mention it in their purchasing decisions.
Heck, add features like secure job release, integration with enterprise directory services, and services for brochure printing and online photo printing/albums. Document management and printing services is a huge industry.
Companies and universities hate doing printer driver and device management, and hence all the outsourcing of printers. But the outsourcing companies have to bolt an extra box on many printers to enable printing, or write special printer GUI firmware, makes it expensive. Could all be on your phone instead. Cf https://www.oki.com/ge/printing/services-and-solutions/smart...
https://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-workpl...
Once again, Google has screwed itself and it's users.
If the company has an equally good alternative available, chances are Google wouldn't have launched theirs in the first place.
10 year support goes a long way, and if you paid enough money you could email in your bugs and get custom hot fixes made for issues that annoyed you.
Even their /bad/ technologies had long term support. If you built on top of shiny new thing and Microsoft dropped it in the next release, it was still going to get patches, bug fixes, and the documentation for it wasn't going to vanish from the world as if it never existed.
Of course this was all before cloud services existed. Back then you'd pay for a product and you got software on a disk/CD and there was an expectation that it'd keep working.
One thing that gets overlooked so frequently, by all companies, is that ongoing costs are ongoing. Whenever I see a new fitness tracker kickstarter advertising amazing cloud services for free, my first thought is that the costs from cloud services will eventually exceed the tiny profit that comes from selling physical consumer hardware.
And a few years later another "It's been a great journey" message goes out as the company runs out of money.
Obviously Google won't run out of $, but costs do add up.
Doing the math on how to distribute funding to bundled cloud services is actually rather hard. You have to figure out for a given product / subscription, how much of that purchase price needs to be distributed to the various teams. That sort of attribution is not easy, and not properly allocating those funds to development resources can kill a product. e.g. someone buys a Chromebook, of course the OS team gets money, but the team making Google docs can argue they deserve a split, after all without them the Chromebooks would be somewhat useless. Analytics helps, but only to an extent.
Google doesn't run out of money; what Google runs out of is the things money can't buy in the short run, and at their scale that's employee hours and (surprisingly) compute and storage bandwidth (because they're building infrastructure at such volume that they end up saturating supplies and literally can't get more hardware at a reasonable price-point to run all the services they want to run).
Too much breadth of services cuts into how much load they can bear on services that are business-core or revenue-positive.
Apple doesn’t care as much about backwards compatibility because it doesn’t really care if you upgrade your operating system - especially on the Mac - or stick with your old one until you buy a new computer. It doesn’t make money on operating system upgrades.
Microsoft put an insane amount of effort into documentation[1] and sample code. They ran developer training programs around the world and published an actual magazine.
They funded the writing and publishing of countless[2] books for developers. They still run Channel 9, where they produce/publish long and short form technical content.
If you wanted to develop for a platform in the 90s/early 2000s, Microsoft had the best documented platforms with an incredible amount of samples to learn from.
[1] Each product team targeted at developers had a dedicated, non-trivial in size, full time documentation team. On top of that Microsoft would hire 3rd party software companies to start using early versions of new APIs and write large scale sample apps using those APIs. I worked on one of these samples apps, it was a complete end to end ordering system for a furniture store that included everything from a tablet pc app for the sales staff to use inputting customer orders, syncing to a database in the warehouse to get the order loaded on a truck, and the delivery driver had an application running to get a signature on delivery of the order. Since this was pre-cellphones everywhere, the truck driver's laptop stored data offline and when brought back to the warehouse it synchronized itself with SQL server using some features new to SQL server at the time.
That was one of thousands of sample apps Microsoft made to show off its APIs. Compare this to the modern world where the cloud database provider billing you by the hour is going to throw out a couple basic hello world examples and that is about it.
[2] Technically countable but a very large #
There were no other platforms seriously in contention in the mid 90s and early 2000s. There was Apple circling the drain and Unix vendors were all over the place.
In today’s world, if you are a major corporation that needs help you have all sorts of “partners” that will help you with your chosen platform, information on any API usage is all online.
In the classic MacOS days in the 80s and early 90s, Apple had the multivolume “Inside Macintosh” series.
Doubtful. The successful products to come out of Google are Search, GMail, and GCP. They bought Adwords, Doubleclick, Android, Youtube, and Nest and Fitbit, I suppose. GCP is their only recent win, but it's a me-too late entrant in a market Google should have invented.
Also, many of the acquisitions you mention were tiny when bought, and Google has a much better track record of growing and improving them than, say, Yahoo.
I can see Docs with GSuite especially in education and maybe Drive.
There are several tech PE firms that specialize in that niche. KKR bought Corel (of WordPerfect fame) recently.
I'm also confident someone at Google already had this obvious idea. Any ex-googlers know why they chose not to / cannot do this?
But that was also an acquisition, so I guess it lifted out of Google's infrastructure more easily.
I can’t imagine you can decouple Googke’s products from their infrastructure.
It had a huge installed base, but of course Google would not sell user engagement in bulk, only in tiny pieces as ads. Advertising the things people take photos of is pretty straightforward too, another reason why Google killed Picasa instead of letting it free.
In case anyone is wondering, the math has been done. I have been told that Google even has an internal page devoted to informing engineers how much something has to be worth before it is worth their time, and it's a big number.
https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/
Google is pro-adapting to change. And it is painful but it is usually the right thing.
Google Plus is the superior way of keeping up with blogs and news sites, and I am really enjoying texting with my friends over Allo ever since they discontinued Hangouts.
But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it."
"Driver" is merely the word we use for "protocol", when the protocol is ad-hoc, non-standard, or badly documented.
Seems like a pretty normal patent to me. Technology doesn't have to be likable, a good design, or even functional to be patented.
Not sure if anyone has cloned that in a Windows utility, but a lot of printers support it.
The problem would be mostly solved if Windows added native support and added a giant warning when anyone tries to install a printer driver saying that it’s a terrible idea.
Printer companies want to differentiate and upsell. The best way of doing that is via software which means first party "drivers" (which is really this huge bundle of bloat and ads at this point). If anyone has recently installed a consumer inkjet for a family member will know what I am talking about. It is basically adware.
Those of us sticking to our nice boring laser printers aren't the main market for consumer printers, it is the Epson/HP/etc sold by big box retailers.
> There exist a variety of methods for a client to submit a job to a printing system and print driverlessly-:
Use a cloud service such as Google Cloud Print (GCP).
and, I think, a bunch of proprietary HP/Epson protocols.
The best part is the toner cartridge that comes with it lasts long enough to totally recoup the cost difference between it and a "consumer" inkjet printer
Sometimes it’s in the best interests of the company to only have one major revenue stream!
They receive press and seem as innovators/bandwagon jumpers simply by entering the ‘flavour of the month’.
This is the entire industry. I work for a non-sexy "tech" travel company, and it's the same thing. Pay down tech debt? Good luck getting any kind of recognition. Make a react graphQL api? You're making senior.
Latest example, now that ConstraintLayout is finally working properly, they come up with JetPack Composer, most likely due to Flutter marketing pressure.
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.
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.
That's usually regarded as the great "bazaar" / "free market" style of getting the best ideas out of the community.
The failure is in not well supporting the good ideas that come up.
Apple released AirPrint in 2010. AirPrint compatible printer still works with an iPad 1.
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.
Which is disappointing, since Google of ten years ago had a distinctly better search.
Compare their success to failure ratio to Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.
How is Chrome anymore of technical success than other browsers?
As far as Android, it came out in the Oracle trial that it only made about $22 billion in profit during its entire existence and the entire ecosystem is still a mess as far as security and updates compared to Windows - ie where one company controls the operating system and licenses it to other OEMs.
Not to mention that the entire Android market is a profit less race to the bottom for all of the manufacturers.
All that being said, Google still derives almost all of its profit from ads compared to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon who have had far more success in introducing diversified products.
But if Google’s failures can be attributed to a lack of leadership, most of Apple’s current success wasn’t the result of the NeXT acquisition. It was the result of bringing its founder back.
When chrome was new it was extremely innovative with how much space it gave to websites, and also came with orders of magnitude faster javascript. The other browsers then copied Chrome so all of them are now fast and sleek, but back then the difference was huge.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-is-insanely-fast...
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.
I’m proud of them for baring the truth even if it is a bit oblique.
After flailing around for a decade, almost all of their profit is still based on ads. They are less diversified than any of the big tech companies besides Facebook.
But the thing is all the examples seem to be more than five years old, because god help me but they don't seem to have done anything in quite a while to be honest.
Google desperately needs to rethink how it moves into new areas and launches new products. "You'll get it when it arrives" seems like such a terrible attitude to take with the general public.
Android and Docs/Drive/Sheets were two acquisitions.
Google is certainly a contender in cloud computing services, but they have a market share of 4% in 2018 for a product category they were one of the first to enter on a big scale, and I don't think niche success is what they are after.
I'm not sure what I think about Chromebooks. I'd like to hope that it has an exciting, Fuchsia-coloured future.
It looks like a talent acquisition: the Where 2 codebase was a C++ app, nothing to do with the Ajax implementation they rolled out.
I'd be interested in learning more about this story.
The Chromebook sells are minuscule.
Chromebook sales were 21% of notebook sales in the US in Q4 2018 and the percentage is growing:
https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebooks-make-big-strides-in-sa...
Also, would enough Googlers be willing to spin out from "the mothership" to go work for a spinoff that likely couldn't afford the same benefits package?
(And this is to say nothing of the fact that most of Google's software is written atop Google's internal software infrastructure, which generally cannot be ported out of the company. It just won't work outside the ecosystem of services it assumes exist).
Not to be hateful, and I couldn't possibly live further from the SV area, but isn't that just a description of startup culture? Are they just being the most successful startup?
Google really needs to ditch him and find a new CEO capable of providing some actual vision and direction, not just randomly lead them to chase various cool technologies.
When compared to both, he’s done about average or less, depending on which benchmark you use. [0]
[0] - https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...
Google can literally _afford_ to kill off highly profitable ventures because something else will make them _more_ money.
(which in itself should be reason enough to judicially split this company up, but that's apparently no longer a thing we do, so here we are)
Of course, innovation is positive and generally drives the quality of life in the civilisation, but... if Google stayed as Search + GMail + AdWords/Sense for decades and only worked to update those services to be generally useful and offer decently modern UX, who'd blame them? Sure, that'd turn them into a sort of utility, but again - who in the general population would actually lose from that?
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.
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.
This isn't Google-specific. Based on my own first-hand experience working in a Global 500 company, I'm inclined to say that it's actually inevitable in any sufficiently large company with a sufficiently large range of business.
The fundamental problem is that there's just way too much heterogeneity for senior leadership to possibly understand all the company's lines of business. Which means that it's impossible to make thoughtful, intentional decisions about all of it at the corporate level. I'm guessing the best strategy is to focus on the bread-and-butter business, and treat all the rest with a sort of benign neglect. That seems to be what Google is doing. But you can't neglect things indefinitely - you do need to occasionally clean out the hallway closet and get rid of all the stuff you didn't even remember you had.
Enormous Japanese and Korean companies don't seem to have this trouble, and they're far more heterogeneous than any American company. Yamaha for instance makes boat engines and high-end pianos and audio electronics.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
But I don't necessarily think they have the same weight, so to speak. For example, the majority of products Google shut down were free, and the majority of Microsoft's were not. How should that be evaluated? I don't really know! It would be interesting to look at this.
They were also mostly software that you could run practically forever without MS support because MS strives for backwards compatibility. Once Google subsets a service, you can’t use it anymore.
I can't say Google's launched anything exciting in the past decade. If they're shooting for sexy, they're failing miserably.
I've wondered why, and the only thing I can think of is that they are all jumping to machine learning, and the results are worse than the old-fashioned algorithms.
If something is deeply broken, it's what allows them to thrive in spite of themselves.
Our first "fancy" printer included support for Google Cloud Print - except it would periodically "deauthenticate" and require manual setup, which in turn would change certain printer IDs that we needed to send jobs to the printer.
Our next "fancy" printer from Xerox also included support for Google Cloud Print. For whatever reason, we could never enable Google Cloud Print on that model.
We switched to PrintNode and have never looked back. We were able to integrate our label printers with PrintNode as well, so we could automate the process of printing shipping labels. The biggest downside is that we needed a dedicated computer (server in our case) to be connected to the printers in order to route the PrintNode jobs. Not the biggest downside in our case, but to its credit, Google Cloud Print usually connected directly from the printer.
Worked great and support was phenomenal.
Bad news: you'll have to buy a new printer if it doesn't play nicely with CUPS.
Google really is the land of the walking-dead projects.
Nobody's gonna pay you to do it tho...
At the time it had a ton of political backing, and so we were kind of compelled to use it despite the fact that 1/ it was a nightmare from an authentication perspective for our use case, 2/ it had "I've forgotten how to count that low" rate limits, and 3/ didn't map cleanly onto anything we were trying to do.
Nevertheless, we wound up shoehorning it in at the insistence of both that team and our management until it predictably failed without support, at which point it became a crisis.
May something better replace it, but I won't be shedding any tears for what I saw.
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.
It seems like they could have taken a less roundabout route to get there.
At the time, it was not easy to port WPF to core ( mostly because of System.Drawing), they did it now and it's a new framework.
From https://docs.microsoft.com/enus/dotnet/standard/glossary :
"Originally, CoreCLR was the runtime of Silverlight and was designed to run on multiple platforms, specifically Windows and OS X. CoreCLR is now part of .NET Core and represents a simplified version of the CLR. It's still a cross-platform runtime, now including support for many Linux distributions. CoreCLR is also a virtual machine with JIT and code execution capabilities."
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&r...
I sort of like this idea, of just making changes and waiting for users to complain when those changes screw them over... I do hope that someone is paying attention to those complaints.
Each printer having its own driver is sort of like ... each terminal having its own escape sequences. When printers and terminals were purpose-built electronics with limited hardware functionality, it made sense to put the smarts into the computer and have it figure out which operations were supported by the device. Nowadays everyone just uses TERM=xterm and there aren't physical terminals anymore (even the companies that used to build them will now sell you cheap general-purpose computers that run a full-screen terminal emulator). Printers have gone the same way; there's enough computational power inside the printer itself that you can just send it something like a PDF and tell it to figure things out.
I bought an Oki 691 impact printer simply because it spoke to anything on the network without the need for drivers.
Driver-less printing is great if I'm in the same network, but not so if not.
CUPS is a program that implements the Internet Printing Protocol, basically a way to send, view, and cancel print jobs over an HTTP API. If you have a local printer connected with a parallel port, you can run CUPS and have other machines send to it. The other thing CUPS does is conversions: you can send a PDF to CUPS, and it will run the driver to convert it to whatever format the printer needs. So an application that talks to CUPS only needs to know how to generate PDFs. CUPS also supports talking to remote print servers, e.g., other CUPS servers, printers that natively speak IPP, or printers that speak some other protocol.
Google Cloud Print is a service which has the unusual property that printers connect to it, not vice versa. Therefore you can print a document to a Google Cloud Print printer without being on the same network, which IPP doesn't let you do. (For printers without direct GCP support, you'd need to leave a computer plugged into it and running, but some newer printers with built-in networking know how to talk to Google and let you register it to your Google account.)
(There's something called the "IPP sharing extensions" (IIRC) for supporting things like central print servers with auth, proxying and whatnot for enterprise deployments)
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]
Considering how annoying I find this meme even though I have absolutely no stake in it, people on the inside are probably telling their therapists about it. The better part of a decade has passed since Google Reader was shut down, and it's still the go-to reaction of people who want to seem oh so unique, rebellious, and cynical.
EDIT: At this point, is there any value in comments about how Google kills things? I feel like it's a waste of time for a knowledgeable crowd like HN.
It allows to print documents even when you're not on your network.
But there's lots of this out there. You can set it up on any machine you have - if you leave a desktop on all the time or have a NAS that lets you run VMs too you can put this functionality there too.
What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between computer and printer (that work with many operating systems)?
Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and authorization support in actively maintained firmware?
Could Cloud Print support (with private servers and an open standard) just be merged into CUPS now?
Open Source moves quick. :)
"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-...
I really don't understand why they didn't keep this announcement under wraps and extend the service for another year, as this is exactly the kind of story they don't need with the lackluster launch of Stadia. Google really can't bring large parts of the business together to focus on a strategic goal which seems to result in this flailing around product to product.
As the support document states, as far as Chrome OS goes, the removal was made possible precisely because its CUPS support became good enough to supplant Cloud Print.
That being IPP everywhere (also knows as AirPrint, "Driverless Printing", Mopria(?)).
But the reason to have Google's (or someone's) servers involved is so that you don't need to be on the same network (e.g., you can print to your home printer, behind a firewall/NAT, while you're at a coffeeshop, also behind a firewall/NAT).
It seems like the use cases of printing to your home printer from anywhere is few and far between.
Having to dig out the wifi credentials just to use the printer isn't fun.
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)
On a Mac or any iOS device you just connect to a network and all of the printers just show up. You don’t need an app. I have a newer iPad but even my old first generation iPad that hasn’t seen an operating system update since 2011 will print to any of my three AirPrint printers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time I had an Android device in my house (my son’s) don’t you still have to install separate printer drivers for printers if they don’t support Google Cloud Print?
I have an HP LaserJet and a Canon photo printer, and both vendor's Service Plugins magically showed up on my phone.
Said no-one ever.
"I am Dalek of Borg. These are not the 'Droids you're looking for. You never existed."
The opensourcing of Bazel and absl:: is a big start - but there are a lot of core Java libraries you'd be missing, and all the loadbalancing, identity, config and storage systems would all need shims to slightly-incompatible opensource solutions.
So, I'm one of the lucky few trans folks who have managed to survive and flourish. I'm vividly aware of at least one reservoir of brilliant people who don't get a crack to show the world what they can do.
Instead of just shuttering projects that aren't sexy enough, or are too difficult to maintain, or don't contribute to your OKRs or promotions. Why not give them away? Why not give them to a team of folks with: disabilities, barriers to professional advancement; etc. Google could quality-ensure and knowledge-transfer, meanwhile doing social good, and getting ongoing support for a product that they would otherwise have to add to the increasingly embarrassing pile of abandonware?
I'm not saying it would be easy -- I can think of any number of places where this could go horribly wrong -- but it is quite obviously a step in the right direction to try.
There are lots of great minds that would kill for a chance to do something boring for a change, because financial (and then food, and then shelter) instability is anything but.
It's fashionable to blame Google for most things these days, but in honesty, if Google were truly evil they could have done much worse things. Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to.
For example, throughout all these years I could never understand how Google allowed Yelp to become what they are today. Google own all the core technologies in that space: search, map, mobile OS. They literally have all the home fied advantages, yet Google decided to take a step back and allowed Yelp to take the lead. They could have easily destroyed Yelp anytime they wanted to but they never did that.
To me personally, Google is probably the most reasonable and undervalued company out there. With similar power in their hands, other companies would have just gone all out and probably be extremely evil for a crazy amount of profits in return, but for Google they have always refrained themselves from doing exactly that. Too bad most people just never considered this angle.
I dunno; I don't really care about any of it; I've never trusted them enough to use any of their products I wasn't actually giving them money for.
>Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to.
Lolwut? No, actually, they don't. They didn't beat Yelp in the early days because they weren't in the game. They may eventually do so, as Yelp degenerates into a stupid protection racket, but hopefully this entire idea goes away, as until they solve the sibyl problem, its a horse shit idea.
And if they started doing crap like this (for no reason, mind you: google is an ad company), they'd very likely end up lots of little baby googles the way ATT did. They probably will anyway. And good riddance to bad rubbish.
Of course they've long since jumped the shark, and even removed the "don't be evil" part of their corporate motto.
I use it all the time.
So I don't completely understand why you need a proprietary Google "cloud" service that they can sunset some years later and break. When I heard about this I wondered why someone can't build a consumer-friendly solution on these older protocols.
Of course, printing itself is less relevant than it was 20 years ago, so it's not exactly a booming industry.
* a Google Cloud Print-ready printer, or
* a computer that can run Chrome and bridge non-Google Cloud Print-ready printers to Google Cloud Print.[0]
So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and registering a "classic printer". To combat this, I made a simple Python script that runs an HTTP server, accepts file uploads, assumes cupsd is running on the same host, and throws jobs at my printer. This has worked nicely, and over time I've added additional features, such as the ability to specify double-sided printing or number of copies.
The wording in this link is the source of my confusion. The first paragraph states (somewhat brusquely) that users should "identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy" without giving any suggestions on how this might best be accomplished. What's more, the first link[1] on the page claims "native printing" is getting better, but upon clicking this link I'm directed to a page about Chrome Enterprise.
So... what am I supposed to make of this? I have to pay for an enterprise edition of ChromeOS to use printers now? Google's own infographics[2] seem to suggest so. How is this an improvement? The article goes on to bullet-point several of the specific features that will be available by end-of-year. It's not clear if these apply to everybody, or to only those persons who are paying for Chrome Enterprise.
Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS? What is Google angling for by intentionally crippling software and systems that work _perfectly fine_ elsewhere?
I will keep on trucking with my tiny "print proxy" script, while continuing to not give a shit about Google's inane antics regarding printers.
The only saving grace for this article is the very last link[3] which appears to detail a _suspiciously_ simple process for adding a networked printer. I'll have to commandeer my wife's Chromebook the next time I get a chance, and test this process out. I've never seen this particular article before, and to my knowledge adding a printer like this was previously not a supported operation on ChromeOS.
Hang on, though. We're not out of the woods yet. Because of course, the only helpful page I've found so far links[4] to _yet more instructions_ for adding a native printer. The first step is "sign into some Google service" and the steps seem geared towards an "organizational unit". No. Not happening. What the hell is all this? I just want to add a local printer. I'm not sending print jobs to Google first, and I don't want support articles that assume I'm administering an organization.
[0] https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/1686197 (see also the header "Connect a printer that’s not cloud-ready")
[1] https://www.blog.google/products/chrome-enterprise/chrome-en...
[2] https://www.blog.google/topics/connected-workspaces/introduc... (image a bit of the way down. IDKWTF "printer management" is supposed to mean but it seems like something I'd want)
[3] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252
[4] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en&ref...
There isn't one (assuming you don't use ChromeOS).
Google is saying: "We're killing this. Find something else."
I think the support text is wrong—you could do this on Linux as well. It'll be a moot point though when Cloud Print shuts down.
> Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS?
Have you tried recently? I don't think it is anymore. Yesterday my Chromebook seemed to just see my printer on my local LAN (via Rendezvous, I assume).
I agree these product/support docs you linked are pretty alarming. But I think the actual situation is (or if not is, will be) much better for basic ChromeOS in simple situations:
* auto-discovered network-connected printer on the same LAN as the Chromebook
* network-connected printer where you know the hostname and it's reachable from the Chromebook
* USB printer connected directly to the Chromebook
Hopefully those docs will improve soon...
Note that while I work for Google, I don't have any inside knowledge of this.
The sad fact is that once a consumer realizes the device they've bought is encumbered with artificial limitations, they might not trust it even when (if!) these limitations are lifted later.
- Printing easily from Linux
- Printing from your phone
- etc.
This is as easy as it can be without needing cloud print though
> - Printing from Chromebooks
> - Printing from your phone
This is an artificial restriction created by google. There is already a network printing protocol that works without the "cloud". You just have to support it.
Is there any open source alternatives?
I doubt many printer manufacturers go more than a year without revising the designs at least a little.
For a device you already bought? Not really. How often do you replace your printer?
If you rely on GCP for your home/home-office/small business, you might be a little peeved to discover that your several-hundred-dollar printer might be reduced to a "dumb"/local-only printer next year because the manufacturer decided to rely on a closed-source third-party service for what you consider core functionality of your printer.
Moreover, how do you print from Android now? Go ahead and search for instructions how to do that which don't involve either A) Google Cloud Print or B) a vendor-specific app (which probably only works with network-connected printers).
We are also adding off-network printing support early 2020, also 100% free. Our gift to you. With Mobility Print you can print from BYO Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iOS and Android. devices.
Alternatives:
- Put it in maintenance mode and outsource it. A 5 person team offshore for this mode would cost ~$250K.
- Open source it
- Sell it to a startup
- Sell it to an equity firm
- Make a cloud service out of it
- Add advertising/data collection to it that might benefit other products/AI efforts (with user agreement)
I am of the firm believer that all code that gets written should be preserved. Someone out there sometime would be looking for it.
Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and authorization support in actively maintained firmware?
Could Cloud Print support (with private servers) just be merged into CUPS now?
Cloud Print was THE main reason why I never fully switched away from Chrome. It was more reliable than even the "native" printing capabilities of my printer, which would randomly refuse to print, but over Cloud Print it worked every time.
It was also very convenient to send print jobs even while not at home.
Well, thanks for allowing me to get rid of Chrome entirely, I guess.
PaperCut Mobility Print is an alternative to Google Cloud Print.
Short of "regulating" these companies to open-source or sell the infra to a caretaker entity when services are shutdown, there is no other option. Even then, it is a massive ask of Google (that every service be separable from anything proprietary Google infra provides), and it also unrealistic to expect another company / governing body to run it without issues.
At this point, it is what it is. If you use a free service, expect it to die at some point in the future. This happens to many services where the entire company disappears. The fact that Google survived 20 years shouldn't be held against them if products went down and the company didn't. Numbers are enough to sway the stats and make Google the bad company that shuts-down services too often.
If you’re that passionate and people will miss the service, then that sounds like a business opportunity to me.
Just because it’s not revenue positive (enough) for google, doesn’t mean it couldn’t support a smaller start up.
I’ve got to agree here, this feature got replaced by a native ChromeOS printing feature and probably wasn’t being used much.
It’s not as bad as others.
Google is a mass market company thus chump change is irrelevant to them.
Plus they are used to operating at a scale by providing products for free. Consumers are used to Google providing products for free. Thus it’s jarring for a lot of users to suddenly pay for basic functionality. Enterprises probably don’t need this because they’ve already figured out network printing decades ago.
Plus when you start charging people “money,” you’re expected to provide “human” support. Google won’t come near products where “human” support is necessary even with a 10ft pole unless you’re spending gajillion dollars with them.
In a strategic sense it makes sense for “Google” to shut it down. Companies like Readdle will probably fill in the spots
The problem is that Page and Brin, the authors of the perverse incentives at Google, are still in charge. Alphabet would have been a great place to bring in some people who are good at maintaining projects. Hell Google could learn a thing or two via osmosis about efficiency from them. Maybe cut the ageist bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come with experience instead of making the same mistakes over and over.
But no, it’s still the Larry and Sergei show.
Hey, they're more than happy to hire anyone who can pass a four-hour CS undergrad final as a mid-level engineer, regardless of age or experience.
One of the things that people learn in college is that college is way harder than high school and a bunch of things that didn’t matter much in high school are super important. Same thing happens when you leave college.
College teaches a bunch of skill that will absolutely save your ass once a month, maybe once a week at first. Then you have to learn a bunch of skills that save your ass every single day.
It is rare that I compliment Microsoft, but somehow they managed to hire people right out of college and not give them Peter Pan syndrome, while Google has failed at this. And I think it starts with the interview process. MS looked for improvisation. Google focuses on book learning.
It's time for a management change at Google and Alphabet.
Look, I too got annoyed when Google killed Reader. It sucked for a couple days. I moved on.
This doesn't even register as a product. It was an experiment that wasn't needed, so they killed it.
Holding onto every silly project you ever worked on doesn't make you responsible, it makes you a directionless hoarder. Even Google doesn't have infinite bandwidth (heh) to work on pointless side-projects.
They aren't killing Gmail. Or GCP. Or Maps. Or anything else you ever used. Let it die. Don't upvote this post just to use it for ammunition on some overly-generic tirade against Google product management. You are just adding noise to the world.
I use google cloud print a lot. And so to other people I know, so in my closer circles it's ~ 30% who do not use it at all (but still print occasionally).
For sure, it's not the biggest thing, but it really wasn't unknown either. And just because something is not as popular it still continues to shows googles product graveyard policy..
So yeah, a lot of people think "Oh damn they are shutting down GCP" because it legitimately impacts them. This bizarre notion throughout this discussion that it was some weird fringe service is not supported by reality.
And Google has a poor product record for good reason, so the criticism is very well deserved. They made their bed and now they lie in it. Someone would be incredibly foolhardy to seriously "buy" games on Stadia, for instance, which is a service that has an incredibly high probability of being Googled.
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/document/c04024231
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.
I don't think most people even have printers anymore. If they do they probably have an old one they don't use often.
Hi, founder of Breezy here (www.breezy.com), a secure cloud / mobile print infrastructure that actually is "enterprise-ready". (For example: we have tens of thousands of active users across thousands of retail branches for one of the top 3 banks in the US, plus thousands more across dozens of countries around the world.)
I started Breezy in 2009 because, as a corporate lawyer at the time, I needed a way to print from my BlackBerry and couldn't find one. I applied to the 2010 YC batch with Breezy, got rejected, went through Founder Institute instead, raised a 750k seed round in 2011, almost ran out of money, pivoted to an enterprise focus, raised a bit more money, barely survived a BS patent lawsuit from a Canadian competitor now owned by HP, went through lots of other ups and downs, and here we are.
We're never going to be a unicorn, but it's a neat little business in a niche that while "nice to have" for most companies, is critical to some. If you need quality cloud print infrastructure, hit me up.
---
Meanwhile, a few thoughts from a 10-year industry veteran:
- GCP was never enterprise-class in any way. "Utterly unreliable" was the most common complaint we heard from customers.
- The core problem for a lot of enterprise use cases isn't driver incompatibility; it's network routing. Your MFPs are on this network segment over here, but your users (especially mobile devices) are on that one over there. Cloud printing can save you a lot of network headaches.
- "Driverless printing" doesn't work very well, and never has. This goes double for Mopria, which while by far the most successful of attempts, is pretty shaky in real-life usage, and lacks most basic capabilities around security, audits, encryption etc etc.
- AirPrint is pretty good and is consistently getting better, but it's always been very consumer-focused and remains so today as far as I can tell. One of the really great features they could add to simplify enterprise adoption would be to enable querying "Print Servers" (which the AirPrint spec does recognize) for lists of printers served by them. Right now there's no way to do this, so in order to reach an AirPrint print queue that's not bonjour-routable from your current IP, you have to have a config profile that points you to that specific queue, rather than to a server that returns a group of queues.
- The other major improvement opportunity there would be the ability to use certs to completely identify the user, thereby enabling (say) an Intune-provisioned iPad to print natively to a Xerox-managed enterprise pull-print / badge-release system, so that users get a native experience of printing via one queue, to any printer in the org. This is possible with Breezy today but there are a number of hoops to jump through on the admin side.
Most companies just roll their own "print client" programs, in my observation. Not that difficult to do (the hardest part is actually sending the document to the printer, which is relatively trivial for macOS/Linux/anything-else-with-CUPS and not-trivial but reasonably-documented to do with Windows; those two should cover your bases).
It's still an easy solution for using a tablet and printing from it.
Their plans always seem like: Beta-final release > take long time to finalize it > kill stage
I bet someone would go to the effort of patching it up and getting it to run.
Only disadvantage is probably that "cloudprint.google.com" is probably hardcoded into millions of printers worldwide, so even if you could run it on your own server, your printer will never work with it.
That's pretty great service.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815
Edit: apparently pointing to a previous comment on a related thread is ... bad? For ... some reason?
Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.
Why stop there, just shut maps.
Something enterprise customers love hearing. Ooof imagine being assigned to sunsetting the service and explaining to what enterprise customers it still has.
Enterprise customers need to figure out that if you're paying $0 for something, you get $0 in support.... if you want something that works, either pay someone enough money to support it, or find an open option and pay your employees enough money to support it in-house.
For that reason we could only run RedHat or Solaris and whatever they supported.
You may install a particular library and then leave, and the new person has no idea what that thing does. If there's some kind of support contract in place, the new person has the means to at least have that thing supported.
For lots of software, you can either trust that it's well-supported upstream and such bugs are likely to be rare, or you can say that your internal use is something you can work around (e.g., if you want to use an open-source IDE, knock yourself out, if it breaks you can find another text editor). But you should explicitly consider that.
Also, the only reason open-source software works as well as it does is that someone else is investing in making it work. Oftentimes that's Red Hat and Oracle. If you're a $10B company and you're expecting open source to magically work with no investment, besides being a jerk, you're also the reason people keep saying "how do we solve the open source sustainability problem" - it's your own fault that support resources for your critical software don't exist.
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.
Ignoring, of course, those users that were using Cloud Print to network enable their printer.
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
(Note: I also posted this comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206)
What an amazing company. Guess I should be happy that I'm now officially done with Google.
the linked article and the original source from google both cover this.
Another Google product killed, another migration strategy to execute. What's next?
And does Chromebook support that?
Google has no customer facing support and they offer "free" services so they can kill them at will.
General rule of thumb: If you're not paying for it and you don't have access to a live person, don't expect it to last.