Google Kills Cloud Print
support.google.com
support.google.com
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 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.
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.
Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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
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.
Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable argument for jut keeping it up.
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/dzqr2d/google_clou...
And one Reason (of many) why I will NEVER buy a Google Stadia Game or put anything mission critical on a Google Product /. Service
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.)
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.
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.
https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebooks-make-big-strides-in-sa...
You'd have to be a fool to trust any google service for anything.
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.
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?!
I am starting to think that I need a similar saying about Google.
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.
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.
It's on the specs page for most HP and Brother networked printers, and probably most others.
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.
It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/
Google is pro-adapting to change. And it is painful but it is usually the right thing.
But, as with many things, "I'll believe it when I see it."
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.
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
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.
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.
Creating new products is probably over incentivized, while the boring work of operating and maintaining existing useful products is under incentivized.
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.
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.
https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...
Latest example, now that ConstraintLayout is finally working properly, they come up with JetPack Composer, most likely due to Flutter marketing pressure.
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.
I can't say Google's launched anything exciting in the past decade. If they're shooting for sexy, they're failing miserably.
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’.
If something is deeply broken, it's what allows them to thrive in spite of themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Driver-less printing is great if I'm in the same network, but not so if not.
I bought an Oki 691 impact printer simply because it spoke to anything on the network without the need for drivers.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
"I am Dalek of Borg. These are not the 'Droids you're looking for. You never existed."
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.
- Printing easily from Linux
- Printing from your phone
- etc.
Is there any open source alternatives?
I doubt many printer manufacturers go more than a year without revising the designs at least a little.
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.