Google Sunsets Google Cloud Print | Hacker News Reader

Google Sunsets Google Cloud Print

support.google.com

129 pointsfranze174 comments

Before you get spooked by another project going to the Google Graveyard(tm), they are sunsetting this in favor of Internet Printing Protocol[0][1], the same open protocol that AirPrint and Microsoft's new Universal Print uses.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol 1: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en

This is for ‘Chrome OS’. Is this also being introduced for Android devices?

As AirPrint is a reasonable protocol I tried looking for how to print to it from non Apple operating systems but all I found was ways to make Linux servers present their printers as AirPrint printers. Great but how to print to them from Linux/Android/Windows?

It's not that complicated. The protocol is defined here https://tools.ietf.org/html/std92 but if you don't feel like doing the plumbing yourself, just use CUPS.

I think Android has it in "Default print service", although there's certanly printers that will be left behind.

E.g. my Cloud Print compatible Oki doesn't have a way forward for Android anymore.

Have you tried the Oki print app?

Yeah, it's pretty awful and it doesn't register as a print service (so you can't print from other apps).

It appears they also have the "OKI Print Plugin" in the play store which appears to be a print service.

Oh this is new, great! Thanks :)

It works great under Linux. I got a new Brother printer recently and in CUPS using the autodetected IPP printer actually gave better results than trying to install the Brother drivers (stuff like double sided printing, margins, DPI options all worked out of the box on IPP and not so well with the drivers).

they are sunsetting this in favor of Internet Printing Protocol

Which matters not at all to people who spent hundreds of dollars on internet connected printers and scanners that support Google Cloud Print.

Firmware update? Nope. Chuck it in the landfill and write another check.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that these same printers support ipp.

Not the one I have. Google Cloud Print or the manufacturer app only.

Plug it into a raspberry pi over USB, share over CUPS.

I follow your [1] link, and it doesn't work for me. It tells me to sign in to admin.google.com, but that says:

"admin.google.com is used for G Suite accounts only. Regular Gmail accounts cannot be used to sign in to admin.google.com."

Is there a way to use Internet Printing Protocol without being a G Suite account?

EDIT: Okay, I see that maybe I can do it myself. Looking up the IPP/IPPS instructions from my printer (Canon TS9120).

Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

I have stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo is great), Google Chrome (Firefox is great), Google Domains (use Gandi / Route53). The most difficult products to shake are Gmail, Docs and Sheets, but I am gradually weaning myself off.

The only signal that seems to get through to corporates is to vocally withhold your funds. PMs at Google probably underestimate the % of people on HN who control the company purse for software spending. Personally, there is no way I can risk locking myself or my employer (that just raised a Series B) into any Google products at this point.

If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.

Actually, let me put my money where my mouth is. Just signed up for Fastmail. Email and privacy is worth way more than than $5/month. I know not everyone is in that position, but I pay more for Spotify and GitHub already.

Getting a Fastmail was my first step toward de-googling myself. Have been super happy with them. They are really stirring email in the right direction. Their effort on JMAP is also very much appreciated.

Get a fun custom tld while youre at it. Fastmail has very good and convenient custom domain support.

I did that when getting rid of gmail (have firstname@lastname.email), it still makes me feel cool and defiant every time I enter it somewhere.

I use surname.io and I can't believe the amount of people that ask me if .io is not a mistake. Makes me realise how much I live a bit in a tech bubble.

I have me@firstname.lastname -- so many double takes when I give it out in person or over the phone

My surname ends in "io" and I've been trying to get my <partial_surname>.io domain for years. It's a shame that it's being squatted, especially considering the only people with that surname are directly related to me (great grandpa legally changed his last name to something made up when he left a certain criminal group) and don't do anything with tech. I've been relegated to using a <surname>.me domain.

If they are related you should find them and ask for it! Have you tried to whois the domain?

About the tech bubble, if you are on HN, you are already in the bubble :D There are so many people that have never ever heard of any domain that is not com/net/org/country

Unfortunately, they're not related. My surname is also pretty short, so the first part (e.g. minus the "io") is set up to be a decent acronym...for something.

Want to be really cool and defiant? Go with gmail@firstname.lastname.com - and then you can enjoy explaining to people that no, you didn't make a mistake... ;)

Fastmail is amazing. I have like 20 domains I have from old side projects I can easily setup email + catchall addresses from and go wild with them. So much customization + UI doesn't look bad as Gmails (I switched after Gmail's horrid design update to include all that padding) and a ton of functionality with Apple/etc. devices.

And you can host websites directly from fastmail! Can't ask anything more from fastmail.

This was the first and best step I have taken in getting off Google services. And, as a plus, Fastmail is _freaking awesome_. I cannot believe I allowed myself to have ads in my _email_ client.

Switching email addresses is somewhere between very hard and impossible. I have a Fastmail, which I now use for new sign-ups, but I have lots of accounts on my Gmail address which I don't want to lose. So effectively I'll have two email addresses forever. Worse things have happened, I suppose.

1 - get yourself a domain and use that as your mail address going forward. Then your mail address can be independent of your provider.

2 - Point it at your mail provider, say fastmail.

3 - Tell gmail to forward all your mail to your new address.

4 - Ask your friends to use your new address. Make sure your mail client uses it as the from address.

4 - <wait a little while and then>: Put a rule in your mail client to highlight (flag or colour or whatever) all messages that were forwarded from gmail. This will help you figure update people, companies, mailing lists etc.

That works fairly well for most needs, but you will more than likely hit an issue with that one website or company that uses your email as a primary key, and it either can't be changed, or you have to contact them to do it manually on their end.

Well you can leave the gmail account around for these stray cases or, you know, contact them.

You can (almost) always change your email address. Just connect to the website and it's usually an option.

On email providers - I moved away from Gmail for my personal email address a few years ago, and now use iCloud. I've had very few issues with spam, and there are no ads. My personal email has much less volume than work, so I haven't really missed the advanced features of Gmail.

From a privacy perspective, how does iCloud compare to others like Fastmail?

The disappointing thing about iCloud for me is the nonstandard 2FA.

No QR code you can scan into an app of your choice. No FIDO/U2F. No printable backup codes. You use your iPhone and if you want a backup, you'd better buy a mac.

As far as I know, Australia forces email providers to give them backdoor into email:

https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18130806/australia-access...

I don’t know how it affects Apple or Fastmail’s non AUS customers. I still pay Fastmail just to support their mission.

https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/help-and-support/how-to-engag...

You're not getting any privacy with Australian services. They require by law backdoors into everything.

> Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

Not really, as long as the pay is there, devs will come.

Spending a lot of money helps less than you might think. You can definitely get well qualified people, but ‘qualified’ is only a proxy for what you want. For example if people leave after 2-3 years you lose out on massive amounts of institutional knowledge. But, more importantly you select for people that are very good at hacking your processes rather than your problems.

Which I suspect is why their search for example has gotten so bad. Google is doing a great many things that look good internally that make search less useful.

Some people are willing to take a principled stance. I have personally turned down significant offers at a cost to myself, including:

  1. Building an HTTP proxy that inject ads into open WiFi networks, e.g. hotel lobby WiFi.
  2. Forking a browser project for a gambling company that would hide their competitors' ads in return for providing free data to East African gambling addicts.
  3. Building a website for a health quack with completely made up medical claims.

None of which seem in the same league as "turning down a little used print protocol."

It’s not about any one project, it’s knowing that your work will either sell more advertising or be tossed aside arbitrarily harming anyone that dared to use your service.

You're not using YouTube?

For business?

> serious about building product consider working at Google

my view is that if you're serious about "building product", then you wouldnt work at google, or Facebook, or for anyone else. You would build and run something yourself.

If you like the "building" part but are indifferent about "product" then somewhere like Google seems great.

Maybe google lets you focus more on the product part? If you run something yourself, most of your time will be building company, not so much product.

  > if you're serious about "building product" [...] You 
  > would build and run something yourself.

Perhaps as a side project, something useful just for yourself. Lots of developers scratch itches they can't scratch at their day job that way; new tech, greenfield ideas instead of maintaining someone else's garbage, etc.

And sometimes those devs go into business for themselves and realize that they don't get to spend all their time building product -- now they've got to build the marketing page and write a bunch of copy and take a ton of screenshots (of features they know they're going to change), and figure out how sales funnels work, and all the other things that go into running a business.

Building and running your own company is the fastest way to get out of pure product development I've ever seen.

"building a product" and "building a company" are two different things, but i agree that for some kinds of products and scale, you need a company to make it really successful. I think about all the "lifestyle businesses" that are examples of products that don't need full on "companies" to exist.

I think that if you are passionate about creating a product for people to use, then you will see through on all the other aspects of making that product survive and be used.

Otherwise, what you're interested in is "development", and big places like Google will give you plenty of experience in doing that.

This is not a value judgement. Personally, I have no problem working at a company where I'm paid to engineer products from the ground up. Maintaining things is boring. But that's just me.

Generally agree, but building product for a wealthy established company can give you an opportunity to reach a wide audience of users with your work.

Why, if you want to keep building an already successful product, like Kubernetes, or Golang, or Chrome (or React, PyTorch, or VSCode, etc) you can join a megacorp and go on. These are going to be around for probably a decade or two.

If you want to build an original product, then yes, it can happen not to align with a megacorp's priorities, even if reasonably successful. Found a startup, try to sell it to a megacorp (if it's Google, it will likely discontinue the acquired product anyway), or keep it to yourself if you can afford it.

The things that make Docs and Sheets and such attractive aren't really the ability to create and edit documents -- we all have perfectly adequate versions of that on our laptops and desktops already -- so much as the availability of those documents on a shareable networked infrastructure. "Here's the URL to see my doc, here's the URL to edit the same copy in place" are the most powerful features.

If, say, Backblaze or Dropbox wanted to put a higher-value service on top of their storage infrastructure, I think that would be a good way to go.

Like onecloud or nextcloud with libre office plugins? Or office365?

Have you used Office 365 and OneDrive? You actually get a nearly full blown Word and Excel with the same file sharing features :-)

You can link the desktop versions to OneDrive and get the actual full blown word and excel.

Is buying desktop versions still a possibility?

Office 365, 5 desktop install (at one time), ~$99 a year. We do one subscription for our family per year. Gives 1T of onedrive space as well.

I personally have had very bad experiences with collaborative editing on Word 365, with it locking whole sections of the doc because someone else is editing them, while in Google Docs even editing the same sentence (e.g. adding items to a list) at the same time Just Works™.

How long ago was that? I've been thoroughly impressed with the installed o365 apps' ability to live multi-user edit these days.

Ah, that's good to know. I last tried it about a year ago, will try again

Dropbox does have Dropbox Paper.

I switched from gmail to mainly using protonmail. I can highly recommend them so far.

> Docs and Sheets

Try out Office online, insanely more featureful. Scold anyone mailing Docs share links by saying you can't open it, insist on a file instead

> Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

I actually had a former college approach me about an opportunity to work at gcloud and feel like I am a great fit for the position. The work seems fun and the pay is right...but my single biggest concern is the future of the product in terms of longevity. I am strongly considering rejecting any possible offers just for this reason.

Is gcloud = GCP? think GCP is a longerm product. It would be CEO suicide to announce you are not going to compete with AWS or Azure.

gcloud = GCP in this context, yes.

GCP could definitely be a good product and a real competitor to AWS/Azure given Google's technical expertise. Given Google's recent track-record though it isn't clear that the vision is there.

My understanding is that Google tends to have internal metrics around all of this stuff, if the data is coming back that usage is declining enough - they usually re-prioritize their efforts. Not necessarily saying I would do the same, but I believe that's how it's supposed to work

Sure, but even if every product closure they only annoy 1% of their users, a hundred product closures in, that's everybody.

Their data-based model fails to account for the fact that they're getting a reputation for not being dependable.

This is the single reason why Google Cloud will never be successful, at least in the next decade. A huge number of software engineers have been burned by being treated as Google statistics. That works great for ads or search, but Google has a reputation as someone you would never, ever, ever, ever build a sustainable business around.

There is a critical mass of people who simply won't use Google in a business-critical setting, and it's growing quickly. Now, that adds any GSuite office which relied on Google for working printers. Is that a lot? Probably not. Multiply that times each time this has happened before, and times the never of businesses wacked out-of-business by Google's automated algorithms, and at this point, I think it's quickly reaching the point where most teams have a Google horror story or two.

It's fine for purely transactional businesses (ones with zero startup/shutdown costs -- for example, one can arbitrage adwords and referral fees).

My guess is that at some point, Google will realize this, either from data or otherwise, and sunset GCE and related services, probably with very short notice, leaving many businesses hanging.

Short of giving a 10-year guarantee of keeping services running at specific cost and service levels, with real liability (not externalizing costs to customers again), I don't see how Google could address this.

The biggest cultural weakness at Google seems to be the No Human support policy and outsourced regional distribution which fuels a growing divide between engineers and customers.

The myopic salarymen who shut down entire product lines based on usage metrics that seem to pale in comparison to Google Search metrics do not understand complex systems, do not understand startups (and the fragility of growth) and certainly don't understand branding or hiring. If these nerds had ever run a business themselves and spent time talking to the customers who pay their salaries, they would spin out these companies instead of sunsetting them.

A large part of leadership/strategy in tech companies is ex-consultants and MBAs.

Engineers don't call all the shots with sunsetting projects.

If anything, we have a healthy (?) skepticism of product managers too but they definitely do talk to customers, look deeply into metrics and think about branding.

> you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

why do you think everybody working at a software company cares about building products? I'm in this field to make a living. The only thing that would turn me off from a company that compensates like Google is a bad work life balance.

As a user though, I'm definitely turned off. This year I've started detaching from google as much as possible, and it's great. the main sticky point for me is how to replace Google Photos.

You say you're turned off enough as a user to divest your personal life from Google.

Who do you think funds the salaries at Google that feeds the compensation? It's you - the customer. Some of these customers are slow-moving businesses, but as an individual you are living in the future.

A decline in revenue will follow a decline in product - the question is by how long for a Titanic the size of Google.

I gather that your argument is if I don't have confidence in google's products, I shouldn't have confidence in their success as a business either. If that's correct, I think that's a reasonable argument but I'm not really concerned about whether Google as a business will fail 5+ years from today. I would honestly be shocked if they failed in less than 5 years, so I wouldn't hesitate to take their compensation.

This is all hypothetical of course. I have no idea what their work-life balance is nor have I tried applying to them

It's not just Google:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

It's $GIANT_CORPORATION value drift.

Well, working at Google has clear benefits - insane money + Google on your resume.

I love Google sheets but I also work with large enough data sets that it regularly freezes up which is always associated with a frustrating “lost connection” message. I’ve been shifting more and more to Excel because of this. It’s pretty funny to move away from Google because my data is too big.

I have totally replaced Drive/Docs/Sheets with Nextcloud [1] + OnlyOffice [2]. You still get online cloud storage and online editors with the bonus of using the widely popular (OOXML standard).

1. https://nextcloud.com/

2. https://www.onlyoffice.com/

As far as Gmail goes, I have heard really good things about Fastmail (as others have mentioned) or if you want to host your own, I highly recommend checking out mailu.io.

What do you use to host nextcloud?

I just have it running in Docker on a DigitalOcean droplet (alongside several other services).

But there are quite a few other options, from renting a managed instance to buying a hardware device with it preinstalled. https://nextcloud.com/yourdata/

For anyone who is interested in self-hosting stuff like Nextcloud but is not ready to dive into the deep end of server management, I would highly recommend checking out https://yunohost.org/. Basically it is a Linux "server" OS that tries to make it as simple as possible to install and manage services like Nextcloud.

I don't necessarily think the Google graveyard is that much bigger than other companies, it's just more visible to the public. Any large software company is going to have a lot of projects that were sunset early or canceled before the first release. I don't have statistics for this, but Cloud Print lasted for 10 years, and that seems like a fairly typical lifespan for any product.

It can be painful seeing the fruits of one's labor killed off by an unsympathetic executive, but it is the nature of the work.

It's not about bigger, so much as about more sudden, arbitrary, and capricious. In most companies, products which consistently don't show a profit are phased out, usually with transition paths.

At Google, products that don't show exponential growth are wack-a-moled, offloading costs on customers and dumping them on the ground.

Nextcloud integrates with Collabora or OnlyOffice. Can anyone here tell if either of them is usable and compare them with the Google offerings?

> If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.

SWEs at Google are certainly on call for pretty much every product. Not really sure how you expect PMs to be on call considering their general lack of technical knowledge. However, PMs and T/PMs are constantly grooming and organizing bug hotlists.

Disclaimer: I work at Google opinions are my own

As long as new grads can continue to make $200k out of college, Google's hiring pipeline will continue to be fine.

I hope they don’t end up killing gmail one day. I was really surprised when they killed there inbox app and it was killed after few years. I was basically using it as a primary email app for the phone

Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

Actually it sounds great - build whatever you can dream up, but never have to worry about supporting it.

> Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

Given that Google is known for using filtering methods with a high false negative rate because they have a great surplus of qualified candidates that they need to weed out, even if it was true, that's probably not a concern for them.

In case someone from Google is reading this: - I am a real person who really manages IT decisions for a real company. - I use Google Cloud Print to keep our zoo of devices happily talking to our Japanese printers in the US and Asia. - You made my day hard by killing this product. There is time that I could have spent with my family or on my health that I will have to divert elsewhere to fix a problem that didn't exist for me yesterday. - My memory is long.

Why does changing vendors impact your family and health time? Sounds like your employer's expectations may be more of a problem.

Presumably they now have a new business necessary project with a maximum 2 month delivery timeline, over the holiday season. It seems completely reasonable that an IT decision maker needs to keep the printers running?

A sudden, new project during the holiday season would definitely impact my family time at least.

Edit: Apparently they announced this last year, so that seems to make the current situation acute by choice or lack of knowledge.

Many companies have an attitude of "when the work is done, you can go home".

Since the cloud print migration will be more work, rather than OP going home at 4pm to see family and go for a jog, now he'll be staying in the office testing printer setups and going home at 9pm after his children are in bed.

Other companies' sadistic cultures are not really Google's fault, though.

It's known for a year. Why didn't you act since then?

I did not get the memo last year that it was running out.

Printing is a horrible experience these days. Even in a managed office environment, you're not safe from all the rough edges.

- Drivers. Why does this still feel so difficult? Just define a public bytecode API (no, not PS) and be done with this already.

- Ink, paper, etc. Even if you shell out $Texas for a laser printer, you still have to manage paper and then it's probably not any good for photos (probably the only thing I want to print).

- Protocol/tech stack straight out of the Old World. Cloud Print seemed like the Dropbox to printing's SMB. Proprietary but less terrible.

- The waiting for anything to happen. If I have to go to the trouble of using your proprietary driver to do anything, can't the printer at least leverage more of the host computer to speed things up?

The whole process feels only slightly less finicky than using a 3D printer.

Using IPP isn't that bad. There are no drivers involved. And printing can work via a cloud ( but some software involved to manage your printers ).

TBH businesses that do serious printing do no buy low end inkjet, but mid to hi end printers that have this features ( and many more) and mostly are covered thru some service contract with a 3rd party which manages them.

My work makes a big deal about setting up a printer. IT needs to add each printer by request and they come around with a flash drive of drivers.

It hasn’t actually been that hard for a while, I’ve added the printers I’ve needed myself via AirPrint, no drivers necessary. I feel like the printer world got easy and no one told anyone.

Airprint is pretty neat. Used it on my iPhone a couple of times and it's a pretty painless experience. No apps/driver to download. You press "print" and it discover the printer and does its thing.

Announced a year ago:

https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-20...

Meanwhile Microsoft are doing the opposite: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/windows/univer...

Long Microsoft! Satya is making good decisions.

What I've learned from 15+ years of solving problems is that problems have Lindy properties: Problems that have been around for a long time will be around for a long time. And printing is a problem as old as computing.

This is literally the same thing Google is adopting as a replacement for GCP.

Funny story about this. A few years ago, someone wrote an @channel, something like “SF office be careful which printer you select, several items from your office have ended up printed in Boston”

To which I replied “this sounds impossible” and started trying to figure out how this person could be so confused about printing that documents might magically make their way across the country from office to office!

At which point I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that Cloud Print existed, and that it was necessary to set up printers this way because of Chromebooks. Oops.

Not sure yet whether I am happy that it’s gone, or sad that other old-school techs like me won’t be able to have similar experiences going forward :)

This has nothing to do with Cloud Print specifically; printers have had support for IP printing for years. And don't most major companies have their printers set up so you print from and to anywhere?

It's not specific to cloud print, it's quite usual. In large companies several sites are on the same internal network, and you can send your print job to any printer.

In my company I can easily print my document on another continent.

Another tombstone goes up: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It’s a legit risk to be basing anything on a Google product or service. Know too many stories of people or companies getting burned when Google wakes up one morning and decides to abandon another product.

The Google Graveyard is a Myth: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hximz7/the_google_g...

Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.

One of the first examples there of not killing a product is "Inbox -> GMail Features" which is almost entirely misleading. The biggest productivity benefits from Inbox, such as bundles and leaving notes directly in the inbox have not been ported. And of course the biggest benefit of Inbox was the clean interface itself. I still curse Google under my breath every day about them killing it off.

I dont know which is worse, killing a product that you are using or asking you to switch to another new product which does almost same thing :(

The first example (GPM -> Youtube Music) is a great example of why 'merged into other products' doesn't delegitimize complaints about Google killing products.

YTM (last time I checked) lacks feature parity with its predecessor, has a questionable migration path, and seems more interested in music videos that you can incidentally play as songs. It integrates messily with its host platform (hn comments on the last thread I read about it indicated that Google's algorithms were inadvertantly tagging unrelated content as 'music'), and dilutes focus on the prior project's core feature-set.

Just because another product's abstract contains some of the product I'm using's core doesn't mean I want to switch over to it because Google's got a short attention span, and wants to reimplement the product I'm using in the most approximate manner possible.

There should really be a "succeeded (in spirit) by ..." for many of these.

Rather than retire products like Cloud Print, why not spin them off as separate companies, or sell them? If there's a couple million users of a niche product, that would seem to argue for its continuation.

It seems as if this "sunset" approach unnecessarily alienates the user community and reflects badly on Google.

there's a couple million users of a free niche product.

One consequence of Google's monorepo is that even small services like this might depend on all sorts of google infrastructure and thus be effectively impossible to spin off.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing: the point of the monorepo is to make it easier and faster to write things like this in the first place.

In fact, I believe Cloud Print depends on Google Talk/XMPP!

That’s pretty funny and might be a good reason for it being sunsetted.

it's not because it's a monorepo. that affects just version control. it's the fact that is may be deeply dependent on other google services. would have been same problem with many repos

Technically true: I used it as synecdoche: (essentially) everybody has access to (essentially) everything.

And also a bit of hyperbole on my part as not everything is in the same repo.

Cloud Print still depends on some Google Talk internal API's. Google Talk went away long ago, and all it's infrastructure was still running for cloud print, making it very expensive to keep going for a small number of users.

It was nice when it worked, but my Brother monochrome printer would regularly un-pair itself from my Google account. And since I only print documents once or twice a year, it was unpaired every time I went to use it.

As a bonus, Brother (often the top-recommended printer model) has decided to entirely drop support for ChromeOS.

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/153313/...

"Google has announced the end of support for the Google Cloud Print service, effective December 31, 2020. Currently, we do not have any additional information to provide regarding Brother machines' future compatibility with Google Chrome OS."

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en

Note that Brother is conspicuously absent from the list of compatible printers at the bottom.

Being able to sunset services is not necessarily a bad thing to the dev teams —- it might just make developers happier so they don’t have to maintain unpopular services and do boring work. In contrast AWS/Amazon has a huge “no one way door” culture (so sunset decision rarely happens since people will point fingers) which could impose maintenance and ownership burden for teams. IMO DNA is different —- Amazon still has the retailer’s DNA

You realise this is one of the main reasons AWS is an order of magnitude bigger than Google Cloud in revenue right?

Sure, I’m just trying to guess why Google choose to do things this way. What’s more, they dare to do this for some reason.

On the other hand, Google’s work life balance might be order of magnitude better than Amazon. I would like to be the Boss of Amazon or an employee of Google :)

Their quarterly financial filings may give you a clue... the search, YT and network ads business revenue and margins are so huge that what they do anywhere else pretty much doesn't really matter from a corporate results standpoint :-)

I've both lost and hired employees to/from Google and compared to my industry, by all accounts the culture around financial discipline appears to be way less important which may explain some of what you see.

That and the fact they had like 5 years of a head start.

This has been discussed almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815

My understanding what this was the only way to print via Chromebooks?

What is the new way to print from ChromeOS?

Chrome support printing with printer that support IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol

If you have access to a Windows printer share you could use that too. That's how we did it. It often broke though and you would have to re-login to your chrome account on the Windows machine to re-connect it.

No, ChromeOS ships CUPS for awhile now.

Sort of. There are still lots of USB printers which just won't work with ChromeOS - despite working fine in regular Linux.

ah ffs, why do they have to do this all the time?

I already couldn't print to my local brother printer despite it showing up on a chromebook. Just silently hung.

I found out from searching online I had to configure a generic printer instead??

I've got a native Google Print option on my Canon printer; makes me wonder how much manufacturers spent on development and how many devices it got shoehorned into.

I didn't know what cloud print was but I think I'm convinced I need fast mail now, haven't seen something so lauded in a minute

We have a chromebbook and all four members of my family cannot print to a Brother hl-3170cdwv printer. To print, we log into a windows computer which recognizes that printer. Why can’t the chromebook do printing when both are on the home wifi? For this reason I am not going purchasea chromebook next time. It will be a windows computer.

Depending on your skill, Chromebook will print just fine to CUPS running on a tiny Linux VM or Raspberry Pi.

That's too bad because this give lot of opportunity to share internal CUPS printers over internet: https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector

Anyone knows workarounds?

Put your connected printer pc on wire guard vpn, or use a service like tailscale, that way you can securely use "cloud" print, with any device.

Great!

I love when these inherently panopticon enabling cloud-backed device services are sunsetted, making bricks (or partial bricks in this case) out of stuff people bought. It harms the public's trust in this computing paradigm.

When I recently had to make a decision about which Cloud provider to use, Google, although looking fine technically, wasn't even an option because of their killing everything attitude. Reading stuff like [1] I am not assured they will never kill their Cloud offerings.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

Almost makes me wonder how long until they kill GMail.

I used Google Cloud Print myself, so I've started a project to resolve printing problem and some other ones. It was inspired by sunset of Google Cloud Print. I believe we should have a cloud printing solution which will not disappear suddenly.

PrintNode is an excellent alternative (superior IMO), though for some printers that used the embedded Cloud Print app, you will need to setup a server.

Why is google famous for killing their services is it because they run out of funding to fund those services

2030: Google Sunsets Search

2040: Google sunsets users

You are being optimistic.

I expect 'Google Search' to become 'Google Ads World' within the next 4 years.

killedbygoogle++

Okay what's next in line for the Killed-By-Google ?

GMail ?

Google Duo ?

Google Keep ?

Google Contacts ?

Google Calendar ?

Google Health / Fit ?

Stadia, probably >_<

Stadia is great, and I think people are starting to see that.

I'll agree with you when Stadia free tier includes free to play games like league of legends like nVidia's GeForce Now does.

Geforce now let's you play many games you already purchased through steam as well. great feature

Technically Stadia is good and works surprisingly well, but the game selection is pitiful.

But getting better all the time. I actually now have more than I have the time to play.

That said, I'm coming from not having a console for many years, so all the games are brand new to me. :)

"Google killed a thing nobody used! What's next? GMAIL?!"

Do you pay for Gmail? I don't think this is an unreasonable concern.

It is an unreasonable concern in the case of Gmail because it would impact too many people. There would be backlash significant enough to damage Google Search.

Yes, I do. Do you see the email in my profile? That's Google Apps. I mean GSuite. Uh, Google Workspace.

Anyway, point is, I pay for it and you can/should too.

https://workspace.google.com/

Gmail being a complimentary service takes a core role of Google's user identity tracking and control. Don't forget that Gmail always has been and will be the primary reason why users are creating Google accounts.

Google Keep, Google Tasks, and Google Shopping List have a weird overlap. I suspect one will go or they will be merged. For some actions on a Google device, voice commands will create a list in either and it's not always clear which one.

Add Google Assistant Reminders and Google Calendar to this list.

Which of these 5 would you use to set a reminder to get milk?

(Note: Bonus points if you say you'd send yourself a delayed email through Gmail)

From what I can tell, Google Reminders, Google Calendar reminders and google assistant's reminders are all one and the same thing: just the same google calendar feature.

Tasks and Shopping Lists are the weird ones like GP mentioned.

Keep is part of GSuite/Workspaces but didn't get a new logo in the redesign, so it's probably next on the chopping block.

Finally one shutdown that is clearly positive for users. I hope Goole will also make sure that cloud print app is also removed from all android phones.

if it's so positive, why are the other people in this thread so upset? (early thread, not lots of responses yet)

Other people in this thread will be upset because hn loves to get mad whenever Google shuts down anything even if they don't use it.

it sounds like most of the responses of people upset are because they use it.

I actually used Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Inbox, and Reader.

It is annoying to use a service and spend time and effort getting everything setup on it (e.g. setting up computers and printers, importing music, etc.) to have the rug pulled out from under you without a replacement or explanation.

I value stability and long-term solutions so I don't have to continually "fix" things that were previously working fine.

Each time Google shuts down something that I use, it impacts me and I have to change things. If they force me to change things, then I might as well look into alternative non-Google solutions that have better stability and longer lifespans.

Most of them are probably upset about all the other stuff google got rid of that people actually used.

Google Cloud Print is a service I actually use.

However, because of the way Google acts, I've stopped taking advantage of new services they add, as I can't trust them to remain available.

I now actively avoid Google services whenever I can.

Last time Google killed something someone pointed out that we're still mad that Google killed Reader and honestly that was dead on for me

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