Google Ending Support for Jamboard | Hacker News Reader

Google Ending Support for Jamboard

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

185 pointsnkcmr257 comments

How does Google not recognize the doom loop they’re entering with these decisions?

1. Google has already made it tremendously difficult for any product of theirs to succeed. They could have a product that’s extremely successful by any reasonably measure, but not at Google scale, in which case they kill it. So the standard of success a product needs to reach at Google is already ridiculously high.

2. Because Google makes so many products and has such high standards, they also kill a lot of products (and services). Which means they’re surely forming a reputation of introducing products to the market that will not survive. Which surely must be a drag on the initial uptake of every product as many people aware of Google’s history are unwilling to invest their time and resources using it. So in addition to the high standards to succeed, there’s also a significant drag in usage caused by the high likelihood of the product being killed.

Both of which lead to more products being killed which leads to future products being less likely to reach success and more likely to be killed and so on.

I would agree about Reader, but Jamboard is not something I will miss. There are a lot better alternatives.

Because the people in charge of recognizing problems in the current system got where they are due to the current system.

Because their real money-makers still make money.

The only thing left is stuff that happens in the here and now. You give Google money, they show your ads now. Anything with any permanence gets shut down eventually, so people don't fall for it.

Had Stadia only offered subs without having to buy the games, I'm sure it would still be around.

The best thing they could do is to open source it. I could use it in my projects and I don’t want to start from scratch. Anyone happens to know Jamboard product managers? What do they think about open sourcing it?

This is a bummer, I use Jamboard (the software not the hardware) to draw diagrams during Zoom calls and send the link to participants after. I mostly use a Wacom tablet to do the actual drawing.

Any good free alternatives out there ?

Edit: The proposed alternatives they mention in the update (FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro) really don't fit that workflow.

I've been enjoying Excalidraw a lot[^1]. It lets you share diagrams without accounts and you can even collaborate in real-time.

[^1]: https://excalidraw.com/

For a tool that combines both, meetings like zoom and embedded Excalidraw, check out https://oorja.io ; You create a room, click on "+" button inside to add Excalidraw.

Disclaimer: This is my side project.

Seconding Excalidraw! A feature I really like: you can export diagrams in PNG with the scene data embedded in the image metadata. This lets you modify the diagram by opening the PNG image directly.

TLDraw is really nice: http://tldraw.com

As is Excalidraw

I built https://flat.social that has whiteboarding functionalities (among others). Not as advanced as Miro or FigJam but useful for quick diagrams during meetings / brainstorming.

Twiddla?

You can try Milton https://www.miltonpaint.com/

https://mural.co/

Mural has a free tier. I did not used it much but was nice.

Maybe not your workflow but I am so happy that we stopped using Jamboard and switched to Miro. It’s a universe filled with joy and happiness and freedom. Now I am looking for a free Miro alternative with at least two users and nothing is even close. Not sure what’s happening in the industry that makes people produce horrible UX and not being able to see how Miro does it properly.

We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I'm at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, no whiteboard is a first-class citizen in VTC world. Partially, no one else knows how to use whatever is in use today.

I actually have a slate chalkboard my dad got from an old schoolhouse in Nebraska. He built a frame for it, gave it me when my kids were young, and I have moved with that all over the world. I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that.

I love chalkboards so much, I really, really miss them.

If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards.

Yes! Not to mention, chalk is a simple nontoxic product made from abundant natural resources, while dry erase markers are plastic waste. It's so unnecessary.

Chalk is drying out your hands though if you use black boards alot. It was a workplace environment problem for teachers.

Solved with a chalk holder!

Now that's crazy talk ;)

I worked in offices that had whiteboards and I never found anybody used them

Workplace culture? When we were in the office, whiteboards were used at least weekly.

A bit different now with remote-first or hybrid... If one person isn't in the office, it's basically dead in the water.

Probably different fields. My company made enterprise CMS software so not much of what we did really required modeling.

Perhaps you didn't really need them. The team I worked in used them a lot but that is because we had two week intense brainstorming workshops several times a year. We would sometimes have half a dozen of us drawing and writing on a huge whiteboard at the same time, all the while arguing about what was the best way to solve this particular problem. This was in a combined electrical engineer/software developer/physicist team.

Without the whiteboard we would have been sketching on paper and would have been buried in waste paper within the hour.

The problem with chalkboards in a meeting, assuming you've set up a dedicated camera for it, is that remote participants can't draw on it.

When I worked at a place with Jamboards, it was actually super useful doing meetings with virtual post-it notes that remote participants could move around. And it meant the meeting's facilitator could be remote as well.

> If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards.

You gotta be sure to get the super special chalk mathematicians are hoarding, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8

Cheers to Walter Lewin :)

Hagoromo ended up not going out of business, so there's no longer any worries about finding Hagoromo chalk. It's worth the cost.

I like the way (good) chalkboards look but touching chalk sets my teeth on edge.

You mean because of the squeaking sound that sometimes happens? Break the chalk in half to get rid of the resonance!

Nah, dusty and gross-feeling and dries out my hands.

Yup I'm the same. I'm horrified at how my skin feels covered in chalk dust.

Chalk feels like it made sense in a time back when people didn't bathe daily and didn't know about deodorant. When the words "skin care" were decades away from being uttered for the first time. The fact that chalk is white-colored doesn't make it any less dirty or filthy.

It doesn't feel like it belongs in the twenty-first century, not in civilized places like lecture halls or meeting rooms.

(Chalking up before sweaty rock climbing, of course, is a totally different story.)

College was where I learned how underrated chalkboards are; every lecture hall had them, and this wasn't long ago. No smell, no toxicity, quick erasing, reliable writing mechanism, precise writing.

> I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that.

You should check out Huddly Canvas -- it's a USB whiteboard camera designed for just this use case.

https://www.huddly.com/conference-cameras/canvas/

That looks great but it needs to not cost $1300. Seems like their use case is conference rooms but I’d love for remote folks with their own whiteboards to have this.

I can't imagine they sold that many of these.

The correct move here would have been to offer a buyback/refund, starting at say 50% of the sales value for those that bought at launch 7 years ago going up to 100% for those that bought just before they stopped selling them (as far as I can tell: quite recently).

They already got those $600/year "management and support fees".

My take: Google simply doesn't care about its reputation any longer. They are firmly in the customer milking phase in the stereotypical giant company lifecycle.

Also: This kind of behavior in the B2B field influences (lack of) faith in e.g. GCP's long-term commitments.

It's about time we had legislation (at least in the EU) that mandated an option to be able to use physical products in an offline mode. Features that require a connection to the Internet should only be an augmentation at most and not the core without which the product cannot work.

This is an incredible idea. It’s very much like mandating the recyclability of electronics but goes one step further - enforcing the reusability of electronics. It would be a game changer for consumer and environmental protection. Literal tonnes of e-wasted iPhones would instead become offline music/game devices.

Or some way to force opening up the software upon the product's death. The hardware is great and I'd love to pick one up for cheap for my home office to use for Zoom meetings.

With the price these things were sold for and the type of companies that bought them, I expect someone to buy these things and hack them to work with Jitsi or some other open source solution not long after the cloud service shuts down.

It may be worth tracking down if any stores still stock these things and what companies have invested in many of them, so you can try to get a deal on the hardware after the sunset date.

That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.

Honestly, people buying these products should be smarter. They bought an expensive chalkboard that they knew depends on someone else's computers (unless they didn't even bother to look into how the products work), without any guaranteed server support period anywhere to be found.

Anyone who cares about their purchases suddenly no longer working will simply avoid this hardware. The people who do purchase this stuff don't really care. They may act outraged in hopes of getting enough people worked up to start a class action lawsuit they can benefit from, but they failed to even consider "what if the servers shut down" before spending five grand on a glorified touchscreen and hooking themselves up to a $600 per year subscription. To make things worse, they bought this stuff from Google.

Screw Google and their e-waste factories, but banning all online products seems like an unnecessary hampering for innovation to be honest.

I suggest an alternative solution: for up to x years after a product is sold by retail stores, the servers must be up or the consumer must be able to get all of their money back from the sellers. This adds risk to the businesses launching and shutting down IoT stuff willy-nilly and helps consumers. Products sold in third party stores will have to be pretty reliable for stores to take the risk stocking this crap.

In a perfect world, I'd like the law to mandate that online-only products like these must put their server source under escrow (to be opened when the service shuts down) and must provide the user with an option to pick an alternative server address. Sadly, I don't think that idea is going to survive even a single day of IT lobbying.

With Availability as a critical part of the cybersecurity CIA acronym, I think it may just be possible that the EU's Cyber Resilience Act will include something to solve this problem.

> That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.

I get your point but making calls is no longer the principal reason to own a smartphone. I have made no calls in the last two months and have received just one. But I have spent hours on Skype via WiFi, recorded tens of hours of video and taken hundreds of photographs, as well as read lots of books, sent and received money for goods that I have used the phone to list for sale online. Not to mention email and dozens of other applications.

Almost none of my use needed the cellular network.

Skype needs servers, as does sending and receiving money, email, and dozens of other applications.

The fact phones are barely used for calling these days only makes legislation for devices using online servers more difficult.

It really doesn't feel that hard to write legislation that exempts uses that are definitionally network tied. But, to continue the phone analogy, if it somehow loses network access, I expet to be able to turn it on, take photos, run local software (that isn't network dependent), etc. Losing network access should not turn the device into a brick including non-network related functions.

I agree, but "brick" is subjective. If Google turns off the jamboard servers and turns them into normal whiteboards, are they bricks? They were bought specifically with video calling in mind.

Turning them into power hungry competitors for a slab of treated plastic sounds pretty bricky to me, like pushing firmware to a phone that turns it into a fancy front camera mirror. Even if Google just disables the software entirely and turns these smart panels into a big, rectangular light panel, they still serve some function.

Ideally you'd write some sort of legislation that will ensure that products like these become open so that third parties like Zoom can integrate with them so that they remain functional.

I can't think of a good way to describe that concept in legal terms, though, at least not without making it very hard to sell any connected device at all.

> That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.

Cell phones use globally standardized, government regulated network protocols with many providers. Not a private, locked down, super-duper encrypted, single provider SAAS.

I think the legislation should be that if you shut down a device's backend you must open up the protocol so someone else can implement it.

The point is that the phone needs to be navigable without a check with a server. It can fail at taking calls as much as you want, just give me the calculator.

This touches on a fundamental problem with the current electronic-whiteboard market: poor cross-vendor compatibility.

It adds seriously risk to a widespread deployment in any organization.

I knows schools and businesses that bought these. Should have just bought normal 4k touchscreen displays with rolling stands. Then you can use whatever software you want on it. Could even run google's browser-based jamboard on the non-jamboard display.

I bought a Jamboard for our small 20 person half remote company before Covid.

Jamboard was definitely ahead of its time. Giant (bigger than your living room TV) touch screen monitor with a camera, speakers and microphone built in.

I think this is an example where the market need is clearly there (does anyone like the state of remote brainstorming/remote whiteboarding?) but Google is deciding not to capture the market.

It looks like their strategy here is to promote Miro. They’ve been pushing the Google Meet + Miro native integration heavily for the past couple of weeks. Seeing this announcement, it makes sense why.

Microsoft has (had?) a similar product back in 2014, so surely before, my client used them in all their meeting rooms and senior managers offices.

They still do, it's called the "Surface Hub" line, currently at "Surface Hub 2" - integrates with Teams and other apps.

However - recent changes in "management" and direction with Surface hardware products/division may impact this in the near future.

Apparently they just announced Surface Hub 3

The Google meet executives must have more internal clout than the Jamboard executive(s). And so it goes.

I kind of wonder how many companies bought these before COVID and kept paying google throughout the pandemic. And now the accountants are back and wondering why they're still paying.

Does that work as a whiteboard you can scribble on with the results shown in real time on N other devices synchronised with it? As the one thing I miss from the office is a shared whiteboard. Quite sloppy conflict resolution would work out adequately, people would expect a mess when they scribble on the same area.

Not this one obviously as google are shutting it down, but if the tech works someone else is probably selling the same thing. Or will be shortly.

Yes! Price aside, if everyone has the hardware, it's like having a whiteboard that everyone can stand at and draw on and "discuss" (argue) over which boxes should go where.

My employer owns hundreds of those across all our offices. I hope they auction them. I’ll buy one for $50 on the off chance it gets hacked/jailbroken.

It is not that expensive to set up a team of engineers to keep a product working for 10+ years. Microsoft had/has this. They called it "sustained engineering". They don't do any new feature work, just bug fixes and security issues on legacy software. The product team gets disbanded, and ownership is moved to sustained engineering. And they keep it running for years.

One of the reasons Google has so many failed product launches is because consumers don't trust them to provide long-term service and support. At some point they will need to realize that this behavior is inhibiting their ability to become more than just an ads company.

I wonder in these situations: why don't they spin it off / sell it to some other smaller company that doesn't need a Billion Users to succeed?

Never used it myself, but it looks like a useful product. Shame to have it disappear if there are still enough people who would buy it.

Probably it is too tightly integrated with other google internal services to be able to give the code to a third party and have them operate the business.

In some senses it is a bit of an indictment on Google's cloud offering that their teams don't build it on those.

The issue though would be the source code. Most projects at Google are developed in the monorepo and this makes it very difficult to split things out (to sell, or in some cases to open source) because the code likely links to all kinds of internal things.

Steve Yegge had a great rant around a dozen years ago that explains why their teams don't.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

And that also would be why they are shutting it down.

Google internal services are always being rewritten, and code migrated from the old version of the service to the new one. If nobody is willing to migrate an externally visible product, it has to sunset at the same time that the internal service does.

This philosophy does wonders for internal code quality and consistency. It also makes people outside the company wonder whether they should trust Google's public offerings.

It's crazy to me that people keep willingly buying hardware that requires a service to work. You have a high up-front cost, yet you're at someone else's mercy. That's the worst of buying and renting combined.

Obviously it isn't very profitable to keep supporting a product you've already sold at the moment, so something must be done to make it more attractive.

At the very least there should be a support commitment which marks the life time of the device. Stated upfront and comparable before purchase, a bit like those EU energy efficiency labels.

8 years might be a fine life span for some customers. But they should be aware of it in advance. And they should be motivated to ask "and what do we do with it afterwards?".

I work in IoT and my single goal working in the industry is to do as much as I can (which will likely still be small) to make devices that are entirely separable from the cloud by enabling the use of different services and by being local-fist.

Imagine if private organizations built their own road network and then sold you a car that can only be driven on that road. Once that company goes out of business, the road vanished and your car is now a very heavy paperweight that literally cannot turn on. This would be totally unacceptable to us, yet we tolerate home automation vendors selling garbage that is locked to their propitiatory systems and will happily brick itself once those systems go offline.

I work in IoT as well and definitely try to implement as much as possible locally as well. What companies seem to forget is that any part of the product that's cloud hosted becomes an ongoing cost that goes up in proportion to the number of devices sold.

The less you have in the cloud (generally) the better the economics for the manufacturer.

It's an interesting one because anyone developing a software-only product has the opposite incentive - putting as much on the cloud as possible reduces support costs - no more "it says it's compatible with Windows, but doesn't run on my 20-year old laptop!" or having to field support requests from ancient versions. Plus it provides cover for charging users monthly, and there's a good chance your hosting costs are less than the cost of supporting a locally installed version.

The more complex your software is, the more true this is - self-hosted enterprise software is not only more work to setup (ergo, more support tickets) but installed on a vast array of configurations (e.g., bare-metal K8s, OpenShift, GKE, Docker Swarm, EC2, ECS, etc, etc), only a portion of which are economical to test against and which will generate a steady stream of unique issues. Having an "enterprise-ready" SaaS product is expensive, sure, but probably less expensive than supporting hundreds or thousands of customers setting up their own unique version of your product.

On the other side, it's not possible to move hardware to the cloud so the core support costs don't - can't - go away. Adding cloud in that case is adding ongoing hosting costs and support costs and is at best reducing the volume of support requests, but adding "Cloud" won't eliminate whole classes of customer support like it could with a software-only product.

Yeah, I think the problem is that we’ve been taught that pre-optimization is the root of all evil and that we should getting it working before improving upon it.

Pre-optimization became a thing because enthusiasts liked the challenge of creating an elegant solution, but I posit that it continued because devs knew they were not going to be getting back to fixing inefficient code if it mostly worked. Usually stuff like this doesn’t matter when you’re leaking 5mb an hour on a 128gb dedicated server and you’re deploying at least twice per week. But when the devices that connect to you go from 10,000 to 1,000,000, you’re leaking 500mb an hour and then you have a problem very quickly.

What I'm thinking of isn't so much 'optimization' as basic design decisions. For a lot of IoT products that integrate machine learning/computer vision features, you've got a choice of implementing that stuff in the cloud or on device. You need a bit more compute to do the work on device, but ongoing costs are far lower and a lot more predictable. As a side effect, you also enable fully independent operation.

I'm working on a IoT startup and we'd prefer to rent you the equipment as part of the service. That way there is no confusion. Having customers buy equipment they really don't own seems ridiculous to me.

This is also acceptable to me, especially if it’s X per month for service and device (including device replacement if needed). I also like how it reduces capex for a business that is looking to connect their devices and just needs a plug-and-play system.

How does that help someone who has built your product into their working procedures? When you decide to stop doing it they are in an even worse situation than the Jamboard users because presumably you will repossess the hardware.

Not really, though. In both cases the customer won't have a working device. Just in this case it's obvious while in the other it's less so.

They can seek a new provider and integrate new devices. It also puts more pressure on us to keep the devices viable. Our revenue model is dependent on low cost devices working in the field as long as possible.

You may be making a huge difference to a few people.

That the Pebble app has the option to connect to a third-party service provider (and that the Pebble works indefinitely without any connection to a phone, apart from some time drift) will probably keep my beloved watch alive over a decade past its official life span, maybe even longer.

It actually feels like something I own now, which makes a hell of a difference to me.

That it is like that probably comes down to a combination of tiny decisions during the development process in which the right people were in the right place.

Thank you for doing that. I've made it a rule that any smart home device I get must but usable when the internet is off. I got burned a few years ago when my fiber line was cut and I was without internet for five days, so I couldn't turn on some of my lights or control the temp on the thermostat.

Vowed to make sure that never happens again. All my smart switches now have local control.

The internet should add functionality, but not gate it.

Sadly, many schools making these purchases are painfully uninformed about tech, hence why we see so many consumer-hostile edtech subscriptions succeed. They definitely would benefit from some EoL transparency

Just show them some California -cool videos that Google “gets them” and Pichar talking some generic BS that they care about Education. That will work 8/10 times.

Many things like cellphone contracts have already gotten this right: You enter a contract guaranteeing service on their end and payment on yours, pay a reduced upfront cost kinda as a deposit, and pay the rest monthly. Then either party can terminate after the contract is up (or you both continue). Cloud-serviced hardware is nothing new.

Somehow this isn't an expectation with IoT, probably because they're shiny new toys in the experimental phases.

The amount of people here saying it's ok or even a long lifespan (?!) is shocking.

At college, around 2008 I had electronic circuit labs where we used Soviet oscilloscopes dating back to the 70s. They worked perfectly well (we couldn't read the Cyryllic, but after 10min intro you understand the knobs). And why wouldn't they work?

Stockholm syndrome of some is unbelievable. And then when I say that I don't want any cloud-controlled devices, people tell me I'm paranoid...

If Google is to retire hardware like this, they should either open source the full stack, write new OSS version of it, or refund the customers plus be fined in tens of millions for e-waste. (While they green wash).

PS. I used Jamboards at Google and they were cool for meetings or job interviews.

They are refunding customers. And probably the thought, if we make the Jamboard offline, everyone will migrate to different solutions anyway. They could just open Android for them, and let any app run on it though I guess...

The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls.

Jamboard was a pricey item, but $5,000 was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a $600 "annual management and support fee," plus subscriptions to Google Workspace for every user, plus an optional $1,350 for the rolling stand. A one-year total with a single Workspace user is around $7,000.

Looks like most go for around/under $1,500US on the secondary market. The NVIDIA hardware looks interesting although EOL: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-tx1

Something about the way the article is written makes it sound like the author thinks $1,350 is speedy for a stand. It seems well in line with other manufacturers like Apple, who charge $999 for a stand and $699 for wheels (that cant be attached together and aren’t nearly as tall as Google stand).

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand

They are ending support, but they still own all the associated patents around it, correct?

What if there was a corporation that bought out every entrant involving new technology (not necessarily monopolizing their already dominant verticals, but other new inventions/ideas)? They either have a winner, or they stifle innovation in corresponding area for the lifetime of any associated patents.

> What if there was a corporation that bought out every entrant involving new technology (not necessarily monopolizing their already dominant verticals, but other new inventions/ideas)? They either have a winner, or they stifle innovation in corresponding area for the lifetime of any associated patents.

There are companies like this: patent trolls. That's why the big tech companies all have patent sharing agreements now.

It sounds like a corporation could impede the humanity/progress of countries that respect these patents by patent_lifetime * number_of_patents so long as they have the money to do so.

That’s literally a feature

That's explicitly the opposite of the intent of patents.

You do realize you are describing the exact thing that's currently plaguing the software industry, among others?

That's literally what a patent troll is

This has been a long time coming. My company owns a Jamboard (the hardware). They were selling it hard when we bought it. We got to use it for a year before the service contract expired. All the major features stopped working, there was no way to renew online and the salespeople were no longer answering phone calls or emails.

So now we have an expensive, heavy albatross on our hands. Really makes you want to avoid depending on Google for anything again.

Have one in my living room: 100 lb bright red deadweight. Does get excited questions from guests though!

I'm pretty intimately familiar with Android hardware devices having launched some myself and planned on creating for some sort of "jailbreak" (really you'd want to break into the Jamboard MDM system, not the OS) but it hasn't been a priority.

You can pick these up for cheap sometimes when people realize it needs a $1000 a year license to function...

I've hit a related problem with my interactive display from A.G. Neovo.

For use as a whiteboard, I really want low latency from (a) dragging the stylus to (z) the display catching up with what I've drawn.

Their built-in Android app is great in that regard, but it's proprietary so it's not good for collaboration.

Unfortunately, there's much worse input-to-update latency if I use it as an external touch display, or if I use it's built-in Chrome browser with whiteboard websites.

Without the ability to root the device, I can't really investigate the source of that extra latency.

And it's not Google Play certified, so I can't install native whiteboarding apps from some the well-known vendors I've tried. (Those vendors require installation via Google Play.)

It's been a frustrating and expensive experiment.

How people continue to trust buying anything from Google is just beyond me. I am glad that they are doing something for schools, but this is just ridiculous.

Shutting down a free service that you didn't have to buy into, fine whatever. It still sucks but at least you didn't invest in a platform.

But if you are going to make a physical device you cannot treat it like you treat everything else.

The device cost $6k and $600/yr from the article. Not free but I doubt many people are affected.

It doesn't really matter how many people were affected, the point is that people made an investment (and not a small one) and its being shut down.

And it isn't like this is the first hardware that Google has abandoned, but they turn it into ewaste since it's tied to the cloud.

It’s being shutdown after 8 years. That’s not a bad lifespan. Most electronics are obsolete but that age and replaced with new ones. Especially at businesses - it’s already amortized by then and reached end of life.

Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.

I'm sure the Jamboard service contains such top secret and critical code that it could never be open sourced in order for those devices to keep functioning with a proxy sever, no no no.

Googles backends are all proprietary solutions. So you’d need to open source a huge swath of google code. Much of which has assumptions of running in Google’s DCs.

Yes, everything is in the soup called /google3.

And it's time wasted; the SWE working on the Jamboard may prefer to work on higher impact projects;

The PO as well.

For example, an hypothetical PO @ Google may have this possibility to launch a new product instead (e.g. deprecating the Pixel 7);

- New launch = promotion.

- Promotion = better salary.

- Better salary = happy wife.

- Happy wife = happy life.

Indeed, shutdowning Jamboard was the right solution from his perspective.

It's all about alignement of incentives.

Eh. They could just opensource the code but not its dependencies. The opensource world is remarkably good at taking something like that and getting it working again.

They won’t though, unfortunately.

I don’t think you get how difficult that is. It wouldn’t build, it would include a ton of internal libraries. For example stubby is not open source. Internal spanner is different than external spanner, including API/SDKs. The code pulls in a ton of internal libraries. Etc.

So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.

I know exactly how difficult it is. I was part of the cleanup crew who stayed back to opensource wave after google decided to pull the plug. My name is all over the opensourced Google Wave ("Wave in a box") codebase. We rewrote the whole data layer so you could run it without google's infra. That took a nontrivial amount of engineering time - a month or two if memory serves.

> So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.

Oh, it definitely wouldn't build. But you'd be surprised how resourceful opensource developers can be when they have a clear scope & clear spec to work towards. This sort of work is akin to making the world's simplest emulator for a video game console - except you only need to get "one game" to run, and you have its source code and you can change the code as much as you like. Its fun, satisfying work.

Obviously you're rolling the dice on whether or not anyone from the community would step up and do that work on your behalf. But the alternative is killing your product entirely. The opensourced wave died because we didn't grow an opensource community who understood & wanted to maintain the codebase. Looking back, we might have done a better job of that if we didn't do all the work ourselves to make it usable first.

Mind you, I have no idea how the community at large would react to google releasing broken source code. They might complain even more than the service just going dark. But I can still dream.

Imagine if you had to purchase new furniture every eight years for no reason other than the vendor decided to render it useless.

PLEASE STOP GIVING CAPITALISTS IDEAS!

Obsolete, yes. But being obsolete is not equatable to a full shutdown. Cars go obsolete, but we would never allow car manufacturers to prevent a car from turning on just because it's obsolete. Just like we don't accept that with our phones, or our laptops, or any physical consumer electronic.

8 years ? For a display that's essentially a graphics terminal to a remote app? That customers are paying for ongoing service? For hardware that is still 100% working?

Honestly, what is really stopping it from being supported? Can they unlock it so a secondary market can load OSS onto it and keep it going for the next 10-15 years?

It's incredibly wasteful. The tech industry produces prodigious amounts of waste with a deliberate purpose (revenue).

Does the Jamboard cease to be usable without the cloud-based stuff?

Most cloud based items are like this by default, and by design. We throw the environment under the bus, to make our next quarterly profit.

Who's "we" here? I'm sure not throwing the environment under the bus.

That's why I'm asking about the Jamboard in particular. There are lots of comments about cloud-connected hardware in general here, and yes, I know it tends to suck. But the article is about the Jamboard.

Not sure where the 8 years number is from. It was launched in 2017 and CDW was selling it until 2021. That means some people have it for less than 2 years

I wonder if the OP is going to complain about all our skype based conferencing hardware that has become obsolete over the last few years?

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled...

How recently was one of these phones sold?

You're missing the point.

First this is just yet another bad mark against Google that should be used to discourage buying into any hardware platform from Google of this nature. The single exception I would give is the Pixel line since even if they discontinue Pixel, Android is still there.

But they are treating hardware like they do their other software. Because this hardware is tightly tied to the cloud instead of shutting it down, they should be putting it in maintenance mode. No new features and you can't buy hardware anymore. But continue to keep it up for a longer period of time for those that spent money with you.

Great this product lasted more than 2 years, we have a record! That doesn't mean that they are not handling the shutdown of this product in a responsible manner.

Google is continuing their track record of how they are handling their pet projects and it is a bad decision to buy into any of them. Particularly if there is hardware involved

The lifetime of "appliance" type electronics has always been much longer than that. In my first job, in 2012, I was using electronic test equipment running Windows 95. Anything industrial has a lifetime of 10+ years. Most electronics doesn't need to be cutting edge - and non-cutting-edge electronics hasn't really changed much in the last 15-20 years anyway.

If we want this type of technology to actually be useful, it should have a lifetime somewhere near the thing it replaces. Otherwise schools and universities will get burned once and go back to whiteboards. 8 years isn't really acceptable.

Internet dependence is the difference. Even consumer electronics that don’t rely on Internet services often last a couple decades, and sometimes more.

This worldview is fine for running a company and making money, but it isn't the only one that exists. The whole IoT push over the last 10 years is new, and a lot of consumers haven't had to think of questions like "what happens when tech support goes away for my digital whiteboard" or "what happens to my fridge when company is goes bankrupt", so I don't think patting them on the head and saying "This sucks for you, but it could have been worse" is really a compassionate stance.

You're underlying thesis is correct though, you're not legally required to care about other people when you design or sell products.

When was the last one sold? If it wasn't 8 years ago, then that one has a shorter than 8-year lifespan.

They sold units recently no. So there’s some ppl who might have only gotten a few years of usage

I have to imagine that these have been for sale throughout that time. I can see an argument that 8 years is a long time, but imagine if you purchased it last year, that's now a 2 year lifespan.

We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them.

I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it.

I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.

I run a lot of hardware older than 8 years.

You're assuming everyone bought it 8 years ago. What about the schools, companies etc that bought it a year or two ago? Still 'not a bad lifespan'?

When did they stop selling them?

So you would be happy if Tesla were to stop supporting my eight year old Model S?

There's no need for electronics to be obsolete after 8 years. I have tons of electronic items from the 1980's that are still working fine. Not to mention a 16 year old car jammed with electronics which are all working.

> Most electronics are obsolete but that age

More than thirty years ago I inherited my mothers LED display alarm clock, I think it was at least ten years old then. It is still running in my bedroom.

It might well be obsolete but it is in perfect working order, it performs according to its specification, and satisfies my desire for a clock that is always visible.

My project was done and Google killed the whole IoT wtf

I understand outrage, but I think it’s misdirected in this occasion. It’s an 8 year old product, that because of the price, age and small niche like had customers that you can count in hundreds.

Still. Our company only bought it half a year ago, at least 3 of them. So no, we won’t get to enjoy it for 8 years…

Edit: nvm, my CISO just confirmed me that this apparently “only” affects first generation users. We have the newer Board 65 types that will continue to be supported for the things we use it.

My last company bought a bunch of these just before the pandemic to help facilitate working with remote offices. All the big conference rooms had one.

Nobody wanted to use them, and they went completely unused to my knowledge.

This product seems like the kind of thing a company would buy, it would be tried out in a few meetings, then everyone would go back to driving the meeting room's mounted TV with a laptop.

Our CEO later came out to our office for a tour -- something he'd never done -- , and I have a funny anecdote about these. (It's an SF headquartered company; our Atlanta office had ~200 engineering, ~500 total headcount, and we had lots of other remote offices smaller than ours.)

During his visit, our CEO made sure to take time with each team to solicit feedback from us. It was something we were looking forward to -- it was a chance to have a face to face open dialogue with him where we could make asks and air our grievances. While we all got the chance to say our piece, our CEO couldn't help but be super excited about Jamboards. He filled the my team's discussion with notes about them and made lots of excited suggestions, which cut into our time with him significantly. He ultimately spoke with every single team at the office about these things and kept asking us to let him know when, not if, we wanted more of them. He never thought to ask if we liked or wanted them.

I understand our CEO's desire to remove friction between Atlanta and SF and New York and all the other offices, but this was such a peculiar choice that none of us (even leadership) were a party to.

The Jamboards ultimately went completely unused and took up entirely too much space in the office corners. They wasted electricity, too.

That makes it pretty clear that this is a hardware obsolescence issue - the old hardware can't run newer android, and thus can't receive security updates, etc. The only real option is to cut off the old hardware in hopes they won't be left on and become a security problem for the owners. For a $600/month fee I would think Google should just replace the old hardware with a newer model, or they should have originally made the compute part of the system modular and upgradeable. But now it's just e-waste? I hope Google learns something from this, but they probably won't.

what product or service has lasted indefinitely? Google will compensate those who adopted it, life goes on.

I understand nothing lasts forever. Google seems to think almost nothing should last more than 10 years.

Google Reader. Never forget.

I can still run DOS 6.22 right now. Probably even older software.

In fact, just about most 'owned' software that does not depend on the cloud can be run for ever. Especially software that was sold as a perpetual license.

You can run DOS 6.22 on brand new hardware, with an EFI bios? Or on a pc you pulled from a closet or a VM?

You can run DOS 6.22 on an emulator. On modern hardware. (Even the latest Mac + their custom processor.) It doesn't have to be the boot Operating System. But it still runs, and can be used usefully if I've built something on top of it.

The point is, 'the cloud' for services + software tied to physical hardware is proving over and over to be a dead end, and effectively a mechanism to create ewaste.

Google could publish a docker image of the server software, and update the Jamboard firmware to provide a facility to connect to it. (DNS-SD, DHCP Options, Manual entry, whatever). And then Google has zero ongoing costs, and people who have bought into this ecosystem now have hardware they can continue to use, and we make far less e-waste.

> But it still runs, and can be used usefully if I've built something on top of it.

That's because somebody else put in the effort to emulate the pieces requires for DOS. The vendor you bought DOS from is not building your VM software so that you can continue to use DOS.

Yes? So?

The stack from boot-to-emulator can be 100% owned + managed by an organization or individual (and in fact, can be 100% OSS, except for whatever binary blobs are needed). Doesn't have to be crafted from bespoke bytes + bits to count. The important piece is that once this is running, there no one else that can prevent it from operating, except the organization or individual managing it (and perhaps dubious legal powers). Replacement hardware can be obtained. Backups can be made. Redundant power can be managed. The software can be re-installed. And if the unaffiliated OSS developers no longer want to maintain the software, the organization or individual can independently decide, if it is worth it to update the OSS themselves if no hardware or environment can run that.

We don't have to get rid of old working hardware. We should prioritize not being wasteful. And we should prioritize empowering hardware owners to decide for themselves how to maintain & manage their hardware, even if they want to go it alone.

Say someone provides unofficial Jamboard support, with no cloud. What would that look like, and how many people are going to actually use that vs just changing to a new thing?

Organization keeps a server on-prem that saves + shared boards, and enables collaboration with other people on-prem. Data from the boards are owned by the organization, and can be used as long as they need to.

Jamboard inherently required the cloud, so I'm not sure what your point is.

But google isn't retiring their cloud. They're just kicking the jamboards off it. The jamboards are computers capable of doing local compute. There's no hardware limitation preventing them from being a lot more useful.

What we need is longer minimum warranties for electronics, with support and security fixes for 10+ years.

yes, which is why they will still work as offline whiteboards that can still be physically plugged into a computer and serve as a display.

Microsoft Windows still exists, and can open executable compiled for it 25+ years ago.

Microsoft Office still exists, and can still open Word / Excel / etc files from 25+ years ago.

Adobe Photoshop still exists, and can open PSD files created 25+ years ago.

Microsoft Xbox One X still exists, and is backwards compatible with titles from the OG Xbox release, as far back as 22 years ago - https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/backward-compatibility?cat=...

Microsoft Zune (launched 2006) is still supporting and fixing compatibility issues, all the way up through Windows 11 now 17 years post-launch - https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-just-fixed-a-zune-compatib...

Warframe (Canadian MMO-lite third-person action video game) still supports every purchased piece of digital content ever sold, on all platforms, from the very first purchase, over the past 10 years. (I believe the same is true for Final Fantasy 14 which launched in the same year, but I'm less familiar with that one)

Vanilla accounts from World of Warcraft (now 19ish years old) still work and function today.

---

I don't think anyone expects things to last forever. I think they're just expecting things to last longer than "a few years", and there's no technical reason why we couldn't ensure that.

None of these are managed solutions tied to hardware, so the comparisons are irrelevant. What hardware that [inherently] requires a managed service still exists after 10 years? Jamboard inherently required the cloud for "jams". Google will allow for migration to other services that do the same thing and will compensate for the hardware.

Zune is dead as well as the store and your other comparisons are disingenuous at best.

Furthermore, you will still be able to use the Jamboard as a whiteboard and connect it to your computer. It will not stop working. These comparisons are just terrible.

Managed solution _makes it easier_ not harder.

No, not really.

warframe, wow. and xbox probably meets your definition of a managed solution. Especially a mmo

wow is hardware? xbox 1 doesnt work with live anymore

And chances are that any given Xbox 1 doesn't work, period. Probably went red-ring years ago.

I checked the Wii Shop just now... nope, it's dead.

Meanwhile Microsoft killed my Minecraft account that had been peacefully existing since 2012. Botched migration to MS accounts locked out everyone who no longer had access to their old email addresses.

All of what you just stated, every single issue, was addressed with emails, on-screen notifications, and MS Account notifications. Every single issue.

The migration between Mojang and Microsoft took several years to complete.

---

> Since 2021, millions of Java Edition players have switched over from their old accounts to Microsoft accounts.

> https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/sections/12617909134221

> I don't have access to the email on my Mojang account

> If you do not have access to the email that is used to log in to your Mojang account, you will not be able to complete the migration. You will need to change the email on your account first. For instructions on how to do this, see: https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360035056531-Ch...

> If you cannot change your Mojang account email, have your transaction ID or gift code available and contact Minecraft support.

---

2 years is plenty of time to migrate.

If someone waited until the very last moment to migrate, then that is not a Microsoft issue, but a diligence issue with the user.

Be more diligent with life, and these types of issues just don't occur with any frequency.

Here's a line from my favorite over-the-window plaque: "A lack of preparation on your part does not equal an emergency for me."

I can't migrate without access to my old email address unless I wrote down my gift code 11 years ago. I knew about this for 2 years, yet there was nothing I could do. I contacted MS support a few times with no response. Email access was never required until now, just the password, so of course a ton of other people had the same issue.

Also, this isn't my job to begin with. Suppose I simply didn't play the game for 2 years; I'd deserve to lose my account? If MS wants to migrate people to a new account system, it's definitely their job to do that automatically (or at least not lock existing users out), like with every other online service.

> Be more diligent with life

Please don't talk down to me. Microsoft created the "emergency" here, not that I take a Minecraft account anywhere near this seriously.

I apologize for talking down to you. The whining seemed excessive for an issue that has had multiple different ways to 'fix' the issue.

Lack of diligence tends to be the case with most of the whining posts.

> Suppose I simply didn't play the game for 2 years; I'd deserve to lose my account?

Yup. It's in the ToS. Most companies reserve the right to shut down services with no notice. At least MS provided you with 2 years of notice. MS also provided multiple solutions for persons without access to their old email, account information, or receipt.

I had zero ways to fix the issue (unless I want to call in a favor from a friend who works at MS), and MS didn't provide support. I have my username and password; why isn't that enough?

And yes, every service's ToS says they can legally terminate at any time, just as Google kills all their chat apps periodically; doesn't mean it reflects well on their reputation. Microsoft broke this game for a lot of paid customers, particularly the early adopters.

The only one I can think of is Ring. Bravo to them.

Most cloud-supported hardware is pretty fragile, but services in general can last much longer. Google's excessive churn with chat/social services is probably what earned their bad reputation. They also screwed up Nest. 8 years is a lot for them.

Sonos does a pretty good job still supporting there old hardware. The ZP100 came out 20 years ago and works pretty well today

Is the zp100 cloud connected though? I thought the early sonos stuff was entirely on your own network

A lot of us are in trouble when they kill android.

Android is open-source, we could fall back to one of the alternate distros. Actually, we'd be better off without the Google services crap! The real reason we'd be fucked is that we'd lose mobile access to our Google-stored info, this is where the lock-in is. You can migrate, but it's _work_ and god are we lazy.

I’d expect vendor divergence and lock-in to ramp up almost immediately. It only doesn’t happen now because Google does so much work for them for free, that it’s not worth the cost. If they have to pick that up, they’ll get all shitty and proprietary about it ASAP.

Thanks for the periodic reminder to do a Takeout today.

Responding to some of the comments saying that jamboard had a good run and people shouldn't be outraged that google made a decision in their own interest...

Everybody remembers the old saying, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

Well, there should be a reciprocal saying: "Anybody who ever buys google should be fired".

If the lesson here is "caveat emptor", then the real lesson is this: don't buy google.

I worked for a sorta "satellite" IBM company. There was always a path or solution of some sort in the IBM world. Expensive as hell yeah but there was a path. And if you wanted to do something slightly weird or that IBM just didn't want to do... there were these satellite companies that IBM was happy to work with us to cover other solutions.

IBM never cut us off, was happy to certify stuff to work with them and so on.

There seemed to be a general understanding of "people are running their business off of this stuff so we need to make it work".

Google? Naw they'll just quit development and hit the light switch who knows when. Hard stop.

Google is 25 years old. IBM is 99 years old as IBM plus 13 years as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. I wonder which one will still be running at the end of the next 87 years that Google will have to run to equal that? And how many more times Google will pull stunts like this and the Nest thermostat business along the way.

> There seemed to be a general understanding of "people are running their business off of this stuff so we need to make it work".

I think this is the part that Microsoft gets, at a deep level, and Google doesn't (or, more likely, doesn't care)

Right. I think it all comes down to the fact that with Google, maybe 2/3rds of any product is software running on servers they control. You can never see that software, let alone modify it. Even the decision to keep running that software on Google’s hardware is totally out of your hands - Google could turn it off literally any day, for any reason.

This is the downside of relying on someone else’s cloud software: ultimately if it’s not your code and not your computer, its fate is out of your hands. I think its healthy that our industry is finally coming to understand that.

> Google could turn it off literally any day, for any reason.

Google has SLAs and service contracts that they are contractually bound to. They technically can turn off their services any day, but they won't, for the same reason that they won't liquidate all their assets into cash and drop it out of a helicopter - because it'd be extremely financially stupid.

This comment makes no sense because it's discussing something that is extremely unlikely to happen - far, far less likely than a service failure caused by self-hosting.

Those SLAs didn't seem to help people who bought these Jamboards. Or any of the laundry list of beloved products google has shut down over the years. They have a reputation for killing products for a reason - PMs on Stadia were promising that it definitely wouldn't be shut down just months before it was killed.

I'll grant, Google has SLAs on some of their products (like Firebase). But trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Wave, Inbox, Reader, etc. I still remember - with horror - that time google suddenly announced they were massively increasing GCP (Google Apps?) pricing without warning anyone beforehand.

Is there a prediction market for the life expectancy of google products? Some things will probably be around more or less indefinitely: Docs, Gmail, etc. But the base rate for "this google product, service or API will still be available in 1 year" is probably somewhere between 1% and 10%. I'd consider any "all in" strategy on a lot of google's tech to be a serious business risk for that reason. Especially if losing that bet means you need to rearchitect your entire application.

Similarly I have added “never buy Amazon hardware” to my ruleset. He says as he continues an ongoing battle with my only remaining Amazon device, an Echo Show.

Say what you will about Apple, they play the long game.

You might even think people who make these decisions at Google would be embarrassed at this point.

It's absurd given how much money Google makes. They can easily afford to support these products but they refuse to.

This company needs better management. It seems like its being run entirely by MBAs with zero vision or guts.

"Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never bet the business on a Google product, when death is on the line!'"

Inconceivable!

I use Jamboard because MS Whiteboard is impossible to share in a corporate environment, especially to outside users. Jamboard at least works under Google Drive sharing policy/folders without going insane...

I won’t comment on the wisdom of the business decision here, but more on the fact that I don’t see a great solution to the in-person + remote whiteboarding collaboration problem on the market.

Unless your company is 100% remote and is forced into fully digital whiteboarding, my experience is there will sometimes just be a critical mass of people “in the room”, and there’s nothing the remote participants can do to stop them from drawing on a whiteboard. And once that starts happening, the remote participants become second class citizens. This fundamentally limits the remote folks from being part of ideation, design, and decision-making. It’s a handicap that would require executive buy-in to remedy, which you mostly won’t get because execs favor in-person work anyway.

People buy these smart boards thinking it’ll help - they go totally untouched. The barrier to use is too high and nobody wants to look like a fool fumbling around with some proprietary interface, eating into valuable meeting time.

Short of a major revolution in touchscreens + conferencing tech, the only way to keep the playing field even is for remote people to assert that they will do diagramming and visual notes on e.g. Lucidchart on their end, and you’d better be quick at it.

We have one of these at work. I've never seen it used. Not even once. Mostly it gets in the way of seeing the traditional whiteboard behind it, which does get extensively used. Maybe we can use the $600 a year licensing fee toward buying some fresh dry erase markers, I'm pretty sure my employer has not bought any office supplies since the beginning of the pandemic.

A week after Microsoft announces their new version of Surface Hub

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...

That's so strange. I wonder what makes this product category seem like a good investment for Microsoft but not for Google? Since it occupies the same functional role in the office suite. Not to mention Google had the additional market of schools where it integrated seamlessly with Chromebooks.

It's very hard to understand why they'd be going in such different directions.

Microsoft tends to go longer term than Google. Even with smartphones they have multi-year support cycles laid out before devices hit the stores.

Google hardware is developed and sold like as if it was software. If an idea doesn't work, shut it down and migrate to something that may do the trick. I suspect the fast turnover rate of Google employees to have something to do with it as well; after five years, most people working on a product will have left the company.

Outside looking in, Google seems nearly entirely unable to get people to work on things that aren’t new and shiny. Maintenance and polish get little or no attention, and half-assed when they give them any attention at all. Even Android suffers from this, though it’s big enough it trundles on regardless—the parts that get attention are things that can be treated as launches (UI overhauls and such—which usually are only half-baked as far as the developer-facing side, and don’t see much improvement after launch)

Microsoft has the organizational ability to get their workers to give a shit about maintenance and polish, and take it seriously. They have plenty of trouble of their own (I am far from a MS fan) but they don’t suffer that particular pathology—they’re not consistently perfect at it, certainly, but they’re also not consistently totally unable to do it, as Google seem to be.

[edit] to head off nitpicks, google does show an ability to focus on one big area, of course: ads/search. Though, ask anyone who uses their ad platform and I expect you’ll get a pile of complaints about shit that absolutely should not be as broken as it is. The parts that get ongoing attention are service reliability and anything that makes the revenue line measurable go up-and-right the instant it’s enabled.

I have one of these in our office that's been passed from company to company. We don't pay for it and just use it as a (very nice-looking) rolling TV (it has an HDMI input on the back, thankfully).

Any Android exports out there have a sense for how hard it'd be to get root access to something like this?

It's like Pablo Escobar looking for higher margins than offered by cocaine, and being constantly disappointed. Fix the search, Google, before you lose your cash cow. I now append "reddit" to all of my searches to make the results tolerable.

I don't know what the success rate is so far, but it has to be low single digits of Google products/services that stick around? Has anyone ever done that math?

EDIT:

Based on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

I didn't do any editing of the list, just ran wc -l on the 2 lists, so all of those phones are still considered production. That's probably not correct, but I'm not energetic enough to fix it.

Looks like it's right around 50/50, so about 1/2 their products are discontinued/failed.

I wonder if products like these are a dying market with distributed work.

What’s the benefit of a digital whiteboard when I have drawing tools on my computer for a fraction of the price, and the amount of time spent in the office has been cut by 50-100%?

Couple questions.

1. There are plenty of android based large displays with a touchscreen/camera/mic/speaker combo on the market (though I'm sure there weren't as many in 2016.) Why did Jamboard need to be an integrated solution instead of an app you could install on these displays? Maybe limit it to certain devices that you are sure it can run on.

2. I get that they are shutting the software part down, but you should be able to still use it as a dumb display for videoconferencing, right?

Innovation means more duds than hits and it should be encouraged at every level. For business critical applications, yes, there should be a well defined path, and in this case, I am sure there is.

People lose their head every time Google sun sets service. In some cases the criticism is well deserved but not in all. In this case, I am sure there is a path forward for the customers. Heck, they even refunded all costs for Stadia. Google goes well above and beyond what is expected in most cases.

Can someone please clarify: even the software version is winding down? If so, can they simply make all the whiteboards read-only via bitmaps/SVGs instead of migrating them elsewhere?

Edit: From reading the post properly it seems that it will be view-only for a temporary duration before they may be deleted/migrated:

> Between October 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024, the app will be placed in “view-only” mode, during which time you will still be able to backup your Jam files.

I would like to see some law in the EU along the lines: if you stop supporting any HW, you have to open source all, so that the HW has a chance of not ending in a dump.

I think should not be a lot of trouble, because like in this case for google, they will ahut down everything, and will not be making any more money with it.

Most of the comments are talking about the hardware product, but Jamboard is also a software app that is being shut down. I’d never heard of the hardware, but I have made a few Jamboards in Google Drive.

It’s kind of ridiculous that Google is going to delete that user data with barely a year of notice.

Jamboard aside, I've really hesitated buying any Google product because it could be bricked any day, including Nest devices. Understand the business logic behind it, but sooner than later this is going to catch up to them.

This device, like Stadia, was actually pretty great/amazing. Just incredible to see Google fuck these things up from a marketing/sales/strategy perspective. Amazing technology turned to (expensive) dust.

stadia with take-hands-off-controller before visually updating was amazing? it was one of the quickest plug pulls for a reason

I found it really responsive, just playing platform games on my phone.

Stadia was amazing, what made no sense is the business model. They should have operated like GeForce Now. You could have paid a subscription only to run the games in the cloud and buy the game on separate shops.

I'm guessing part of the problem is that some folks internet just couldn't handle it. I tried GeForce NOW and Stadia and Stadia felt miles ahead in responsiveness.

I played Stadia, then Xbox live, then PC and the truth is it really depended on your geographical location and router. Almost all casual fps have some sort of auto aim built in, the ones that did not were unplayable but the ones that did were pretty good

With all this "AI" hype, where is the ultimate diagram tool, in which you draw a diagram like you would on a whiteboard, and then press the button "make it look nice"?

A $5000 price tag with $600 annual fee would mean oh my god, why am I still using whiteboard now? Apparently jamboard is not that good yet.

FFS extremely out of order to do this to the education sector.

They should be obliged to provide an open source off ramp for these and not make them e waste.

Can they at least continue working as 55 inch monitors or is Google going to deliberately contribute to global warming?

A more responsible company might have open-sourced the hardware/software so people could still use it.

Kind of DCEU doom loop - no one will watch the last trickle of movies as all are set to be cancelled :D

Never heard of it and not surprised.

Anyone working on jailbreaking these devices? Might be fun.

I can predict the whining already, but 8 years is really not a short lifespan for a product. That's an honest effort at getting a market, which failed. That's life.

Nothing wrong with pulling the plug, but there’s a common expectation that unless you go out of business you’ll keep supporting a product for years after you stop selling it.

Imagine if Honda decided to stop selling the Accord and on the same day their dealerships stopped carrying parts for it. Would you be willing to buy any model from them knowing it can be abandoned at any moment?

There is, my device is perfectly functional. You shouldn't need to replace $device because they want to make another quick cash grab. Companies should be forced to support the device until the end of universe.

It'd cut down the constant increasing rate of e-waste, rehashes of the same product that contain nothing innovative other than a new camera.

And if $app isn't supported on the older hardware, that's then up to the user to upgrade rather than an path where your forced to upgrade.

Better yet allow the user to swap-out the old device for the new version. I paid €900 outright for my iPhone XR. If Apple want me to use their new device then allow me to trade-in.

It’s still yet another instance of an unsolved problem in this industry: what happens when a company gives up the will to provide supporting infrastructure to devices that they release? Traditionally, the consumer had a chance of continuing to run the device, since it was independent of cloud services. Now these devices are necessarily dependent on these companies with no duty of responsibility on their part. The companies demand subscription income to use the device and then kick users to the curb when the costs exceed that income. This is when consumer protection measures should step in to keep company’s “shareholder value optimization” tendencies in check. For example: keep all device schematics and protocols in escrow such that a community could continue to support the device.

Stop defending the billion dollar corporations when they make expensive hardware into expensive paperweights.

Google could easily open source the software needed to run this without their cloud services.

don't tell me what to do.

What if you only just bought it?

Too big to win, too big to fail.

My job is all in on google. Gmail, meets, gcp, everything. Never heard of jamboard. We'd probably have been using it too, if we ever knew it existed! How is it that closure announcements are when we find out about these things? Especially from a company whose revenue comes from advertising?

We have these scattered around my offices (a large pharma/biotech). They go mostly unused. The idea is good. But it was outside of google's wheelhouse (they have been traditionally weak in consumer hardware except for phones).

Because you're clicking through a HN story when the title is about Google shutting down a product, but did not click through the HN stories when it was announced or when it became generally available. (But those product announcement submissions did actually get a surprising amount of attention on HN, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

I first heard of it when Google sent a couple of free boards for evaluation to a company I used to work at. We were fully on GSuite + GCP, but the hardware was too expensive and not that useful, so we ended up sending them back.

While the (pricy) physical boards were targeted at corporations, the service's main target was probably schools.

Our kid actually uses Jamboard daily, I expect all schools of the area to be doing so, and I'm sure the admins are pretty pissed right now. I wonder if the chromebook sales have been taking too much of a hit and they're cutting losses as usual.

[stub for offtopicness]

(come on you guys, anything this repetitive is off topic on HN. we want curious conversation here...)

And one more to the casket - https://killedbygoogle.com/

OMG I completely missed they killing Google Podcasts.

Just terrible since I dont want to deal with anything YouTube.

It needs a graph over time. It seems like it's going exponential based on HN headlines.

Interesting. A full year of notice is actually pretty good for a Google shutdown if my memory serves correctly.

I think it's reasonable to say that shutdowns are their core competency at this point.

Wow! What a bunch of shortsighted people manage Google! First, they launched half-baked products and spend zero effort to evolve them, then, second, they say: "Oh, I didn't attract much adoption." Well, people are NOT stupid - nobody wants to be dealing an agonizing body as it will be a complete lost of time and effort knowing the sure fate in Google's graveyard!

Does anyone have the link showing that many of these now dead projects are just competition projects for Google developers to wrestle for internal status and power, or to escape Google grunthood?

It is the day after Google's 25th birthday, where we celebrated not only 25 years of ruining the Internet, but also the 289 products they brought to market and then unceremoniously dumped away.

And now today [as of 9/28/2023 at 3:18 PM ET] we celebrate the 290 products they brought to market and then unceremoniously dumped away.

Hey, that's not fair. Google spent about ten years being a net positive for the internet. They used to have a program where they'd pay for pizza delivery for anyone who was up late coding. They've been churning out good FOSS for most of their existence. Given they've been more harm than good for several years now, but let's not rob them of their bright beginnings.

"The next phase of digital whiteboarding for Google Workspace"

A classic Google cancellation title if I've ever seen one.

I'll hold out for the next next phase

Why do they even make new products at this point

If they don't make new products, what are they going to shut down?

Typical Google.

Google doing what Google does. Anyone have a good rec for an alternative to Nest doorbell with 24/7 coverage and no monthly subscription? May as well get ahead of that end-of-life notification.

For fuck's sake. Have so many of these in the office.

Never buying a Google product again. This is beyond ridiculous at this point.

Google is the perfect example of living off just a couple of good decisions made in the past. I wonder how many rich people behave just like Google, i.e. they are touted as being business geniuses but in reality got their wealth from a luckily investment and it has been a struggle ever since

Most companies are this. If you look into detail at the vast majority of successful companies, there is a single product or service that makes the vast majority of their money and it was a combination of hard work, right timing, luck, 6 other things and it's not repeatable.

Frank Slootman (CEO of several public companies, now Snowflake) talks about this in his book. He basically says "don't try to build new products, you aren't going to catch lightning in a bottle twice". There are a few great counter examples, (amazon with AWS being the most obvious) but not many.

Interesting how the term "Auto Update Expiration (AUE)" shifts the focus to being about the device rather than about Google. Something about giving it an initialism too, makes it sound like Google are describing some fundamental law of the world to you (like MTBF) where their hands are tied rather than it being an arbitrary business decision. How many psychologists do they have on payroll to come up with these things?

Haha, wow, I picked up one from the Twitter liquidation sale this Monday. HAHA! What a sucker I am!

It appears to run Android, so I think we can probably pull something off here.

If you have any luck, I’d love to know about it. Our deactivated Jamboard currently serves as nothing more than a mediocre large monitor for a Mac mini.

Oh goddamnit - I really liked Jamboard and used it tons for myself and my team. Guess we have to actually Google for alternatives.

My PM will be in shambles. How will we ever do retrospectives now???

My current team uses Miro, a previous one used retrotool.io

Both handle it in different ways

We use Miro as well, it's pretty solid. Our PMs use it for almost everything. Developers, however, prefer draw.io

I like retrium, but it's much more structured than a whiteboard-style tool

Sigh. My team uses this quite a bit but it has always been my least favorite of the popular "digital whiteboard" tools. Super limited in capabilities, but at least it was convenient and easy to use.

And the de-googlification of my life continues...one app at a time.

It was a pretty bad app. I’m surprised you’ll miss it.

I totally agree it wasn't great. As I said, it was super barebones and my least favorite of the major white-boarding apps.

But it was already "there" because we're on GSuite/Workspaces/whatever they call it these days and everyone had access to it without needing to jump through any hoops or agree on a separate application to start using.

Am I going to mourn the loss? Absolutely not, except for the inevitable 60 minute meeting we'll have where we decide on a replacement tool before all ultimately winding up disappointed in whatever we agree on.

lol - I remember when Fairfax Media (now Nine) got these. Apparently revolutionary. And like all Google things, fizzled out.

Why invest in new Google technology?

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