Google Jamboard is winding down | Hacker News Reader

Google Jamboard is winding down

support.google.com

37 pointswslh33 comments

"Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard from customers that whiteboarding tools like FigJam by Figma, Lucidspark by Lucid, and Miro help them work better together. As these tools have grown more capable, offering advanced features such as an infinite canvas, use case templates, voting, and more, we’ve decided to leverage our partner ecosystem"

i.e. the vastly-profitable Google couldn't add to or enhance the product while smaller, nimbler competitors were able to ...

If it's like anything else coming out of Google, most likely those who made it got their cake, I mean pomo package, and moved to something else. Some other folks were left to maintain it until the inevitable sun setting.

I really hope they have this realization about chat soon.

> i.e. the vastly-profitable Google couldn't add to or enhance the product while smaller, nimbler competitors were able to ...

The real reason is that Google's chart now looks like how Microsoft's used to be[1], while MS seems to have gotten better.

[1] https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1000&fo...

Google Ending Support for Jamboard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37694154

6 months ago | 257 comments

I propose assembling a secret team within Google that will create a product (STOps) solely focused on the successful 'winding down' of Google products/projects/etc. so that when Google ultimately 'winds down' the STOps product it will no longer be able to 'wind down' any currently ongoing or future products/projects/etc...

I think the concept was fine, but the quality was terrible. When they first launched, my employer at the time bought a bunch of them. Lots of people used them a few times, but then stopped because they were unusable. The software was definitely buggy, but they were so bad there could have been hardware issues as well. I don't think anyone I knew ever tired them again. I'm honestly surprised that they lasted this long. Maybe they eventually got better?

Google is losing a lot of ground in the office productivity space. I can see Docs, Sheets and Slides being wound-down in the next few years as the distance between these tools and Office widens.

The only advantage for the above tools is that they are vastly cheaper for an organisation that is already part of Google Workspace — than switching to Office. It is appealing for small businesses and start-ups, but not much else.

No way. Google docs seems so pervasive. I use spreadsheets and docs constantly in my day to day life outside of work.

Isn't there a meme, like, the most important business decisions are made in the 1 inch column section of a Google doc.

I never worked with office online though.

How much do you pay Google to use docs?

I assumed I paid them indirectly with my data like gmail haha

Not sure why this is downvoted — its exactly the right question. Google has a hard fight ahead keeping its loss-leading services alive.

At some point they will need to invest properly in their Workplace suite and start competing in the corporate productivity space — or, as I expect, risk being relegated to the small-business/home-user segment.

I think the lack of a unified, platform integrated chat platform, a la Slack and Teams, will hurt a lot. They did great with Google Docs, and then built out a ridiculously complicated but robust Workspace Admin platform, but don't even seem to be thinking about chat anymore.

Office, Office Web, and Teams are a nice fit for business users. Ops/dev still tend to gravitate towards Slack.

Which makes their RCS complaints even more ...amusing (yes, I know it's not really the same space, or the same team, or the same platform -- but it is chat).

Google Chat apparently is a thing. It can be found in my companies gmail and we used it once, when slack was down.

I just started a new job, and am amazed that even though being the sort of company that don't like spending money, like the previous 3 they have GW and Slack.

Does anybody at Google do anything other than throw stuff over the wall then move on?

The ironic/funny thing about your comment is that Google Workspace does have a pretty full featured chat platform, known as Google Chat. And it's clearly not dead (yet), because I just hit it on my account and get a nice pop-up, "Welcome to the new Chat", "Catch up with all your direct messages, group chats, and spaces - all in one place", and then get some walkthroughs on the new features related to the home screen, filters, etc.

But I agree, Google product management for anything but search and ads is such a cluster-f of afterthoughts, side-of-the-desk work, and the impending feeling that it will all get shut down once whatever engineer championed it leaves or is promoted to something else. Also, a huge part of the entrenchment of Slack is all of its programmability and plugins - lots of companies run "ChatOps". I don't see any of that in Google Chat, and even if it were there I think you'd need to be crazy to actually develop a plugin for it before it likely gets shut down or is migrated to something else.

Google Chat is pretty good and still under active development with the rest of Workspace. A good place to keep up-to-date on new features is their update blog: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/

The Google Chat built into gmail? It’s kind of okay for off the cuff one-on-one chats but its features, and those of rooms (is that what they call it?) doesn’t hold a candle to the other platforms. They had something called Google Chat years ago that they then discouraged everyone to stop using because of Duo and Meets and their other products. They’re behind and they keep burning mind share. It doesn’t feel as mature, integrated, and API enabled as everyone else.

You're right, Google has no right to be so far behind other chat apps, given that Google was the dominate chat system (with Google Talk) almost 20 years ago. I think they might finally be getting their act together with Google Chat.

I really hope this doesn’t happen. The relative simplicity and reliability of Google docs in my experience has always been one of its major advantages over Microsoft Office, not to mention its near seamless real time collaboration functionality.

> Google is losing a lot of ground in the office productivity space.

What makes you think this? Google is huge in schools and universities.

I can see Word being needed for specific advanced use cases (legal?) and Excel necessary for pro-level spreadsheet work, but for everyday business collaboration Google Workspace is fantastic.

It's the inter-connection of tools in the workspace. Microsoft is one short purchase of Mural or Miro away from having the complete ecosystem from documents, to meetings and calls, to whiteboarding all wrapped in a single package. They know that its the ecosystem that matters, not the individual tools.

Multi-user editing is now table-stakes. And whilst applications, like Excel, still are behind Sheets in collaborative editing, its still functional.

Interesting. I really like Google Doc, Sheets, and Slides. Google keeps adding features, which I find to be very useful and innovative. I wish they updated Google Forms too. The only thing I am not a fan of is the AI features, which largely don't work for me.

> I can see Docs, Sheets and Slides being wound-down in the next few years as the distance between these tools and Office widens.

I don't think so at all. It is clear that there is a lot of brain power behind their products (e.g. the UI/UX in small mobile devices). The collaboration is excellent and much more powerful that the obvious competitor.

If we talk about Jamboard it is clear that the app cannot go everywhere.

> We will also work directly with educational institutions to compensate them for their Jamboard devices.

Fwiw, I remember reading about this a while ago.

> Will I be able to keep my Jam files in Drive?

Surely you can keep any file in a Google Drive? The answer that they are going effectively remove files from Google Drives is ... worrying.

You can keep any file in a google drive, but you can't (necessarily) keep things that are not files, but rather references to entities inside other applications.

This is why it's important for applications to have some kind of mechanism for exporting their data as files. But many don't.

Hmm, sounds like Google Jamboard has blurred what file means to the point it's pointless.

The “files” of many online services (including Google Docs and Sheets themselves, but this can even be true of third-party, non-Google services) stored in Drive do not have the data content you might think, they are basically hyperlinks to content stored in the relevant services, so if the service were to go away they would be useless even if they still technically existed in the Drive.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37694154

I still have my 150 lb paper weight of a Jamboard stalking the corner of my living room...

Why would jambord be going away

Why

Reply on news.ycombinator.com