33 ms·

Google Kills Cloud Print

• mceachen 7y ago
  Good news: they give you a year to transition. Bad news: you'll have to buy a new printer if it doesn't play nicely with CUPS. Google really is the land of the walking-dead projects.
  • londons_explore 7y ago
    A year is plenty of time to learn to code and write yourself a CUPS plugin... Nobody's gonna pay you to do it tho...
• branon 7y ago
  I'm confused on what the replacement is. Historically, ChromeOS hasn't been able to print at all unless using Google Cloud Print in some form. To my knowledge there are two existing forms: * a Google Cloud Print-ready printer, or * a computer that can run Chrome and bridge non-Google Cloud Print-ready printers to Google Cloud Print.[0] So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and registering a "classic printer". To combat this, I made a simple Python script that runs an HTTP server, accepts file uploads, assumes cupsd is running on the same host, and throws jobs at my printer. This has worked nicely, and over time I've added additional features, such as the ability to specify double-sided printing or number of copies. The wording in this link is the source of my confusion. The first paragraph states (somewhat brusquely) that users should "identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy" without giving any suggestions on how this might best be accomplished. What's more, the first link[1] on the page claims "native printing" is getting better, but upon clicking this link I'm directed to a page about Chrome Enterprise. So... what am I supposed to make of this? I have to pay for an enterprise edition of ChromeOS to use printers now? Google's own infographics[2] seem to suggest so. How is this an improvement? The article goes on to bullet-point several of the specific features that will be available by end-of-year. It's not clear if these apply to everybody, or to only those persons who are paying for Chrome Enterprise. Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS? What is Google angling for by intentionally crippling software and systems that work _perfectly fine_ elsewhere? I will keep on trucking with my tiny "print proxy" script, while continuing to not give a shit about Google's inane antics regarding printers. The only saving grace for this article is the very last link[3] which appears to detail a _suspiciously_ simple process for adding a networked printer. I'll have to commandeer my wife's Chromebook the next time I get a chance, and test this process out. I've never seen this particular article before, and to my knowledge adding a printer like this was previously not a supported operation on ChromeOS. Hang on, though. We're not out of the woods yet. Because of course, the only helpful page I've found so far links[4] to _yet more instructions_ for adding a native printer. The first step is "sign into some Google service" and the steps seem geared towards an "organizational unit". No. Not happening. What the hell is all this? I just want to add a local printer. I'm not sending print jobs to Google first, and I don't want support articles that assume I'm administering an organization. [0] https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/1686197 https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/1686197 (see also the header "Connect a printer that’s not cloud-ready") [1] https://www.blog.google/products/chrome-enterprise/chrome-enterprise-now-offers-native-print-management/ https://www.blog.google/products/chrome-enterprise/chrome-en... [2] https://www.blog.google/topics/connected-workspaces/introducing-chrome-enterprise/ https://www.blog.google/topics/connected-workspaces/introduc... (image a bit of the way down. IDKWTF "printer management" is supposed to mean but it seems like something I'd want) [3] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252 [4] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en&ref_topic=4413914 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en&ref...
  • jlgaddis 7y ago
    > I'm confused on what the replacement is. There isn't one (assuming you don't use ChromeOS). Google is saying: "We're killing this. Find something else."
  • Donald 7y ago
    It probably suggests Chromebooks are on their way out.
  • kalleboo 7y ago
    The article link takes you to the "Google Chrome Enterprise Help" section of their support site, so all the help articles linked in there are going to be geared towards Chrome Enterprise. Maybe you'll have better luck finding answers in the "Chromebook Help" area? https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&ref_topic=3399712 https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&r...
    • branon 7y ago
      That's link [3] in my comment. That appears to be the new CUPS capabilities that Google has added to ChromeOS. Excited to try it out.
  • scottlamb 7y ago
    > So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and registering a "classic printer" I think the support text is wrong—you could do this on Linux as well. It'll be a moot point though when Cloud Print shuts down. > Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS? Have you tried recently? I don't think it is anymore. Yesterday my Chromebook seemed to just see my printer on my local LAN (via Rendezvous, I assume). I agree these product/support docs you linked are pretty alarming. But I think the actual situation is (or if not is, will be) much better for basic ChromeOS in simple situations: * auto-discovered network-connected printer on the same LAN as the Chromebook * network-connected printer where you know the hostname and it's reachable from the Chromebook * USB printer connected directly to the Chromebook Hopefully those docs will improve soon... Note that while I work for Google, I don't have any inside knowledge of this.
• jacurtis 7y ago
  Wow, that's a real shame, because Google Cloud Print was one of those nice little services that did ONE THING amazingly. I loved that I could print stuff from anywhere and it would be sitting on my printer when I got home. If I am working at a coffee shop, or out of town and bought something that needed to print a receipt, or a confirmation, or anything else. I could print it through Google Cloud Print and it would be ready and printed for me when I got home. It was just a nice convenience that worked every time. Yes there are alternatives... most printers now have an obfusticated email address that you can send to and it will print from. But this is vendor specific and unreliable and required additional steps (had to save to computer, then open an email client, send an email, etc). But then again, how can I be surprised? We are talking about Google, the company famous for shutting down projects. I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow and they shut down google.com search engine. Right now on Hacker News (just a few spots above this post) is a another site [1], which hosts a countdown for when customers expect to shut down the Google Stadia product... a product that only launched a few days ago. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003
  • Justsignedup 7y ago
    Wait did you just say you liked a google service and they killed it? HA! Welcome to the world. Google services always find a great niche. The problem is google wants MAJOR hits or bust.
    • exikyut 7y ago
      No, they just achieve runaway success on mass scale. From Google's perspective the flypaper is just bigger; its contents are no less needle-moving.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        Contrast with Apple. AirPrint was introduced in 2010 and is still going strong.
        • 7y ago
• martin1b 7y ago
  Add that to the Google Cemetary. https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/ https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/
  • codyogden 7y ago
    We’ve already got it on killedbygoogle.com Open Source moves quick. :)
• felipelemos 7y ago
  I wish Google could at least release the code of killed projects as opensource.
  • exikyut 7y ago
    Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Exterminate. "I am Dalek of Borg. These are not the 'Droids you're looking for. You never existed."
  • londons_explore 7y ago
    Generally, Googles infrastructure is so unlike existing opensource systems that even if you had the sourcecode in-hand, the effort required to get it compiling and running while re-implementing all dependencies would be almost as much as starting from scratch. The opensourcing of Bazel and absl:: is a big start - but there are a lot of core Java libraries you'd be missing, and all the loadbalancing, identity, config and storage systems would all need shims to slightly-incompatible opensource solutions.
• officeplant 7y ago
  I can see why people will miss it, but cloud print is always on my short list of things I remove/disable when setting up a phone. How many average people still own/need a printer often enough to not just go use one at the library/kinkos?
  • marklyon 7y ago
    We set it up at our condo building lobby on a nice MFP for anyone to use. Was a great, easy to use solution.
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      Can your printer be accessed via local wifi network / rendezvous? And does Chromebook support that?
• jfkw 7y ago
  Of all the free services to kill, this one really hurts. I just got my parents migrated to using Cloud Print with their Chromebooks and iStuff. As I am providing the usual family-plan IT advice from several timezones away, Cloud Print solved the biggest headache of getting their current project printed to their house or office from wherever they are (or me, if I am helping them). Supporting local printers was a time sink, and remote printing is the logical complement to cloud applications. It seems shortsighted to give it up when there is no real competition in this space AFAICT.
  • thefounder 7y ago
    Expect Chromebooks to get killed as well.
    • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
      Yeah, especially after that google graveyard website, and all the services axed with no good replacements... You'd have to be a fool to trust any google service for anything.
      • drdeadringer 7y ago
        What, if any, alternatives are there for Google Voice?
    • halflings 7y ago
      "In Q4 of 2018, Chromebooks made up 21% of all notebooks sold in the US" https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebooks-make-big-strides-in-sales-numbers-in-q4-of-2018/ https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebooks-make-big-strides-in-sa...
• akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Im guessing there are still lots of people that require physical printing that use Chromebooks and the like. Is there a built in printing solution for them now? Because when the Cr48 was out the Chrome team recommended using Cloud Print.
  • notatoad 7y ago
    >Is there a built in printing solution for them now? the linked article and the original source from google both cover this.
  • themagician 7y ago
    I know with a lot of HP printers you can just send whatever you want printed to a special HP email address as an email attachment and it will print.
• Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Bad timing for an announcement considering the (IMO valid) concerns about Stadia's lifetime.
  • IAmEveryone 7y ago
    In an industry where 80% of startups disappear, it's inevitable that they have to shut down products at a rate not much smaller than their introduction of new products. And if "Google Cloud Print" is considered significant, then that will result in frequent headlines of "Google is shutting down <x>". Considering how annoying I find this meme even though I have absolutely no stake in it, people on the inside are probably telling their therapists about it. The better part of a decade has passed since Google Reader was shut down, and it's still the go-to reaction of people who want to seem oh so unique, rebellious, and cynical.
    • anoncake 7y ago
      You would have a point if Google had become more reliable since Reader was shut down.
• detuur 7y ago
  I mean, why wouldn't they? With all the people out there using it without complaints.
• debatem1 7y ago
  Having helped build a product based on Google cloud print I can only say I'm not sad. At the time it had a ton of political backing, and so we were kind of compelled to use it despite the fact that 1/ it was a nightmare from an authentication perspective for our use case, 2/ it had "I've forgotten how to count that low" rate limits, and 3/ didn't map cleanly onto anything we were trying to do. Nevertheless, we wound up shoehorning it in at the insistence of both that team and our management until it predictably failed without support, at which point it became a crisis. May something better replace it, but I won't be shedding any tears for what I saw.
• penneyd 7y ago
  Ridiculous - who on earth is making these kinds of decisions?
  • dang 7y ago
    Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for a bit better than internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• sanxiyn 7y ago
  Already in https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/, that's fast.
  • codyogden 7y ago
    I got pinged minutes after this dropped. :) Happy that KBG is open source and we can get it updated quickly.
• jlawer 7y ago
  I think this again points to why google struggles with consumer products. It appears that google's strength in technology sometimes lets them leap frog competitors by bringing a better product to market, they seem to screw up getting the whole of business behind it. Sooner or later the competitors catch up with the technology and do the other things right. I really don't understand why they didn't keep this announcement under wraps and extend the service for another year, as this is exactly the kind of story they don't need with the lackluster launch of Stadia. Google really can't bring large parts of the business together to focus on a strategic goal which seems to result in this flailing around product to product.
• inesprimibile 7y ago
  Anybody have any good recommendations for alternatives? We use Cloud Print as a printing solution to allow users in our app to authorize us to send print jobs programmatically to their printers.
  • yellowapple 7y ago
    I've seen QZ Tray used for this sort of thing to great effect. It entails installing both Java and QZ Tray itself, though. Most companies just roll their own "print client" programs, in my observation. Not that difficult to do (the hardest part is actually sending the document to the printer, which is relatively trivial for macOS/Linux/anything-else-with-CUPS and not-trivial but reasonably-documented to do with Windows; those two should cover your bases).
  • adamfeldman 7y ago
    I’ve had success with https://www.printnode.com https://www.printnode.com
• ifthenelseend 7y ago
  anyone in their right mind will use any product from Google? They deprecate like 90% of their services... https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/
• tyingq 7y ago
  Would be nice if they could open source it, though I suppose it depends on Google internal frameworks and services none of us has.
  • londons_explore 7y ago
    I think they should opensource it in a non-compiling, non-working state, as a gesture of openness. I bet someone would go to the effort of patching it up and getting it to run. Only disadvantage is probably that "cloudprint.google.com" is probably hardcoded into millions of printers worldwide, so even if you could run it on your own server, your printer will never work with it.
    • tyingq 7y ago
      Smart DNS relay at the router...
      • londons_explore 7y ago
        Would Google be happy to sign HTTPS certificates for anyone to spoof cloudprint.google.com though?
        • tyingq 7y ago
          Ahh, yeah. But I wouldn't be surprised if many printers skipped client side validation.
• tech234a 7y ago
  It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run. Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1] [1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170 https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170
• tech234a 7y ago
  It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run. Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1] [1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179 https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179 (Note: I also posted this comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206)
  • tech234a 7y ago
    The reference URL [1] was cut off. The full URL should be https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170 https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170.
• mraudiobook_com 7y ago
  Wow, amazing! This was the last reason I was using Chrome. It was literally the one thing they had I couldn't get on other browsers and they kill it. What an amazing company. Guess I should be happy that I'm now officially done with Google.
• anderber 7y ago
  And Google wonders why their products don't gain momentum? Should I trust them when I buy a Chromecast, Stadia, or anything else? I mean even their probably most successful product, the Chromecast, doesn't get many updates and sometimes I wonder if they put much effort into it. It seems like they are very good at the initial launch but slowly and surely they remove resources from that product and things go downhill.
• jonahbenton 7y ago
  So mad about this. I am a paying google customer and this is a feature I use all the time.
• scarface74 7y ago
  Isn’t Google Cloud Print the standard way you print from an Android device?
  • ProZsolt 7y ago
    Yes, it is.
    • scarface74 7y ago
      When they abandon Google Cloud Print, then how would you print from Android devices?
• branon 7y ago
  There was a discussion about this yesterday, I've got a pretty long rant posted on the other thread[0] that participants here might want to read [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815 Edit: apparently pointing to a previous comment on a related thread is ... bad? For ... some reason?
• rcostin2k2 7y ago
  Possible duplicate thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188
  • JaimeThompson 7y ago
    This one was posted a few minutes before but the other one has a better tile.
• jonstaab 7y ago
  We very nearly built our app's printing subsystem on Google Cloud Print, but went with PrintNode instead. So glad, PN has been great to work with.
• JadeNB 7y ago
  Currently one of two on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188 .
• JadeNB 7y ago
  Currently one of two on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606049 .
• cptskippy 7y ago
  I for one am not going to miss this. It always struck me as a very poorly designed response to AirPrint that never worked right.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    What’s the alternative for printing from Android devices?
    • welly 7y ago
      To your own printer? Bluetooth or Wifi. I've got a Canon TS9150 printer and I can connect to it from my phone via wifi, either directly - phone to printer - or if the printer is on your wifi network, that way. Canon have an app for android phones that help you connect to your printer which works quite well.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        Is this really a better user experience? On a Mac or any iOS device you just connect to a network and all of the printers just show up. You don’t need an app. I have a newer iPad but even my old first generation iPad that hasn’t seen an operating system update since 2011 will print to any of my three AirPrint printers. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time I had an Android device in my house (my son’s) don’t you still have to install separate printer drivers for printers if they don’t support Google Cloud Print?
        • giggles_giggles 7y ago
          I have an Android and have never, as far as I can remember, tried to print from it. For you, I opened a random web page and chose "print" and it somehow detected the HP printer on my home WiFi. No required apps, nothing special. It's just there.
    • cptskippy 7y ago
      Search the App Store for "Print Service Plugin". These are the printer drivers put out by all printer makers. They seem to install themselves automatically on your device when Android detects a manufacturer's printer. I have an HP LaserJet and a Canon photo printer, and both vendor's Service Plugins magically showed up on my phone.
• blantonl 7y ago
  I wonder what this means for the Google Chrome hardware ecosystem...
  • PaulHoule 7y ago
    Don't get scroogled!
  • geofft 7y ago
    https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 Chrome OS now has basically full-featured support for CUPS like a normal Linux machine, so you no longer need Cloud Print to print to local printers, and they're adding features to let you use a remote CUPS server.
    • m712 7y ago
      Well, I posted my previous comment before seeing this. This is good news for Chromebook users, at least.
    • toast0 7y ago
      Since the post says they're gonna finish things by the end of this year and there are already plenty of Chromebooks that they stopped updating... my big unanswered question is, of the Chromebooks they stopped updating, how many of them have a usable enough version of CUPS to still be able to print. Ignoring, of course, those users that were using Cloud Print to network enable their printer.
• dleslie 7y ago
  That's a bummer; it was a god send for accessing printers without drivers on the client.
  • geofft 7y ago
    Printers are standardizing on a thing called "driverless printing," based on having some common Page Description Languages (or having the printer have support for handling a PDF directly): https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting#Driverless_Printing_and_Printers https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting#Driverless_Pr... Each printer having its own driver is sort of like ... each terminal having its own escape sequences. When printers and terminals were purpose-built electronics with limited hardware functionality, it made sense to put the smarts into the computer and have it figure out which operations were supported by the device. Nowadays everyone just uses TERM=xterm and there aren't physical terminals anymore (even the companies that used to build them will now sell you cheap general-purpose computers that run a full-screen terminal emulator). Printers have gone the same way; there's enough computational power inside the printer itself that you can just send it something like a PDF and tell it to figure things out.
    • dleslie 7y ago
      Ha, 'bout time. I bought an Oki 691 impact printer simply because it spoke to anything on the network without the need for drivers.
    • pjc50 7y ago
      Thank f--- for that. The era of "Winprinters" and manufacturers trying to differentiate on (awful) software can't end soon enough. Apple had the right idea at the dawn of the LaserWriter back in 1985.
    • tlamponi 7y ago
      You're writing a bit of stuff, may all sound right.. But I'm not sure about what that hasto do with OP's statement? How can I now tell my printer in my home network to print a document from my smartphone on the go or my work PC? And that without installing some half-baked monster app for each printer vendor. Driver-less printing is great if I'm in the same network, but not so if not.
• _nickwhite 7y ago
  ” We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy.” Another Google product killed, another migration strategy to execute. What's next?
  • dleslie 7y ago
    Quit Google and start paying for services that you value.
    • m712 7y ago
      This. It also includes privacy benefits. People need to stop relying on Google.
    • 663e1b 7y ago
      I thought that service was part of the Google Enterprise suite (i.e. a paid service)
      • hoffs 7y ago
        No it was beta all the time
        • ben_jones 7y ago
          Most Google Cloud Products are in Beta for years, with many enterprise customers using them in Beta...
    • sp332 7y ago
      What's a paid alternative to Google Cloud Print?
      • dleslie 7y ago
        Some printers can print from an email; other printers have proprietary cloud printing services.
• ianhawes 7y ago
  My business includes printing, signing, and mailing certain documents, so it was crucial for our efficiency to automate the process of printing. Our first "fancy" printer included support for Google Cloud Print - except it would periodically "deauthenticate" and require manual setup, which in turn would change certain printer IDs that we needed to send jobs to the printer. Our next "fancy" printer from Xerox also included support for Google Cloud Print. For whatever reason, we could never enable Google Cloud Print on that model. We switched to PrintNode and have never looked back. We were able to integrate our label printers with PrintNode as well, so we could automate the process of printing shipping labels. The biggest downside is that we needed a dedicated computer (server in our case) to be connected to the printers in order to route the PrintNode jobs. Not the biggest downside in our case, but to its credit, Google Cloud Print usually connected directly from the printer.
  • brentonator 7y ago
    +1 for printnode, except the last two months where a botched upgrade and some redundancy issues they had internally resorted in outages.
  • HEHENE 7y ago
    Will tack QZ Tray (https://qz.io https://qz.io) onto this list. I've actually used it at my last two jobs for everything from dot matrix printers, laser printers, shipping label printers, and scales (Mettler Toledo.) Worked great and support was phenomenal.
  • Ataraxy 7y ago
    Can also state I had good experience with them and that it's worth looking into. Needed a way to print custom labels and packing slips dynamically and Google Cloud Print was pretty obtuse comparitively.
• areoform 7y ago
  Google has the corporate equivalent of ADHD. Having talked with ex-googlers and current googlers, the problem seems to be deeply baked into their culture. The incentive structures seem to favor the sexy over the boring, making it much more likely that someone will get promoted for launching products versus growing one. The fix seems to be obvious, create a separate path, a maintenance and growth hacker path, where people can take ownership of products and grow them over time. Perhaps people could be judged by their market traction, making them sort-of internal entrepreneurs who over a decade or more, get to share the benefits of shepherding their project.
  • DannyB2 7y ago
    While Cloud Print may be an exception, a problem seems to be that Google has perverse incentives. Creating new products is probably over incentivized, while the boring work of operating and maintaining existing useful products is under incentivized.
    • ajford 7y ago
      From my conversations with ex-googlers, it's exactly this. Like you and OP suggested, promotions and bonuses are heavily tied to launching new things. Being on the team that launches the next new shiny moves you up the ladder. However, those who stay on a product and continue to grow/advance the product don't get nearly as much recognition, and don't get the incentives that a launch does. This translates to people jumping on board an pre-launch project, riding it through launch, then moving on to the next thing, leaving the project in a post-launch slump with few people lingering to maintain and grow the project.
  • Retric 7y ago
    My guess is these things are generally unprofitable because their internal costs are so used to operating as a near monopoly they simply can’t do anything on the cheap. Which ends up killing off seemingly viable products. It’s much like how bell labs invented so much great technology, but could never make the transition to new producers themselves.
• m712 7y ago
  Whatever happened to good old CUPS? Why did they have to introduce so many layers including Google's servers between the user and the printer?
  • pgeorgi 7y ago
    > Whatever happened to good old CUPS? Why did they have to introduce so many layers including Google's servers between the user and the printer? As the support document states, as far as Chrome OS goes, the removal was made possible precisely because its CUPS support became good enough to supplant Cloud Print.
    • oaiey 7y ago
      I am really curious how they will make CUPS printer management on Chrome OS happen. I guess they bet on wide support on printers supporting some protocol native.
      • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Are they going to fix the CUPS bug where a printer with a known hostname becomes unusable when its IP changes?
      • jabl 7y ago
        > some protocol native. That being IPP everywhere (also knows as AirPrint, "Driverless Printing", Mopria(?)).
  • geofft 7y ago
    CUPS is exactly what Google is switching Chrome OS to, as a replacement for Cloud Print. But the reason to have Google's (or someone's) servers involved is so that you don't need to be on the same network (e.g., you can print to your home printer, behind a firewall/NAT, while you're at a coffeeshop, also behind a firewall/NAT).
    • toomuchtodo 7y ago
• ben_jones 7y ago
  > We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy. Something enterprise customers love hearing. Ooof imagine being assigned to sunsetting the service and explaining to what enterprise customers it still has.
  • geofft 7y ago
    Are there paying enterprise customers of Cloud Print? Even today, https://www.google.com/cloudprint/ https://www.google.com/cloudprint/ has a "(beta)" in the logo. Enterprise customers need to figure out that if you're paying $0 for something, you get $0 in support.... if you want something that works, either pay someone enough money to support it, or find an open option and pay your employees enough money to support it in-house.
    • jedberg 7y ago
      That leads to warped thinking though. When I worked at ebay we weren’t allowed to use open source software for this exact reason. If we wanted open source software we had to find a vendor we could pay for support. For that reason we could only run RedHat or Solaris and whatever they supported.
      • atonse 7y ago
        But this is not an unreasonable viewpoint for a larger organization that has attrition, especially with more important applications. You may install a particular library and then leave, and the new person has no idea what that thing does. If there's some kind of support contract in place, the new person has the means to at least have that thing supported.
      • geofft 7y ago
        Having to find an external vendor is definitely warped thinking. Saying "You can't depend on open-source software in production unless you have budgeted for internal support for that software or there's an external vendor" seems entirely fair to me, though. If you find a critical bug, having a $10B company with ten thousand employees sit around waiting for some hobbyist (possibly not available until the weekend because they have a day job with a competing $10B company) to investigate some issue on GitHub is a bit unreasonable both for the company and for the hobbyist. For lots of software, you can either trust that it's well-supported upstream and such bugs are likely to be rare, or you can say that your internal use is something you can work around (e.g., if you want to use an open-source IDE, knock yourself out, if it breaks you can find another text editor). But you should explicitly consider that. Also, the only reason open-source software works as well as it does is that someone else is investing in making it work. Oftentimes that's Red Hat and Oracle. If you're a $10B company and you're expecting open source to magically work with no investment, besides being a jerk, you're also the reason people keep saying "how do we solve the open source sustainability problem" - it's your own fault that support resources for your critical software don't exist.
• Squithrilve 7y ago
  Google is closing on of their perfectly working services? Who could've imagined such a conundrum!
  • zamadatix 7y ago
    I'm amazed someone out there found it a perfectly working service.
    • rootsudo 7y ago
      It worked for me perfectly. I'm going to miss it. :(
• CraigJPerry 7y ago
  Don't worry it'll be OK, we still have HP ePrint. Said no-one ever.
• fybe 7y ago
  Another one bites the dust
• ripdog 7y ago
  >It's enterprise-ready Hahahahahaha oh man they actually wrote that. Sorry for the useless comment, but I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment. I don't think it really matters, of course. Android phones have a full set of manufacturer-specific printing drivers which work fine over the local network, and geofft noted upthread that ChromeOS has CUPS now. Internet printing is gone now, I suppose, but who used that?!
  • mathw 7y ago
    Sadly not for all printers, my printer requires an awful app that does everything itself. Not acceptable! But yeah, Cloud Print doesn't seem to have been particularly widely used or supported.
    • LoSboccacc 7y ago
      yeah but enterprises in general don't own printers, they license them in bulk, there's plenty time to turn them around before the service expires
    • snailmailman 7y ago
      I feel the opposite. My printer supports cloud print, OR an awful app, or just a normal print server thing (idk how printers work) I've always had trouble using the printer except when using cloud print. Cloud print at least works every time, if i try to print another way it often fails silently.
      • m-p-3 7y ago
        > or just a normal print server thing (idk how printers work) I believe most printers nowaday expose themselves on the network using Bonjour/mDNS. You still need the client to know how to talk with it and its drivers, but AFAIK ChromeOS gained that feature some time ago
    • manderley 7y ago
      Try out the "Mopria print service" (mobile printing alliance), most big manufacturers are part of it. They provide a generic driver app for Android that works for mobile printing with models from multiple manufacturers.
• gravypod 7y ago
  This would be a great time for someone to implement a version of this that's paid and has other SaaS features (print-to-mailed-letter, etc). I bet if you streamlined it you could get some customers pretty easily.
• ilamont 7y ago
  Google Cloud Print was a disaster. I could get it to work properly maybe 20% of the time, even with Android devices using the app and Chromebooks. A favorite bug involved a simple print job from one of my kid's Chromebook causing a Brother printer to "print" a blank piece of paper for every sheet remaining in the main tray. By comparison, AirPrint just worked, quickly recognizing new printers from new devices and running jobs pretty much flawlessly.
  • nevf1 7y ago
    AirPrint made up for what Google failed in execution. Cloud Print was a great feature when it worked but unfortunately, it was always a bumpy ride.
  • exhilaration 7y ago
    Just an FYI, I was recently able to get my kids' Chromebook to print to my local Brother (network) printer using these instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/7n3jc1/setting_up_brother_hl2270dw_printer_on_chromebook/ https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/7n3jc1/setting_up... It uses IPP so no extra software or intermediary needed - the print jobs are sent directly to the printer.
  • hsivonen 7y ago
    To print to an AirPrint printer over LAN from Android, one needs to install the Google Cloud Print apk from Play Store. (I witnessed just this week that it didn't work on a newly set up Android One device running Android 9 before installing Cloud Print from Play Store.) With the cloud part of Cloud Print gone, will Google continue to provide the AirPrint-compatible Android software so that Android users won't have to install software from printer vendors like Windows users have to?
    • angry_octet 7y ago
      No.
• lordleft 7y ago
  I know Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their historical support of legacy systems, but on the flip-side it means that as an enterprise you trust that they won't abruptly deprecate something you use.
  • rapsey 7y ago
    Microsoft is the enterprise company. Google never was.
  • noobermin 7y ago
    Despite all the disdain for Microsoft in the spirit of slashdot sentiments, Google has turned out to be worse in many respects.
    • sct202 7y ago
      I think everyone had higher expectations for Google, but Microsoft doesn't get the same level of scrutiny for things like running a fully CCP approved version of Bing in China.
      • v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
        Another example of this double standard is their Health care cloud work, covered by HIPAA, a deal that‘s extremely common in this sector. Also facial recognition tech. While Google is actively limiting its use, Amazon is happily selling it to everyone who‘d have it. It might have something to do with the fact that most media outlets have a vested interest in weakening Google in the public eye. Other than that, What HN/ars is concerned, Google basically seems worse than the military industrial complex and big oil combined. They certainly do annoying shit. But in this specific case, cloud print was a product that was in beta for almost a decade. It was very unreliable and didn‘t work correctly half of the time. But of course killing it counts as ADHD. A 10-year old non-enterprise niche product is ancient in tech years.
  • nine_k 7y ago
    Flak? You mean, respect from people who were around for a few years (or decades) and saw the sexy new thing change from under them in incompatible ways? I've seen some reprieve towards MS for their new things not being nice enough, but never for their old thing continuing to work mostly without a hitch.
• printitout 7y ago
  What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between computer and printer? Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and authorization support in actively maintained firmware? Could Cloud Print support (with private servers) just be merged into CUPS now?
• gtirloni 7y ago
  That thing almost nobody used? Seems fair. EDIT: At this point, is there any value in comments about how Google kills things? I feel like it's a waste of time for a knowledgeable crowd like HN.
  • NilsIRL 7y ago
    I use it and it is very useful. It allows to print documents even when you're not on your network.
    • somehnguy 7y ago
      Can you elaborate on why I would ever want to do that? My printer works on wifi across iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, etc without any additional drivers. So that problem is solved. I've never thought 'gee I wish I could print this document' while somewhere else because I still have to be at the printer to get the document. I'll just save it and print it when I can actually get the document anyway. To me Google Cloud Print just seemed like an over-complication and confusing as to exactly what was going on.
• vngzs 7y ago
  (2013-2019) Gwern did a statistical analysis predicting Google product closures. It's useful context for discussions such as this: https://www.gwern.net/Google-shutdowns https://www.gwern.net/Google-shutdowns
  • sp332 7y ago
    It's not getting killed until next year, so 2013-2020. 7 years is right around the median lifespan according to that page.
  • jayvanguard 7y ago
    I followed this link to a SlateStarCodex article on Google Correlate. At the top of the Google Correlate page was: "Google Correlate will shut down on December 15th 2019 as a result of low usage. You can download your data under Manage my Correlate data in the top bar, or right from here" Good timing! Get your correlations in while you can. https://www.google.com/trends/correlate https://www.google.com/trends/correlate https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/16/google-correlate-does-not-imply-google-causation/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/16/google-correlate-does-...
• Hitton 7y ago
  And that's an example why I think that it's stupid to jump on Stadia bandwagon.
  • numlock86 7y ago
    I think Stadia is different as they sell actual hardware (controller + Chromecast Ultra) and not only a service. Same with Pixel phones ... sort of.
• zarriak 7y ago
  Why doesn't Google just charge for this? This is the only thing that makes printing off of an Android phone even ok. I have a Pixel and for the life of me I cannot print easily from it, and I have tried multiple different printer manufacturers.
  • inapis 7y ago
    Revenue generated from charging for products such as this would be probably chump change for Google. Google is a mass market company thus chump change is irrelevant to them. Plus they are used to operating at a scale by providing products for free. Consumers are used to Google providing products for free. Thus it’s jarring for a lot of users to suddenly pay for basic functionality. Enterprises probably don’t need this because they’ve already figured out network printing decades ago. Plus when you start charging people “money,” you’re expected to provide “human” support. Google won’t come near products where “human” support is necessary even with a 10ft pole unless you’re spending gajillion dollars with them. In a strategic sense it makes sense for “Google” to shut it down. Companies like Readdle will probably fill in the spots
    • hinkley 7y ago
      But Google isn’t Google anymore. They’re Google, an Alphabet Company. So there should be more space for this. The problem is that Page and Brin, the authors of the perverse incentives at Google, are still in charge. Alphabet would have been a great place to bring in some people who are good at maintaining projects. Hell Google could learn a thing or two via osmosis about efficiency from them. Maybe cut the ageist bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come with experience instead of making the same mistakes over and over. But no, it’s still the Larry and Sergei show.
      • vonmoltke 7y ago
        > Maybe cut the ageist bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come with experience instead of making the same mistakes over and over. Hey, they're more than happy to hire anyone who can pass a four-hour CS undergrad final as a mid-level engineer, regardless of age or experience.
• davidwparker 7y ago
  The product has been around 10 years, and they're giving over a year notice before killing it. Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.
  • tyingq 7y ago
    Count up the collective hours spent figuring out why your printer no longer works and finding a new solution. The vast majority of people using it won't see this news. If Google doesn't make the Chromebook transition seamless and invisible, it'll be even worse.
    • dmix 7y ago
      Native print was originally offered in 2017 and they’ll have until 2021 to migrate to it.
      • lonelappde 7y ago
        Does Native Print work over the Internet? That's what Cloud Print did
  • kerng 7y ago
    I am waiting for the day they kill Chromebook or Gsuites - its sometimes difficult to follow why they do terminate certain products. In this case it will hurt enterprises, a market Google desperately tries to enter...
  • kllrnohj 7y ago
    Counter-argument: Just let it sit there and keep working? Outside of security patches, if there even are any, there's always the option of "just stop touching it." After all, the whole pitch of elastic compute is you only pay for what you use. It's not like resources are being freed up for other things here. The software industry is always on this treadmill of churn, leading to stable products continuing to have a constant maintenance burden. But that's not an intrinsic property of the area. It's a thing we do because... we can? We want to? But it's not required. Silo it off and just leave it be.
• JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  I don't know why people expect anything more from Google. Google has no customer facing support and they offer "free" services so they can kill them at will. General rule of thumb: If you're not paying for it and you don't have access to a live person, don't expect it to last.
• printitout 7y ago
  Cc'd here from the other thread: What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between computer and printer (that work with many operating systems)? Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and authorization support in actively maintained firmware? Could Cloud Print support (with private servers and an open standard) just be merged into CUPS now?
• johnmaguire2013 7y ago
  This sucks. I loved Google Cloud Print. I've never had good luck configuring CUPS on Linux, and Google Cloud Print gave me a nice way to not have to deal with it.
  • brutt 7y ago
    Turn off firewall.
• joenathanone 7y ago
  Investing in Google's ecosystem is a risky proposition, as a sys admin I can't in good conscience recommend Google's products to my client's.
• bpodgursky 7y ago
  99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud Print before seeing this headline. Look, I too got annoyed when Google killed Reader. It sucked for a couple days. I moved on. This doesn't even register as a product. It was an experiment that wasn't needed, so they killed it. Holding onto every silly project you ever worked on doesn't make you responsible, it makes you a directionless hoarder. Even Google doesn't have infinite bandwidth (heh) to work on pointless side-projects. They aren't killing Gmail. Or GCP. Or Maps. Or anything else you ever used. Let it die. Don't upvote this post just to use it for ammunition on some overly-generic tirade against Google product management. You are just adding noise to the world.
  • tlamponi 7y ago
    > 99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud Print before seeing this headline. [citation needed] I use google cloud print a lot. And so to other people I know, so in my closer circles it's ~ 30% who do not use it at all (but still print occasionally). For sure, it's not the biggest thing, but it really wasn't unknown either. And just because something is not as popular it still continues to shows googles product graveyard policy..
  • endorphone 7y ago
    I imagine everyone has heard of cloud print -- it's emblazoned on the marketing materials of a bunch of printers. It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time, though it was pretty lame having to send a print job to Google so it can be printed on the device you're standing beside. Android 9 added Wi-Fi direct printing which is much more rational -- on a small minority of devices thus far -- but why not just sunset GCP as deprecated (countless GCP printers and devices that only supported out there) instead of outright killing? Because Google doesn't care. So yeah, a lot of people think "Oh damn they are shutting down GCP" because it legitimately impacts them. This bizarre notion throughout this discussion that it was some weird fringe service is not supported by reality. And Google has a poor product record for good reason, so the criticism is very well deserved. They made their bed and now they lie in it. Someone would be incredibly foolhardy to seriously "buy" games on Stadia, for instance, which is a service that has an incredibly high probability of being Googled.
• hoffs 7y ago
  It's very funny that the article itself calls out most people commenting here > Regardless, Google is getting savaged by bloggers for killing yet another service, one that most of them never even tried, let alone used regularly.
  • hiccuphippo 7y ago
    I used it, not regularly, but was the only way to print from my Linux machine at my company, the printer had it built in even. I wonder what will happen to printers like that next year when the servers disappear.
• tmaly 7y ago
  I use cloud print weekly to print off some homework for my child on the Chromebook. What is the alternative?
  • efficax 7y ago
    ChromeOS has native print capabilities: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en I use it all the time.
    • skykooler 7y ago
      Does this work on older Chromebooks? The only way I was able to get a two-year-old Asus chromebook to print was to share the printer via cloud print from a raspberry pi.
      • freefal 7y ago
        I'm interested in any responses as I had to do the exact same thing.
  • atonse 7y ago
    Apparently ChromeOS already has "native printing" – so try that maybe? Would it support regular network printer drivers or iPrint or AirPrint or something?
• NicoJuicy 7y ago
  So, i won't be able to print my shippings label to my mom from another city anymore :( It's still an easy solution for using a tablet and printing from it.
• AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  I wonder if they gave any of the hardware vendors who proudly advertised, "Google Cloud-Print Ready" on the side of the box more advanced notice than this.
  • londons_explore 7y ago
    A years notice is quite a lot... I doubt many printer manufacturers go more than a year without revising the designs at least a little.
    • AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
      > A years notice is quite a lot... For a device you already bought? Not really. How often do you replace your printer? If you rely on GCP for your home/home-office/small business, you might be a little peeved to discover that your several-hundred-dollar printer might be reduced to a "dumb"/local-only printer next year because the manufacturer decided to rely on a closed-source third-party service for what you consider core functionality of your printer.
• tibbon 7y ago
  That's relatively annoying. I just got a new HP printer that uses cloud print, and I was enjoying using it to make printing from anywhere/my phone easier. Oh well.
• sosuke 7y ago
  Cloud Print is how I print from my Chromebook right? Do they have a replacement? I use this service daily.
  • dudus 7y ago
    According to their support article they are developing some.printing infrastructure for chrome OS to be released before deprecation of cloud print. https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006 https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006
    • mikelward 7y ago
      Printing is already supported. It's the enterprise management bits that are still being developed.
  • mikelward 7y ago
    You can use CUPS locally. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&ref_topic=3399712 https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&r...
    • jessaustin 7y ago
      At that link, we're told to select "Printers" under the heading "Printing". The only item I see under that heading is "Google Cloud Print". I sort of like this idea, of just making changes and waiting for users to complain when those changes screw them over... I do hope that someone is paying attention to those complaints.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• j45 7y ago
  It would be nice if this tech was open sourced.
• lxgr 7y ago
  Nothing about Google killing products is quiet anymore. People have noticed, and I wonder if Google is really aware of the extent of the brand damage that headlines like this cause. Printing is the most corporate thing I can imagine, and even though it is not directly related, as a G Suite customer, this would make me extremely nervous.
  • novaRom 7y ago
    The damage is real. It was one of the arguments against Google Cloud in my company.
    • irrational 7y ago
      Hah! Same with us! We had a meeting where we talked about should we move to Google Cloud, AWS or Azure. Google Cloud was crossed out within 5 minutes of the meeting starting because we have absolutely no confidence that it won't be killed. I don't care how much Google says it won't be. I don't believe them.
• yegle 7y ago
  This is just such a convenient feature: you can remotely print something on the go from your phone and your parents/spouse/kids at home can pick it up. Is there any open source alternatives?
  • nevf1 7y ago
    PrintNode is a great alternative and a well refined product - definitely recommended. However, it has one major drawback as compared with Google's Cloud Print and that's its lack of iOS & Android printing support. https://www.printnode.com/en/faq https://www.printnode.com/en/faq
• dcchambers 7y ago
  I am quick to complain when Google kills a useful project - but I am not mad about this. It was originally created because Chromebooks couldn't print. Chromebooks have been able to print natively for a while now so that is no longer needed. They are also giving over a year of warning. That's plenty of time for people to migrate to a new service or figure out how to implement an alternative. Again I know the Google Graveyard folks will have a field day with this, especially hot on the heals of the Stadia launch and the speculation around when that will die - but I think it's OK to send this ship into the sunset. It served its purpose - there are better solutions now - it's OK to move on.
  • Rebelgecko 7y ago
    IIRC this was also used for printing from Android, and the "replacement" app they released doesn't have the same features
  • canada_dry 7y ago
    > They are also giving over a year of warning. That's plenty of time for people to migrate to a new service or figure out how to implement an alternative. Python 2 would like a word with you.
    • zymhan 7y ago
      Except Python is a widely used language, and this is a simple service for end-users. You don't need to rewrite an app because they're shutting down cloud print.
      • downerending 7y ago
        Or, put another way, if the new way of printing doesn't work for you, you don't need to rewrite anything because you can't. You're screwed. :-) [I for one remain convinced that we are totally going to figure out printing once and for all any decade now...]
    • takeda 7y ago
      The problem with python was giving too much time, companies really started thinking about migrating in mid 2019.
• inception44 7y ago
  https://gcemetery.co/ https://gcemetery.co/ <-- List of all products which Google buried.
  • rafaelvasco 7y ago
    Wow. Never knew it was so many; And many of them died a slow death. If you're going to fail, fail fast.
• EricE 7y ago
  BTW CUPS on a raspberry pi make a great little print server and can extend features like AirPrint to printers that otherwise don't have them. One of the better write-ups: http://ventures.tpedersen.net/errata/raspberrypi/homepiv3 http://ventures.tpedersen.net/errata/raspberrypi/homepiv3 But there's lots of this out there. You can set it up on any machine you have - if you leave a desktop on all the time or have a NAS that lets you run VMs too you can put this functionality there too.
  • ukyrgf 7y ago
    Unless you have a Brother printer. It's been a year so maybe this information is outdated, but last I looked they had absolutely no support/drivers for ARM.
• epx 7y ago
  Pity, I really liked this
• zelly 7y ago
  Crazy thought, what if Android and/or ChromeOS is next? Android always seemed like another "charity" project that didn't directly generate profit (before Nexus/Pixel phones). Most of the value from Android is captured by Chinese phone manufacturers and carriers, not Alphabet. Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.
  • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Google makes a crap ton of money from Android, both directly and indirectly. It's not going anywhere. ChromeOS I'm less sure about.
  • jakub_g 7y ago
    The main goal of Android is to have billions of users using Chrome (which is as of now the only major browser without tracking/ad blocking enabled by default), in order to track you across the web and sell the ads, which is the Google's raison d'etre and main profit center. So, nope.
  • kllrnohj 7y ago
    Android is the largest OS on the planet. Google would only ever give that up if they were going bankrupt, and you know there are companies that would buy that up in an instant and keep it running. Such as, say, Microsoft. Or Amazon.
• markstos 7y ago
  I'm glad to see this one go. When you want to print from one device in a room to another, sharing a copy of the data with Google's servers halfway across the country seems like an odd and privacy-concerning way to accomplish that. I support relatives using Chromebooks and the old fashioned model is printing is much easier to explain and deal with! The wifi printers in my life never seem to maintain reliable connections over long time spans so we resort to using them as USB printers anyway.
  • dazc 7y ago
    I bought a cloud enabled printer for my Dad, who uses a Chromebook. The only way I could get it to print reliably was to connect it to my Windows machine via a cable and have my dad email me whatever he wants to print. In other words, I now have two printers in my office to do what I was doing already with one.
    • ben_jones 7y ago
      Counterpoint, I bought my dad a chromebook and he bought a random printer on Amazon. Works fine after connecting both to the same wifi.
• EricE 7y ago
  Looks like IPP Everywhere could be a self-hosted alternative that has much of Google Cloud Print functionality including the ability to print securely from the public cloud https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html
• EricE 7y ago
  IPP Everywhere looks like a viable and open alternative: https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  Here is an Epson page on setting up Google Cloud Print with their printers: https://epson.com/Support/wa00605b https://epson.com/Support/wa00605b As you can see, it was really valuable to just set up a printer once, and everything internet-enabled could just print to it. When this goes away, everyone in the world who relied on this setup will need to dig out manuals and figure out a custom solution for every device and user, because nothing replaces the Cloud Print functionality. (DNS-SD discovered Driverless Printing isn't even necessarily supported on such printers, and is local-only)
• jdlyga 7y ago
  I loved Google Cloud Print. It made printing from various computers I have a lot easier, since I didn't have to install drivers on each one. It's the only reason I have Chrome installed still. Why does Google always kill useful products?
• markstos 7y ago
  My experience with the opposite of the author's. Cloud Print rarely worked for me and generated more work setting up and managing relative's newly wireless printers when the old method of direct USB printing worked reliability and was largely "plug-n-play". Good riddance.
• novaRom 7y ago
  There are rumors Google will close Stadia soon.
  • jasonvorhe 7y ago
    If they handle Stadia like they did Cloud Print it'll live on for 10 years and then you'll be informed a year before the scheduled shutdown. That's pretty great service.
    • tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      Except it will be in beta for the whole period.
• MisterOctober 7y ago
  Not sorry to hear this. GCP never worked reliably and was absolute hell to support for the several months I had to do. Rood giddace to rad bubbish, see ya never Cloud Print!
• reportgunner 7y ago
  I would understand the need for a "Cloud" print if you'd need to print in another country that you never visit, but what does someone need a cloud print for otherwise ?
  • johnmaguire2013 7y ago
    - Printing from Chromebooks - Printing easily from Linux - Printing from your phone - etc.
    • leonlag 7y ago
      > - Printing easily from Linux This is as easy as it can be without needing cloud print though > - Printing from Chromebooks > - Printing from your phone This is an artificial restriction created by google. There is already a network printing protocol that works without the "cloud". You just have to support it.
      • johnmaguire2013 7y ago
        I've always struggled to set up network printing on Linux.
• tech234a 7y ago
  It’s unfortunate that Cloud Print will be shutting down. It was a convenient and useful utility. It couldn’t have cost that much to run. Perhaps the shutdown has something to do with the product possibly being based on Google Talk? The port requirements for the print server include: “5222 TCP (XMPP, using STARTTLS), with a persistent connection to: talk.google.com.” [1] [1]: https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170 https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170 (Note: I also posted this comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815)
  • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    This seems pretty plausible considering Hangouts, aka Talk 2, is being shut down the same month. So weird that presumably they glommed their print service on top of chat.
    • tech234a 7y ago
      The Google Talk connection appears to only be used to receive print job notifications on the print server. I guess it made sense in 2010 when Cloud Print was launched.
  • dang 7y ago
    Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, I have to go find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the replies to the surviving copy. That takes quite a lot of REPL work. Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email hn@ycombinator.com and get us to merge them. Then your comment will get moved to the winning branch, and you've benefited the whole community with an un-split discussion. (I appreciate your mentioning the duplicates, though, because otherwise we wouldn't have known about them. Maybe there's a software idea in there.)
    • PascLeRasc 7y ago
• gowld 7y ago
  "quietly".
• NicoJuicy 7y ago
  I don't think Google understand how essential product support is.. It's one of the reasons why Microsoft is extremely popular for the cloud ( I think). Microsoft is very clear on products which aren't SLA supported. The only thing I remember is killing Silverlight. And seeing .net core thrive, it was the right decision. But don't forget, that changing the direction of the company was made public with a new CEO, although undeniably Ballmer prepared the foundation for Azure now. Crossplatform products ( eg. office) were always ready to release, they just didn't do it.
  • contextfree 7y ago
    How was it the right decision? Silverlight was cross-platform, then they made a Windows-specific fork which is WinRT XAML/WinUI (most people don't realize this but this stack originated as a repurposing of the Silverlight codebase directly, it wasn't a rewrite), now they are apparently hoping to make it cross platform again (see e.g., https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/winui_winrt_windows_api_webassembly/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/winui_winrt_windows... ) It seems like they could have taken a less roundabout route to get there.
    • NicoJuicy 7y ago
      WinUI is based on .net core. Silverlight on .net framework. At the time, it was not easy to port WPF to core ( mostly because of System.Drawing), they did it now and it's a new framework.
      • contextfree 7y ago
        Silverlight wasn't built on the full .NET Framework CLR, it was built on CoreCLR which was the direct ancestor of today's .NET Core. From https://docs.microsoft.com/enus/dotnet/standard/glossary https://docs.microsoft.com/enus/dotnet/standard/glossary : "Originally, CoreCLR was the runtime of Silverlight and was designed to run on multiple platforms, specifically Windows and OS X. CoreCLR is now part of .NET Core and represents a simplified version of the CLR. It's still a cross-platform runtime, now including support for many Linux distributions. CoreCLR is also a virtual machine with JIT and code execution capabilities."
• awill 7y ago
  This is terrible. I use Linux at home, and Linux has always had difficulty printing. I deliberately bought a Brother laser printer with Google Cloud Print to avoid these issues. It also makes it easy to print from my phone. Had I known this, I might have bought an HP printer, which are known to have better Linux drivers....
• xyst 7y ago
  Coincides with the slow death of the printing industry
• swills 7y ago
  Google: We recommend that you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy.
• asveikau 7y ago
  Network protocols for printing on a LAN are quite old. LPD and SMB are two that I use at home. I know I am an advanced user and this won't solve it for the masses, but if I combine that with ssh I can already print anywhere. So I don't completely understand why you need a proprietary Google "cloud" service that they can sunset some years later and break. When I heard about this I wondered why someone can't build a consumer-friendly solution on these older protocols. Of course, printing itself is less relevant than it was 20 years ago, so it's not exactly a booming industry.
• erikbye 7y ago
  Just got an email saying they are shutting down Google Translator Toolkit, too.
• dmix 7y ago
  > Regardless, Google is getting savaged by bloggers for killing yet another service, one that most of them never even tried, let alone used regularly. I’ve got to agree here, this feature got replaced by a native ChromeOS printing feature and probably wasn’t being used much. It’s not as bad as others.
  • jessaustin 7y ago
    I find the service to be very convenient when I have something my parents need to see. It's so much easier to just print the damn thing on their printer, than to walk them through the process of navigating to a particular site, opening a particular attachment on a particular email, etc. That's often when I'm using a chromebook, but not necessarily. All you need is a browser to use this service.
• wehrkeoruw 7y ago
  Has anyone tried buying these sunsetting projects from Google? I'd definitely pay like $3-$5/mo to have this service, and the implementation is involved enough that it'd be a hassle to duplicate.
• netwanderer3 7y ago
  Everyone is criticizing Google for ending many of their services lately. However, are we being biased? Considering a very high amount of various different services Google is offering (much more than any other typical company), it would make sense that their discontinuing rate would be higher than others as well. Someone should do a statistics check or comparison vs. other big companies for a more accurate assessment. The fact that Google gets reported on the news more often may make their service cancellation rate appear with a higher frequency as well. It's fashionable to blame Google for most things these days, but in honesty, if Google were truly evil they could have done much worse things. Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to. For example, throughout all these years I could never understand how Google allowed Yelp to become what they are today. Google own all the core technologies in that space: search, map, mobile OS. They literally have all the home fied advantages, yet Google decided to take a step back and allowed Yelp to take the lead. They could have easily destroyed Yelp anytime they wanted to but they never did that. To me personally, Google is probably the most reasonable and undervalued company out there. With similar power in their hands, other companies would have just gone all out and probably be extremely evil for a crazy amount of profits in return, but for Google they have always refrained themselves from doing exactly that. Too bad most people just never considered this angle.
  • scottlocklin 7y ago
    > Everyone is criticizing Google for ending many of their services lately. However, are we being biased? I dunno; I don't really care about any of it; I've never trusted them enough to use any of their products I wasn't actually giving them money for. >Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to. Lolwut? No, actually, they don't. They didn't beat Yelp in the early days because they weren't in the game. They may eventually do so, as Yelp degenerates into a stupid protection racket, but hopefully this entire idea goes away, as until they solve the sibyl problem, its a horse shit idea. And if they started doing crap like this (for no reason, mind you: google is an ad company), they'd very likely end up lots of little baby googles the way ATT did. They probably will anyway. And good riddance to bad rubbish. Of course they've long since jumped the shark, and even removed the "don't be evil" part of their corporate motto.
• nickhalfasleep 7y ago
  I have this setup for my parents to allow them to print to their chromebooks. This will be annoying as heck to replace.
• jdofaz 7y ago
  On the bright side, for me, this is a product I never used. Not even once.
• jaredhansen 7y ago
  Well, it finally happened: we outlasted Google! Hi, founder of Breezy here (www.breezy.com), a secure cloud / mobile print infrastructure that actually is "enterprise-ready". (For example: we have tens of thousands of active users across thousands of retail branches for one of the top 3 banks in the US, plus thousands more across dozens of countries around the world.) I started Breezy in 2009 because, as a corporate lawyer at the time, I needed a way to print from my BlackBerry and couldn't find one. I applied to the 2010 YC batch with Breezy, got rejected, went through Founder Institute instead, raised a 750k seed round in 2011, almost ran out of money, pivoted to an enterprise focus, raised a bit more money, barely survived a BS patent lawsuit from a Canadian competitor now owned by HP, went through lots of other ups and downs, and here we are. We're never going to be a unicorn, but it's a neat little business in a niche that while "nice to have" for most companies, is critical to some. If you need quality cloud print infrastructure, hit me up. --- Meanwhile, a few thoughts from a 10-year industry veteran: - GCP was never enterprise-class in any way. "Utterly unreliable" was the most common complaint we heard from customers. - The core problem for a lot of enterprise use cases isn't driver incompatibility; it's network routing. Your MFPs are on this network segment over here, but your users (especially mobile devices) are on that one over there. Cloud printing can save you a lot of network headaches. - "Driverless printing" doesn't work very well, and never has. This goes double for Mopria, which while by far the most successful of attempts, is pretty shaky in real-life usage, and lacks most basic capabilities around security, audits, encryption etc etc. - AirPrint is pretty good and is consistently getting better, but it's always been very consumer-focused and remains so today as far as I can tell. One of the really great features they could add to simplify enterprise adoption would be to enable querying "Print Servers" (which the AirPrint spec does recognize) for lists of printers served by them. Right now there's no way to do this, so in order to reach an AirPrint print queue that's not bonjour-routable from your current IP, you have to have a config profile that points you to that specific queue, rather than to a server that returns a group of queues. - The other major improvement opportunity there would be the ability to use certs to completely identify the user, thereby enabling (say) an Intune-provisioned iPad to print natively to a Xerox-managed enterprise pull-print / badge-release system, so that users get a native experience of printing via one queue, to any printer in the org. This is possible with Breezy today but there are a number of hoops to jump through on the admin side.
• thrillgore 7y ago
  Just another day that ends in Y. Meanwhile, game developers have lost faith in Stadia and it's been out for a week at best. The reason? Google kills its own products. It's time for a management change at Google and Alphabet.
• taco_emoji 7y ago
  So is there any REAL alternative out there? Yeah yeah, ChromeOS supports CUPS now, which is great if your printer connects to the network, but what about those of us who have an older printer that's USB-only? Moreover, how do you print from Android now? Go ahead and search for instructions how to do that which don't involve either A) Google Cloud Print or B) a vendor-specific app (which probably only works with network-connected printers).
• markstos 7y ago
  I'm glad to see Google is dropping their closed-source, "share a copy of everything you print with Google" service. Instead, they are doubling down on supporting open source printing standards and projects like CUPS. That's a win.
• alexnewman 7y ago
  Yet another reason to switch to hcaptcha.com. Just wait for google to turn off your homepage.
• QueridoGuy 7y ago
  I do believe that right after the event of the first google pixel, all google products were “failure” by their standards. they haven’t created anything big ever since. Same goes to Microsoft and their latest product kills. At least their new products are getting better now. Google never created anything significant. That’s why I wouldn’t trust their new products. They really need to stop publishing products that feels like beta. Their plans always seem like: Beta-final release > take long time to finalize it > kill stage
  • ben_jones 7y ago
    Same goes for Microsoft? Looking through https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/allproducts https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/allproducts thats a real stretch.
• irrational 7y ago
  I'd like the Unicode Consortium to add a surprised (but not really surprised) emoji that we only use when Google kills a product. I think this will be okay since we will be using it constantly.
• projektfu 7y ago
  I didn't see anything about the migration path for servers using the CloudPrint API. My medical records/pharmacy/invoicing software uses CloudPrint to reach printers. What are the alternatives for SAAS?
  • januzis 7y ago
    PrintNode, only had good experience with them, migrated from cloud print after I could not get some thermal printers working properly
• Teknoman117 7y ago
  That's a shame. It's the only way I could get my printer to consistently work across platforms. Oh well...
• lousken 7y ago
  Stadia is next
• mancerayder 7y ago
  New motto: Print No Evil.
• Mikeb85 7y ago
  Well it seems like it's more or less being replaced by Mopria printing, which is a platform agnostic wireless printing service and already incorporated into recent versions of Android. Not a bad thing IMO, replacing Google services with new industry standard services.
• undoware 7y ago
  I'm reading a lot of commenters above chime in with explanations for why it's logistically hard for GOOG to maintain these scut-work keep-lights-on projects because they are so unappealing to their engineers and often involves e.g. boring, non-promotable work. This gave me a Radical idea. So, I'm one of the lucky few trans folks who have managed to survive and flourish. I'm vividly aware of at least one reservoir of brilliant people who don't get a crack to show the world what they can do. Instead of just shuttering projects that aren't sexy enough, or are too difficult to maintain, or don't contribute to your OKRs or promotions. Why not give them away? Why not give them to a team of folks with: disabilities, barriers to professional advancement; etc. Google could quality-ensure and knowledge-transfer, meanwhile doing social good, and getting ongoing support for a product that they would otherwise have to add to the increasingly embarrassing pile of abandonware? I'm not saying it would be easy -- I can think of any number of places where this could go horribly wrong -- but it is quite obviously a step in the right direction to try. There are lots of great minds that would kill for a chance to do something boring for a change, because financial (and then food, and then shelter) instability is anything but.
• ryanmercer 7y ago
  So how do they expect us to print from Chrome OS (or our phones and tablets for that matter)? I mean, my daily driver is a Chromebox.
• rpmisms 7y ago
  FUCK. This was my only good solution for making all the printers in my office work together. I'm glad I'm leaving next week.
• harikb 7y ago
  People rely on a lot of "free" Google services, but don't realize that it takes an enormous amount of people to keep things running without security issues. Another point is that, it takes hundreds of thousands of paying customers to get something to a point it is self sustainable. Just because a few random users are ready to pay $50 for the service, if at all, does not make it successful for Google or any other company. Short of "regulating" these companies to open-source or sell the infra to a caretaker entity when services are shutdown, there is no other option. Even then, it is a massive ask of Google (that every service be separable from anything proprietary Google infra provides), and it also unrealistic to expect another company / governing body to run it without issues. At this point, it is what it is. If you use a free service, expect it to die at some point in the future. This happens to many services where the entire company disappears. The fact that Google survived 20 years shouldn't be held against them if products went down and the company didn't. Numbers are enough to sway the stats and make Google the bad company that shuts-down services too often.
• etxm 7y ago
  It interesting to me when I see people passionate about google killing a service. If you’re that passionate and people will miss the service, then that sounds like a business opportunity to me. Just because it’s not revenue positive (enough) for google, doesn’t mean it couldn’t support a smaller start up.
• vkaku 7y ago
  Well, this one had more value than Stadia.
• cmurf 7y ago
  I wonder if they'll replace it with IPP Everywhere support? Totally dropping the ability to print out of the box would be disappointing, but I suppose someone could package up an app that enables IPP Everywhere printing. Google Cloud Print might have had more sophisticated discovery.
• outworlder 7y ago
  Google, what the heck? Cloud Print was THE main reason why I never fully switched away from Chrome. It was more reliable than even the "native" printing capabilities of my printer, which would randomly refuse to print, but over Cloud Print it worked every time. It was also very convenient to send print jobs even while not at home. Well, thanks for allowing me to get rid of Chrome entirely, I guess.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Chromebooks can't be that far behind after this one.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  Google got loved by offering tiny things like these... I don't get it. Why stop there, just shut maps.
• sytelus 7y ago
  So, why these companies can't look for other avenues then just killing products? Alternatives: - Put it in maintenance mode and outsource it. A 5 person team offshore for this mode would cost ~$250K. - Open source it - Sell it to a startup - Sell it to an equity firm - Make a cloud service out of it - Add advertising/data collection to it that might benefit other products/AI efforts (with user agreement) I am of the firm believer that all code that gets written should be preserved. Someone out there sometime would be looking for it.
• willemgroen 7y ago
  PaperCut made Mobility Print free this week: https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/ https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-pri... We are also adding off-network printing support early 2020, also 100% free. Our gift to you. With Mobility Print you can print from BYO Windows, Mac, Chromebook, iOS and Android. devices.
• qazpot 7y ago
  Why don't they open source the projects instead of shutting them down.
• isawczuk 7y ago
  I will try to defend their decision. In era of avaliablity of cheap screens, paper is used mostly as a temporary storage eg. tickets. If we could encourage using more eco solutions this would be one of the steps forward.
• forgingahead 7y ago
  I had never heard of this product before this HN post. While I agree Google kills off many useful products, perhaps there is a deeper reason that many products were birthed without any real long-term plan or ownership?
• willemgroen 7y ago
  PaperCut made Mobility Print free on the same day as Google's announcement: https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/ https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-pri... PaperCut Mobility Print is an alternative to Google Cloud Print.