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> We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution and execute a migration strategy. Something enterprise customers love hearing. Oo

> 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.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  If you click on the article above, the marketing material very clearly stated "Enterprise-Ready". It seems likely some people may have bought-in due to the Google brand, but your right I don't have any sales numbers.
- joombaga 7y ago
  It was billed as a product feature on printers themselves. Mine had it, and I don't remember a "(beta)" on the box.

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.
ben_jones 7y ago
If you click on the article above, the marketing material very clearly stated "Enterprise-Ready". It seems likely some people may have bought-in due to the Google brand, but your right I don't have any sales numbers.
joombaga 7y ago
It was billed as a product feature on printers themselves. Mine had it, and I don't remember a "(beta)" on the box.