11 ms·

Google Sunsets Google Cloud Print

129 points by franze 6y ago

Steltek 6y ago
Printing is a horrible experience these days. Even in a managed office environment, you're not safe from all the rough edges. - Drivers. Why does this still feel so difficult? Just define a public bytecode API (no, not PS) and be done with this already. - Ink, paper, etc. Even if you shell out $Texas for a laser printer, you still have to manage paper and then it's probably not any good for photos (probably the only thing I want to print). - Protocol/tech stack straight out of the Old World. Cloud Print seemed like the Dropbox to printing's SMB. Proprietary but less terrible. - The waiting for anything to happen. If I have to go to the trouble of using your proprietary driver to do anything, can't the printer at least leverage more of the host computer to speed things up? The whole process feels only slightly less finicky than using a 3D printer.
- ccozan 6y ago
  Using IPP isn't that bad. There are no drivers involved. And printing can work via a cloud ( but some software involved to manage your printers ). TBH businesses that do serious printing do no buy low end inkjet, but mid to hi end printers that have this features ( and many more) and mostly are covered thru some service contract with a 3rd party which manages them.
- donatj 6y ago
  My work makes a big deal about setting up a printer. IT needs to add each printer by request and they come around with a flash drive of drivers. It hasn’t actually been that hard for a while, I’ve added the printers I’ve needed myself via AirPrint, no drivers necessary. I feel like the printer world got easy and no one told anyone.
- remir 6y ago
  Airprint is pretty neat. Used it on my iPhone a couple of times and it's a pretty painless experience. No apps/driver to download. You press "print" and it discover the printer and does its thing.
code4tee 6y ago
Another tombstone goes up: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ It’s a legit risk to be basing anything on a Google product or service. Know too many stories of people or companies getting burned when Google wakes up one morning and decides to abandon another product.
- duhast 6y ago
  The Google Graveyard is a Myth: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hximz7/the_google_graveyard_is_a_myth/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hximz7/the_google_g...
  - code4tee 6y ago
    Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.
  - falcor84 6y ago
    One of the first examples there of not killing a product is "Inbox -> GMail Features" which is almost entirely misleading. The biggest productivity benefits from Inbox, such as bundles and leaving notes directly in the inbox have not been ported. And of course the biggest benefit of Inbox was the clean interface itself. I still curse Google under my breath every day about them killing it off.
  - totaldude87 6y ago
    I dont know which is worse, killing a product that you are using or asking you to switch to another new product which does almost same thing :(
  - crocodiletears 6y ago
    The first example (GPM -> Youtube Music) is a great example of why 'merged into other products' doesn't delegitimize complaints about Google killing products. YTM (last time I checked) lacks feature parity with its predecessor, has a questionable migration path, and seems more interested in music videos that you can incidentally play as songs. It integrates messily with its host platform (hn comments on the last thread I read about it indicated that Google's algorithms were inadvertantly tagging unrelated content as 'music'), and dilutes focus on the prior project's core feature-set. Just because another product's abstract contains some of the product I'm using's core doesn't mean I want to switch over to it because Google's got a short attention span, and wants to reimplement the product I'm using in the most approximate manner possible.
mobilio 6y ago
That's too bad because this give lot of opportunity to share internal CUPS printers over internet: https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector Anyone knows workarounds?
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Put your connected printer pc on wire guard vpn, or use a service like tailscale, that way you can securely use "cloud" print, with any device.
oefrha 6y ago
This has been discussed almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815
fs111 6y ago
ah ffs, why do they have to do this all the time?
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Meanwhile Microsoft are doing the opposite: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/windows/universal-print https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/windows/univer...
- pgt 6y ago
  Long Microsoft! Satya is making good decisions. What I've learned from 15+ years of solving problems is that problems have Lindy properties: Problems that have been around for a long time will be around for a long time. And printing is a problem as old as computing.
- izacus 6y ago
  This is literally the same thing Google is adopting as a replacement for GCP.
rootsudo 6y ago
:(
levosmetalo 6y ago
Finally one shutdown that is clearly positive for users. I hope Goole will also make sure that cloud print app is also removed from all android phones.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  if it's so positive, why are the other people in this thread so upset? (early thread, not lots of responses yet)
  - swiley 6y ago
    Most of them are probably upset about all the other stuff google got rid of that people actually used.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Google Cloud Print is a service I actually use. However, because of the way Google acts, I've stopped taking advantage of new services they add, as I can't trust them to remain available. I now actively avoid Google services whenever I can.
  - nvr219 6y ago
    Other people in this thread will be upset because hn loves to get mad whenever Google shuts down anything even if they don't use it.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      it sounds like most of the responses of people upset are because they use it.
    - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
      I actually used Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Inbox, and Reader. It is annoying to use a service and spend time and effort getting everything setup on it (e.g. setting up computers and printers, importing music, etc.) to have the rug pulled out from under you without a replacement or explanation. I value stability and long-term solutions so I don't have to continually "fix" things that were previously working fine. Each time Google shuts down something that I use, it impacts me and I have to change things. If they force me to change things, then I might as well look into alternative non-Google solutions that have better stability and longer lifespans.
tsjq 6y ago
Okay what's next in line for the Killed-By-Google ? GMail ? Google Duo ? Google Keep ? Google Contacts ? Google Calendar ? Google Health / Fit ?
- w0utert 6y ago
  Stadia, probably >_<
  - scotth 6y ago
    Stadia is great, and I think people are starting to see that.
    - mcny 6y ago
      I'll agree with you when Stadia free tier includes free to play games like league of legends like nVidia's GeForce Now does.
      - ShamelessC 6y ago
        Geforce now let's you play many games you already purchased through steam as well. great feature
    - himinlomax 6y ago
      Technically Stadia is good and works surprisingly well, but the game selection is pitiful.
      - scotth 6y ago
        But getting better all the time. I actually now have more than I have the time to play. That said, I'm coming from not having a console for many years, so all the games are brand new to me. :)
    - forest_dweller 6y ago
      No it isn't. It is total garbage. It doesn't do what it promises. It requires a huge amount of bandwidth that isn't realistic if you live anywhere else that doesn't have google fibre. The service is kinda expensive and there isn't many games for it. In comparison I could get a PS4 or an XBox with a games pass for similar amount of money. Also no second hand games (I can go to the local CeX and get old games for next to nothing). Everyone I know (I run a discord with about 100 gamers on there) think it is garbage and the last time I checked the sales numbers reflected that.
howlgarnish 6y ago
Announced a year ago: https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-2020/amp/ https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-20...
blantonl 6y ago
My understanding what this was the only way to print via Chromebooks? What is the new way to print from ChromeOS?
- izacus 6y ago
  No, ChromeOS ships CUPS for awhile now.
  - edent 6y ago
    Sort of. There are still lots of USB printers which just won't work with ChromeOS - despite working fine in regular Linux.
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  Chrome support printing with printer that support IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol
- quaffapint 6y ago
  If you have access to a Windows printer share you could use that too. That's how we did it. It often broke though and you would have to re-login to your chrome account on the Windows machine to re-connect it.
pgt 6y ago
Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline. I have stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo is great), Google Chrome (Firefox is great), Google Domains (use Gandi / Route53). The most difficult products to shake are Gmail, Docs and Sheets, but I am gradually weaning myself off. The only signal that seems to get through to corporates is to vocally withhold your funds. PMs at Google probably underestimate the % of people on HN who control the company purse for software spending. Personally, there is no way I can risk locking myself or my employer (that just raised a Series B) into any Google products at this point. If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  > serious about building product consider working at Google my view is that if you're serious about "building product", then you wouldnt work at google, or Facebook, or for anyone else. You would build and run something yourself. If you like the "building" part but are indifferent about "product" then somewhere like Google seems great.
  - ako 6y ago
    Maybe google lets you focus more on the product part? If you run something yourself, most of your time will be building company, not so much product.
  - generalk 6y ago
    > if you're serious about "building product" [...] You > would build and run something yourself. Perhaps as a side project, something useful just for yourself. Lots of developers scratch itches they can't scratch at their day job that way; new tech, greenfield ideas instead of maintaining someone else's garbage, etc. And sometimes those devs go into business for themselves and realize that they don't get to spend all their time building product -- now they've got to build the marketing page and write a bunch of copy and take a ton of screenshots (of features they know they're going to change), and figure out how sales funnels work, and all the other things that go into running a business. Building and running your own company is the fastest way to get out of pure product development I've ever seen.
amiga-workbench 6y ago
It was nice when it worked, but my Brother monochrome printer would regularly un-pair itself from my Google account. And since I only print documents once or twice a year, it was unpaired every time I went to use it.
- wffurr 6y ago
  As a bonus, Brother (often the top-recommended printer model) has decided to entirely drop support for ChromeOS. https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/153313/~/google-chrome-os-and-chromebook-compatibility https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/153313/... "Google has announced the end of support for the Google Cloud Print service, effective December 31, 2020. Currently, we do not have any additional information to provide regarding Brother machines' future compatibility with Google Chrome OS." https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en Note that Brother is conspicuously absent from the list of compatible printers at the bottom.
jchallis 6y ago
In case someone from Google is reading this: - I am a real person who really manages IT decisions for a real company. - I use Google Cloud Print to keep our zoo of devices happily talking to our Japanese printers in the US and Asia. - You made my day hard by killing this product. There is time that I could have spent with my family or on my health that I will have to divert elsewhere to fix a problem that didn't exist for me yesterday. - My memory is long.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Why does changing vendors impact your family and health time? Sounds like your employer's expectations may be more of a problem.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    Presumably they now have a new business necessary project with a maximum 2 month delivery timeline, over the holiday season. It seems completely reasonable that an IT decision maker needs to keep the printers running? A sudden, new project during the holiday season would definitely impact my family time at least. Edit: Apparently they announced this last year, so that seems to make the current situation acute by choice or lack of knowledge.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Many companies have an attitude of "when the work is done, you can go home". Since the cloud print migration will be more work, rather than OP going home at 4pm to see family and go for a jog, now he'll be staying in the office testing printer setups and going home at 9pm after his children are in bed.
    - agentdrtran 6y ago
      Other companies' sadistic cultures are not really Google's fault, though.
- dmortin 6y ago
  It's known for a year. Why didn't you act since then?
forest_dweller 6y ago
Don't rely on anything from Google. They will take it away as soon as the metrics don't directly support it, leaving you high and dry. Don't use these cloud services. You can't trust them.
adontz 6y ago
I used Google Cloud Print myself, so I've started a project to resolve printing problem and some other ones. It was inspired by sunset of Google Cloud Print. I believe we should have a cloud printing solution which will not disappear suddenly.
grej 6y ago
killedbygoogle++
whoevercares 6y ago
Being able to sunset services is not necessarily a bad thing to the dev teams —- it might just make developers happier so they don’t have to maintain unpopular services and do boring work. In contrast AWS/Amazon has a huge “no one way door” culture (so sunset decision rarely happens since people will point fingers) which could impose maintenance and ownership burden for teams. IMO DNA is different —- Amazon still has the retailer’s DNA
- sfifs 6y ago
  You realise this is one of the main reasons AWS is an order of magnitude bigger than Google Cloud in revenue right?
  - whoevercares 6y ago
    Sure, I’m just trying to guess why Google choose to do things this way. What’s more, they dare to do this for some reason. On the other hand, Google’s work life balance might be order of magnitude better than Amazon. I would like to be the Boss of Amazon or an employee of Google :)
    - sfifs 6y ago
      Their quarterly financial filings may give you a clue... the search, YT and network ads business revenue and margins are so huge that what they do anywhere else pretty much doesn't really matter from a corporate results standpoint :-) I've both lost and hired employees to/from Google and compared to my industry, by all accounts the culture around financial discipline appears to be way less important which may explain some of what you see.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    That and the fact they had like 5 years of a head start.
ianhawes 6y ago
PrintNode is an excellent alternative (superior IMO), though for some printers that used the embedded Cloud Print app, you will need to setup a server.
gegtik 6y ago
I already couldn't print to my local brother printer despite it showing up on a chromebook. Just silently hung. I found out from searching online I had to configure a generic printer instead??
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
red2awn 6y ago
2030: Google Sunsets Search
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  2040: Google sunsets users
- dazc 6y ago
  You are being optimistic. I expect 'Google Search' to become 'Google Ads World' within the next 4 years.
api 6y ago
Great! I love when these inherently panopticon enabling cloud-backed device services are sunsetted, making bricks (or partial bricks in this case) out of stuff people bought. It harms the public's trust in this computing paradigm.
blisterpeanuts 6y ago
Rather than retire products like Cloud Print, why not spin them off as separate companies, or sell them? If there's a couple million users of a niche product, that would seem to argue for its continuation. It seems as if this "sunset" approach unnecessarily alienates the user community and reflects badly on Google.
- jbellis 6y ago
  there's a couple million users of a free niche product.
- gumby 6y ago
  One consequence of Google's monorepo is that even small services like this might depend on all sorts of google infrastructure and thus be effectively impossible to spin off. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: the point of the monorepo is to make it easier and faster to write things like this in the first place.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    In fact, I believe Cloud Print depends on Google Talk/XMPP!
    - gumby 6y ago
      That’s pretty funny and might be a good reason for it being sunsetted.
  - supergirl 6y ago
    it's not because it's a monorepo. that affects just version control. it's the fact that is may be deeply dependent on other google services. would have been same problem with many repos
    - gumby 6y ago
      Technically true: I used it as synecdoche: (essentially) everybody has access to (essentially) everything. And also a bit of hyperbole on my part as not everything is in the same repo.
easton 6y ago
Before you get spooked by another project going to the Google Graveyard(tm), they are sunsetting this in favor of Internet Printing Protocol[0][1], the same open protocol that AirPrint and Microsoft's new Universal Print uses. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol 1: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  This is for ‘Chrome OS’. Is this also being introduced for Android devices? As AirPrint is a reasonable protocol I tried looking for how to print to it from non Apple operating systems but all I found was ways to make Linux servers present their printers as AirPrint printers. Great but how to print to them from Linux/Android/Windows?
  - gumby 6y ago
    It's not that complicated. The protocol is defined here https://tools.ietf.org/html/std92 https://tools.ietf.org/html/std92 but if you don't feel like doing the plumbing yourself, just use CUPS.
  - izacus 6y ago
    I think Android has it in "Default print service", although there's certanly printers that will be left behind. E.g. my Cloud Print compatible Oki doesn't have a way forward for Android anymore.
    - tssva 6y ago
      Have you tried the Oki print app?
      - izacus 6y ago
        Yeah, it's pretty awful and it doesn't register as a print service (so you can't print from other apps).
lincolnq 6y ago
Funny story about this. A few years ago, someone wrote an @channel, something like “SF office be careful which printer you select, several items from your office have ended up printed in Boston” To which I replied “this sounds impossible” and started trying to figure out how this person could be so confused about printing that documents might magically make their way across the country from office to office! At which point I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that Cloud Print existed, and that it was necessary to set up printers this way because of Chromebooks. Oops. Not sure yet whether I am happy that it’s gone, or sad that other old-school techs like me won’t be able to have similar experiences going forward :)
- aikinai 6y ago
  This has nothing to do with Cloud Print specifically; printers have had support for IP printing for years. And don't most major companies have their printers set up so you print from and to anywhere?
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  It's not specific to cloud print, it's quite usual. In large companies several sites are on the same internal network, and you can send your print job to any printer. In my company I can easily print my document on another continent.
tobltobs 6y ago
When I recently had to make a decision about which Cloud provider to use, Google, although looking fine technically, wasn't even an option because of their killing everything attitude. Reading stuff like [1] I am not assured they will never kill their Cloud offerings. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  Almost makes me wonder how long until they kill GMail.
werber 6y ago
I didn't know what cloud print was but I think I'm convinced I need fast mail now, haven't seen something so lauded in a minute
dole 6y ago
I've got a native Google Print option on my Canon printer; makes me wonder how much manufacturers spent on development and how many devices it got shoehorned into.
hi41 6y ago
We have a chromebbook and all four members of my family cannot print to a Brother hl-3170cdwv printer. To print, we log into a windows computer which recognizes that printer. Why can’t the chromebook do printing when both are on the home wifi? For this reason I am not going purchasea chromebook next time. It will be a windows computer.
- seized 6y ago
  Depending on your skill, Chromebook will print just fine to CUPS running on a tiny Linux VM or Raspberry Pi.
mraza007 6y ago
Why is google famous for killing their services is it because they run out of funding to fund those services

129 points by franze 6y ago

Printing is a horrible experience these days. Even in a managed office environment, you're not safe from all the rough edges. - Drivers. Why does this still feel so difficult? Just define a public bytecode API (no, not PS) and be done with this already. - Ink, paper, etc. Even if you shell out $Texas for a laser printer, you still have to manage paper and then it's probably not any good for photos (probably the only thing I want to print). - Protocol/tech stack straight out of the Old World. Cloud Print seemed like the Dropbox to printing's SMB. Proprietary but less terrible. - The waiting for anything to happen. If I have to go to the trouble of using your proprietary driver to do anything, can't the printer at least leverage more of the host computer to speed things up? The whole process feels only slightly less finicky than using a 3D printer.

ccozan 6y ago
Using IPP isn't that bad. There are no drivers involved. And printing can work via a cloud ( but some software involved to manage your printers ). TBH businesses that do serious printing do no buy low end inkjet, but mid to hi end printers that have this features ( and many more) and mostly are covered thru some service contract with a 3rd party which manages them.
donatj 6y ago
My work makes a big deal about setting up a printer. IT needs to add each printer by request and they come around with a flash drive of drivers. It hasn’t actually been that hard for a while, I’ve added the printers I’ve needed myself via AirPrint, no drivers necessary. I feel like the printer world got easy and no one told anyone.
remir 6y ago
Airprint is pretty neat. Used it on my iPhone a couple of times and it's a pretty painless experience. No apps/driver to download. You press "print" and it discover the printer and does its thing.

code4tee 6y ago

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

duhast 6y ago
The Google Graveyard is a Myth: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hximz7/the_google_graveyard_is_a_myth/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hximz7/the_google_g...
- code4tee 6y ago
  Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.
- falcor84 6y ago
  One of the first examples there of not killing a product is "Inbox -> GMail Features" which is almost entirely misleading. The biggest productivity benefits from Inbox, such as bundles and leaving notes directly in the inbox have not been ported. And of course the biggest benefit of Inbox was the clean interface itself. I still curse Google under my breath every day about them killing it off.
- totaldude87 6y ago
  I dont know which is worse, killing a product that you are using or asking you to switch to another new product which does almost same thing :(
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  The first example (GPM -> Youtube Music) is a great example of why 'merged into other products' doesn't delegitimize complaints about Google killing products. YTM (last time I checked) lacks feature parity with its predecessor, has a questionable migration path, and seems more interested in music videos that you can incidentally play as songs. It integrates messily with its host platform (hn comments on the last thread I read about it indicated that Google's algorithms were inadvertantly tagging unrelated content as 'music'), and dilutes focus on the prior project's core feature-set. Just because another product's abstract contains some of the product I'm using's core doesn't mean I want to switch over to it because Google's got a short attention span, and wants to reimplement the product I'm using in the most approximate manner possible.

mobilio 6y ago

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

anaganisk 6y ago
Put your connected printer pc on wire guard vpn, or use a service like tailscale, that way you can securely use "cloud" print, with any device.

oefrha 6y ago

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

fs111 6y ago

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

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

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

pgt 6y ago
Long Microsoft! Satya is making good decisions. What I've learned from 15+ years of solving problems is that problems have Lindy properties: Problems that have been around for a long time will be around for a long time. And printing is a problem as old as computing.
izacus 6y ago
This is literally the same thing Google is adopting as a replacement for GCP.

rootsudo 6y ago

levosmetalo 6y ago

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

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
if it's so positive, why are the other people in this thread so upset? (early thread, not lots of responses yet)
- swiley 6y ago
  Most of them are probably upset about all the other stuff google got rid of that people actually used.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Google Cloud Print is a service I actually use. However, because of the way Google acts, I've stopped taking advantage of new services they add, as I can't trust them to remain available. I now actively avoid Google services whenever I can.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Other people in this thread will be upset because hn loves to get mad whenever Google shuts down anything even if they don't use it.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    it sounds like most of the responses of people upset are because they use it.
  - thesuperbigfrog 6y ago
    I actually used Google Cloud Print, Google Play Music, Inbox, and Reader. It is annoying to use a service and spend time and effort getting everything setup on it (e.g. setting up computers and printers, importing music, etc.) to have the rug pulled out from under you without a replacement or explanation. I value stability and long-term solutions so I don't have to continually "fix" things that were previously working fine. Each time Google shuts down something that I use, it impacts me and I have to change things. If they force me to change things, then I might as well look into alternative non-Google solutions that have better stability and longer lifespans.

tsjq 6y ago

Okay what's next in line for the Killed-By-Google ? GMail ? Google Duo ? Google Keep ? Google Contacts ? Google Calendar ? Google Health / Fit ?

w0utert 6y ago
Stadia, probably >_<
- scotth 6y ago
  Stadia is great, and I think people are starting to see that.
  - mcny 6y ago
    I'll agree with you when Stadia free tier includes free to play games like league of legends like nVidia's GeForce Now does.
    - ShamelessC 6y ago
      Geforce now let's you play many games you already purchased through steam as well. great feature
  - himinlomax 6y ago
    Technically Stadia is good and works surprisingly well, but the game selection is pitiful.
    - scotth 6y ago
      But getting better all the time. I actually now have more than I have the time to play. That said, I'm coming from not having a console for many years, so all the games are brand new to me. :)
  - forest_dweller 6y ago
    No it isn't. It is total garbage. It doesn't do what it promises. It requires a huge amount of bandwidth that isn't realistic if you live anywhere else that doesn't have google fibre. The service is kinda expensive and there isn't many games for it. In comparison I could get a PS4 or an XBox with a games pass for similar amount of money. Also no second hand games (I can go to the local CeX and get old games for next to nothing). Everyone I know (I run a discord with about 100 gamers on there) think it is garbage and the last time I checked the sales numbers reflected that.

howlgarnish 6y ago

Announced a year ago: https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-2020/amp/ https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-20...

blantonl 6y ago

My understanding what this was the only way to print via Chromebooks? What is the new way to print from ChromeOS?

izacus 6y ago
No, ChromeOS ships CUPS for awhile now.
- edent 6y ago
  Sort of. There are still lots of USB printers which just won't work with ChromeOS - despite working fine in regular Linux.
whereistimbo 6y ago
Chrome support printing with printer that support IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol
quaffapint 6y ago
If you have access to a Windows printer share you could use that too. That's how we did it. It often broke though and you would have to re-login to your chrome account on the Windows machine to re-connect it.

pgt 6y ago

Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline. I have stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo is great), Google Chrome (Firefox is great), Google Domains (use Gandi / Route53). The most difficult products to shake are Gmail, Docs and Sheets, but I am gradually weaning myself off. The only signal that seems to get through to corporates is to vocally withhold your funds. PMs at Google probably underestimate the % of people on HN who control the company purse for software spending. Personally, there is no way I can risk locking myself or my employer (that just raised a Series B) into any Google products at this point. If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.

madeofpalk 6y ago
> serious about building product consider working at Google my view is that if you're serious about "building product", then you wouldnt work at google, or Facebook, or for anyone else. You would build and run something yourself. If you like the "building" part but are indifferent about "product" then somewhere like Google seems great.
- ako 6y ago
  Maybe google lets you focus more on the product part? If you run something yourself, most of your time will be building company, not so much product.
- generalk 6y ago
  > if you're serious about "building product" [...] You > would build and run something yourself. Perhaps as a side project, something useful just for yourself. Lots of developers scratch itches they can't scratch at their day job that way; new tech, greenfield ideas instead of maintaining someone else's garbage, etc. And sometimes those devs go into business for themselves and realize that they don't get to spend all their time building product -- now they've got to build the marketing page and write a bunch of copy and take a ton of screenshots (of features they know they're going to change), and figure out how sales funnels work, and all the other things that go into running a business. Building and running your own company is the fastest way to get out of pure product development I've ever seen.

amiga-workbench 6y ago

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

wffurr 6y ago
As a bonus, Brother (often the top-recommended printer model) has decided to entirely drop support for ChromeOS. https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/153313/~/google-chrome-os-and-chromebook-compatibility https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/153313/... "Google has announced the end of support for the Google Cloud Print service, effective December 31, 2020. Currently, we do not have any additional information to provide regarding Brother machines' future compatibility with Google Chrome OS." https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en Note that Brother is conspicuously absent from the list of compatible printers at the bottom.

jchallis 6y ago

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

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Why does changing vendors impact your family and health time? Sounds like your employer's expectations may be more of a problem.
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  Presumably they now have a new business necessary project with a maximum 2 month delivery timeline, over the holiday season. It seems completely reasonable that an IT decision maker needs to keep the printers running? A sudden, new project during the holiday season would definitely impact my family time at least. Edit: Apparently they announced this last year, so that seems to make the current situation acute by choice or lack of knowledge.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  Many companies have an attitude of "when the work is done, you can go home". Since the cloud print migration will be more work, rather than OP going home at 4pm to see family and go for a jog, now he'll be staying in the office testing printer setups and going home at 9pm after his children are in bed.
  - agentdrtran 6y ago
    Other companies' sadistic cultures are not really Google's fault, though.
dmortin 6y ago
It's known for a year. Why didn't you act since then?

forest_dweller 6y ago

Don't rely on anything from Google. They will take it away as soon as the metrics don't directly support it, leaving you high and dry. Don't use these cloud services. You can't trust them.

adontz 6y ago

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

grej 6y ago

killedbygoogle++

whoevercares 6y ago

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

sfifs 6y ago
You realise this is one of the main reasons AWS is an order of magnitude bigger than Google Cloud in revenue right?
- whoevercares 6y ago
  Sure, I’m just trying to guess why Google choose to do things this way. What’s more, they dare to do this for some reason. On the other hand, Google’s work life balance might be order of magnitude better than Amazon. I would like to be the Boss of Amazon or an employee of Google :)
  - sfifs 6y ago
    Their quarterly financial filings may give you a clue... the search, YT and network ads business revenue and margins are so huge that what they do anywhere else pretty much doesn't really matter from a corporate results standpoint :-) I've both lost and hired employees to/from Google and compared to my industry, by all accounts the culture around financial discipline appears to be way less important which may explain some of what you see.
- sofixa 6y ago
  That and the fact they had like 5 years of a head start.

ianhawes 6y ago

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

gegtik 6y ago

I already couldn't print to my local brother printer despite it showing up on a chromebook. Just silently hung. I found out from searching online I had to configure a generic printer instead??

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

red2awn 6y ago

2030: Google Sunsets Search

tinus_hn 6y ago
2040: Google sunsets users
dazc 6y ago
You are being optimistic. I expect 'Google Search' to become 'Google Ads World' within the next 4 years.

api 6y ago

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

blisterpeanuts 6y ago

Rather than retire products like Cloud Print, why not spin them off as separate companies, or sell them? If there's a couple million users of a niche product, that would seem to argue for its continuation. It seems as if this "sunset" approach unnecessarily alienates the user community and reflects badly on Google.

jbellis 6y ago
there's a couple million users of a free niche product.
gumby 6y ago
One consequence of Google's monorepo is that even small services like this might depend on all sorts of google infrastructure and thus be effectively impossible to spin off. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: the point of the monorepo is to make it easier and faster to write things like this in the first place.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  In fact, I believe Cloud Print depends on Google Talk/XMPP!
  - gumby 6y ago
    That’s pretty funny and might be a good reason for it being sunsetted.
- supergirl 6y ago
  it's not because it's a monorepo. that affects just version control. it's the fact that is may be deeply dependent on other google services. would have been same problem with many repos
  - gumby 6y ago
    Technically true: I used it as synecdoche: (essentially) everybody has access to (essentially) everything. And also a bit of hyperbole on my part as not everything is in the same repo.

easton 6y ago

Before you get spooked by another project going to the Google Graveyard(tm), they are sunsetting this in favor of Internet Printing Protocol[0][1], the same open protocol that AirPrint and Microsoft's new Universal Print uses. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol 1: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en

tinus_hn 6y ago
This is for ‘Chrome OS’. Is this also being introduced for Android devices? As AirPrint is a reasonable protocol I tried looking for how to print to it from non Apple operating systems but all I found was ways to make Linux servers present their printers as AirPrint printers. Great but how to print to them from Linux/Android/Windows?
- gumby 6y ago
  It's not that complicated. The protocol is defined here https://tools.ietf.org/html/std92 https://tools.ietf.org/html/std92 but if you don't feel like doing the plumbing yourself, just use CUPS.
- izacus 6y ago
  I think Android has it in "Default print service", although there's certanly printers that will be left behind. E.g. my Cloud Print compatible Oki doesn't have a way forward for Android anymore.
  - tssva 6y ago
    Have you tried the Oki print app?
    - izacus 6y ago
      Yeah, it's pretty awful and it doesn't register as a print service (so you can't print from other apps).

lincolnq 6y ago

Funny story about this. A few years ago, someone wrote an @channel, something like “SF office be careful which printer you select, several items from your office have ended up printed in Boston” To which I replied “this sounds impossible” and started trying to figure out how this person could be so confused about printing that documents might magically make their way across the country from office to office! At which point I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that Cloud Print existed, and that it was necessary to set up printers this way because of Chromebooks. Oops. Not sure yet whether I am happy that it’s gone, or sad that other old-school techs like me won’t be able to have similar experiences going forward :)

aikinai 6y ago
This has nothing to do with Cloud Print specifically; printers have had support for IP printing for years. And don't most major companies have their printers set up so you print from and to anywhere?
benhurmarcel 6y ago
It's not specific to cloud print, it's quite usual. In large companies several sites are on the same internal network, and you can send your print job to any printer. In my company I can easily print my document on another continent.

tobltobs 6y ago

When I recently had to make a decision about which Cloud provider to use, Google, although looking fine technically, wasn't even an option because of their killing everything attitude. Reading stuff like [1] I am not assured they will never kill their Cloud offerings. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

clankyclanker 6y ago
Almost makes me wonder how long until they kill GMail.

werber 6y ago

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

dole 6y ago

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

hi41 6y ago

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

seized 6y ago
Depending on your skill, Chromebook will print just fine to CUPS running on a tiny Linux VM or Raspberry Pi.

mraza007 6y ago

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