7 ms·

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

nerdjon 3y ago
It doesn't really matter how many people were affected, the point is that people made an investment (and not a small one) and its being shut down. And it isn't like this is the first hardware that Google has abandoned, but they turn it into ewaste since it's tied to the cloud.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  It’s being shutdown after 8 years. That’s not a bad lifespan. Most electronics are obsolete but that age and replaced with new ones. Especially at businesses - it’s already amortized by then and reached end of life. Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    I'm sure the Jamboard service contains such top secret and critical code that it could never be open sourced in order for those devices to keep functioning with a proxy sever, no no no.
    - bushbaba 3y ago
      Googles backends are all proprietary solutions. So you’d need to open source a huge swath of google code. Much of which has assumptions of running in Google’s DCs.
      - rvnx 3y ago
        Yes, everything is in the soup called /google3. And it's time wasted; the SWE working on the Jamboard may prefer to work on higher impact projects; The PO as well. For example, an hypothetical PO @ Google may have this possibility to launch a new product instead (e.g. deprecating the Pixel 7); - New launch = promotion. - Promotion = better salary. - Better salary = happy wife. - Happy wife = happy life. Indeed, shutdowning Jamboard was the right solution from his perspective. It's all about alignement of incentives.
      - josephg 3y ago
        Eh. They could just opensource the code but not its dependencies. The opensource world is remarkably good at taking something like that and getting it working again. They won’t though, unfortunately.
        bushbaba 3y ago
        I don’t think you get how difficult that is. It wouldn’t build, it would include a ton of internal libraries. For example stubby is not open source. Internal spanner is different than external spanner, including API/SDKs. The code pulls in a ton of internal libraries. Etc. So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.
        josephg 3y ago
        I know exactly how difficult it is. I was part of the cleanup crew who stayed back to opensource wave after google decided to pull the plug. My name is all over the opensourced Google Wave ("Wave in a box") codebase. We rewrote the whole data layer so you could run it without google's infra. That took a nontrivial amount of engineering time - a month or two if memory serves. > So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful. Oh, it definitely wouldn't build. But you'd be surprised how resourceful opensource developers can be when they have a clear scope & clear spec to work towards. This sort of work is akin to making the world's simplest emulator for a video game console - except you only need to get "one game" to run, and you have its source code and you can change the code as much as you like. Its fun, satisfying work. Obviously you're rolling the dice on whether or not anyone from the community would step up and do that work on your behalf. But the alternative is killing your product entirely. The opensourced wave died because we didn't grow an opensource community who understood & wanted to maintain the codebase. Looking back, we might have done a better job of that if we didn't do all the work ourselves to make it usable first. Mind you, I have no idea how the community at large would react to google releasing broken source code. They might complain even more than the service just going dark. But I can still dream.
  - astrodust 3y ago
    Imagine if you had to purchase new furniture every eight years for no reason other than the vendor decided to render it useless.
    - moate 3y ago
      PLEASE STOP GIVING CAPITALISTS IDEAS!
  - notaustinpowers 3y ago
    Obsolete, yes. But being obsolete is not equatable to a full shutdown. Cars go obsolete, but we would never allow car manufacturers to prevent a car from turning on just because it's obsolete. Just like we don't accept that with our phones, or our laptops, or any physical consumer electronic.
  - jasonjayr 3y ago
    8 years ? For a display that's essentially a graphics terminal to a remote app? That customers are paying for ongoing service? For hardware that is still 100% working? Honestly, what is really stopping it from being supported? Can they unlock it so a secondary market can load OSS onto it and keep it going for the next 10-15 years?
    - foobiekr 3y ago
      It's incredibly wasteful. The tech industry produces prodigious amounts of waste with a deliberate purpose (revenue).
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      Does the Jamboard cease to be usable without the cloud-based stuff?
      - supportengineer 3y ago
        Most cloud based items are like this by default, and by design. We throw the environment under the bus, to make our next quarterly profit.
        throw10920 3y ago
        Who's "we" here? I'm sure not throwing the environment under the bus.
        hot_gril 3y ago
        That's why I'm asking about the Jamboard in particular. There are lots of comments about cloud-connected hardware in general here, and yes, I know it tends to suck. But the article is about the Jamboard.
    - freedrock87 3y ago
      Not sure where the 8 years number is from. It was launched in 2017 and CDW was selling it until 2021. That means some people have it for less than 2 years
  - briffle 3y ago
    I wonder if the OP is going to complain about all our skype based conferencing hardware that has become obsolete over the last few years? https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled-devices-or-platforms-are-no-longer-supported https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled...
    - callalex 3y ago
      How recently was one of these phones sold?
  - nerdjon 3y ago
    You're missing the point. First this is just yet another bad mark against Google that should be used to discourage buying into any hardware platform from Google of this nature. The single exception I would give is the Pixel line since even if they discontinue Pixel, Android is still there. But they are treating hardware like they do their other software. Because this hardware is tightly tied to the cloud instead of shutting it down, they should be putting it in maintenance mode. No new features and you can't buy hardware anymore. But continue to keep it up for a longer period of time for those that spent money with you. Great this product lasted more than 2 years, we have a record! That doesn't mean that they are not handling the shutdown of this product in a responsible manner. Google is continuing their track record of how they are handling their pet projects and it is a bad decision to buy into any of them. Particularly if there is hardware involved
  - leoedin 3y ago
    The lifetime of "appliance" type electronics has always been much longer than that. In my first job, in 2012, I was using electronic test equipment running Windows 95. Anything industrial has a lifetime of 10+ years. Most electronics doesn't need to be cutting edge - and non-cutting-edge electronics hasn't really changed much in the last 15-20 years anyway. If we want this type of technology to actually be useful, it should have a lifetime somewhere near the thing it replaces. Otherwise schools and universities will get burned once and go back to whiteboards. 8 years isn't really acceptable.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Internet dependence is the difference. Even consumer electronics that don’t rely on Internet services often last a couple decades, and sometimes more.
  - moate 3y ago
    This worldview is fine for running a company and making money, but it isn't the only one that exists. The whole IoT push over the last 10 years is new, and a lot of consumers haven't had to think of questions like "what happens when tech support goes away for my digital whiteboard" or "what happens to my fridge when company is goes bankrupt", so I don't think patting them on the head and saying "This sucks for you, but it could have been worse" is really a compassionate stance. You're underlying thesis is correct though, you're not legally required to care about other people when you design or sell products.
  - Thorrez 3y ago
    When was the last one sold? If it wasn't 8 years ago, then that one has a shorter than 8-year lifespan.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    They sold units recently no. So there’s some ppl who might have only gotten a few years of usage
  - tayjohno 3y ago
    I have to imagine that these have been for sale throughout that time. I can see an argument that 8 years is a long time, but imagine if you purchased it last year, that's now a 2 year lifespan. We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them. I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it. I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I run a lot of hardware older than 8 years.
  - ulfw 3y ago
    You're assuming everyone bought it 8 years ago. What about the schools, companies etc that bought it a year or two ago? Still 'not a bad lifespan'?
  - bagels 3y ago
    When did they stop selling them?
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    So you would be happy if Tesla were to stop supporting my eight year old Model S?
  - supportengineer 3y ago
    There's no need for electronics to be obsolete after 8 years. I have tons of electronic items from the 1980's that are still working fine. Not to mention a 16 year old car jammed with electronics which are all working.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > Most electronics are obsolete but that age More than thirty years ago I inherited my mothers LED display alarm clock, I think it was at least ten years old then. It is still running in my bedroom. It might well be obsolete but it is in perfect working order, it performs according to its specification, and satisfies my desire for a clock that is always visible.
- szundi 3y ago
  My project was done and Google killed the whole IoT wtf

It doesn't really matter how many people were affected, the point is that people made an investment (and not a small one) and its being shut down. And it isn't like this is the first hardware that Google has abandoned, but they turn it into ewaste since it's tied to the cloud.

justapassenger 3y ago
It’s being shutdown after 8 years. That’s not a bad lifespan. Most electronics are obsolete but that age and replaced with new ones. Especially at businesses - it’s already amortized by then and reached end of life. Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  I'm sure the Jamboard service contains such top secret and critical code that it could never be open sourced in order for those devices to keep functioning with a proxy sever, no no no.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    Googles backends are all proprietary solutions. So you’d need to open source a huge swath of google code. Much of which has assumptions of running in Google’s DCs.
    - rvnx 3y ago
      Yes, everything is in the soup called /google3. And it's time wasted; the SWE working on the Jamboard may prefer to work on higher impact projects; The PO as well. For example, an hypothetical PO @ Google may have this possibility to launch a new product instead (e.g. deprecating the Pixel 7); - New launch = promotion. - Promotion = better salary. - Better salary = happy wife. - Happy wife = happy life. Indeed, shutdowning Jamboard was the right solution from his perspective. It's all about alignement of incentives.
    - josephg 3y ago
      Eh. They could just opensource the code but not its dependencies. The opensource world is remarkably good at taking something like that and getting it working again. They won’t though, unfortunately.
      - bushbaba 3y ago
        I don’t think you get how difficult that is. It wouldn’t build, it would include a ton of internal libraries. For example stubby is not open source. Internal spanner is different than external spanner, including API/SDKs. The code pulls in a ton of internal libraries. Etc. So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.
        josephg 3y ago
        I know exactly how difficult it is. I was part of the cleanup crew who stayed back to opensource wave after google decided to pull the plug. My name is all over the opensourced Google Wave ("Wave in a box") codebase. We rewrote the whole data layer so you could run it without google's infra. That took a nontrivial amount of engineering time - a month or two if memory serves. > So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful. Oh, it definitely wouldn't build. But you'd be surprised how resourceful opensource developers can be when they have a clear scope & clear spec to work towards. This sort of work is akin to making the world's simplest emulator for a video game console - except you only need to get "one game" to run, and you have its source code and you can change the code as much as you like. Its fun, satisfying work. Obviously you're rolling the dice on whether or not anyone from the community would step up and do that work on your behalf. But the alternative is killing your product entirely. The opensourced wave died because we didn't grow an opensource community who understood & wanted to maintain the codebase. Looking back, we might have done a better job of that if we didn't do all the work ourselves to make it usable first. Mind you, I have no idea how the community at large would react to google releasing broken source code. They might complain even more than the service just going dark. But I can still dream.
- astrodust 3y ago
  Imagine if you had to purchase new furniture every eight years for no reason other than the vendor decided to render it useless.
  - moate 3y ago
    PLEASE STOP GIVING CAPITALISTS IDEAS!
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  Obsolete, yes. But being obsolete is not equatable to a full shutdown. Cars go obsolete, but we would never allow car manufacturers to prevent a car from turning on just because it's obsolete. Just like we don't accept that with our phones, or our laptops, or any physical consumer electronic.
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  8 years ? For a display that's essentially a graphics terminal to a remote app? That customers are paying for ongoing service? For hardware that is still 100% working? Honestly, what is really stopping it from being supported? Can they unlock it so a secondary market can load OSS onto it and keep it going for the next 10-15 years?
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    It's incredibly wasteful. The tech industry produces prodigious amounts of waste with a deliberate purpose (revenue).
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Does the Jamboard cease to be usable without the cloud-based stuff?
    - supportengineer 3y ago
      Most cloud based items are like this by default, and by design. We throw the environment under the bus, to make our next quarterly profit.
      - throw10920 3y ago
        Who's "we" here? I'm sure not throwing the environment under the bus.
        hot_gril 3y ago
        That's why I'm asking about the Jamboard in particular. There are lots of comments about cloud-connected hardware in general here, and yes, I know it tends to suck. But the article is about the Jamboard.
  - freedrock87 3y ago
    Not sure where the 8 years number is from. It was launched in 2017 and CDW was selling it until 2021. That means some people have it for less than 2 years
- briffle 3y ago
  I wonder if the OP is going to complain about all our skype based conferencing hardware that has become obsolete over the last few years? https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled-devices-or-platforms-are-no-longer-supported https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled...
  - callalex 3y ago
    How recently was one of these phones sold?
- nerdjon 3y ago
  You're missing the point. First this is just yet another bad mark against Google that should be used to discourage buying into any hardware platform from Google of this nature. The single exception I would give is the Pixel line since even if they discontinue Pixel, Android is still there. But they are treating hardware like they do their other software. Because this hardware is tightly tied to the cloud instead of shutting it down, they should be putting it in maintenance mode. No new features and you can't buy hardware anymore. But continue to keep it up for a longer period of time for those that spent money with you. Great this product lasted more than 2 years, we have a record! That doesn't mean that they are not handling the shutdown of this product in a responsible manner. Google is continuing their track record of how they are handling their pet projects and it is a bad decision to buy into any of them. Particularly if there is hardware involved
- leoedin 3y ago
  The lifetime of "appliance" type electronics has always been much longer than that. In my first job, in 2012, I was using electronic test equipment running Windows 95. Anything industrial has a lifetime of 10+ years. Most electronics doesn't need to be cutting edge - and non-cutting-edge electronics hasn't really changed much in the last 15-20 years anyway. If we want this type of technology to actually be useful, it should have a lifetime somewhere near the thing it replaces. Otherwise schools and universities will get burned once and go back to whiteboards. 8 years isn't really acceptable.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Internet dependence is the difference. Even consumer electronics that don’t rely on Internet services often last a couple decades, and sometimes more.
- moate 3y ago
  This worldview is fine for running a company and making money, but it isn't the only one that exists. The whole IoT push over the last 10 years is new, and a lot of consumers haven't had to think of questions like "what happens when tech support goes away for my digital whiteboard" or "what happens to my fridge when company is goes bankrupt", so I don't think patting them on the head and saying "This sucks for you, but it could have been worse" is really a compassionate stance. You're underlying thesis is correct though, you're not legally required to care about other people when you design or sell products.
- Thorrez 3y ago
  When was the last one sold? If it wasn't 8 years ago, then that one has a shorter than 8-year lifespan.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  They sold units recently no. So there’s some ppl who might have only gotten a few years of usage
- tayjohno 3y ago
  I have to imagine that these have been for sale throughout that time. I can see an argument that 8 years is a long time, but imagine if you purchased it last year, that's now a 2 year lifespan. We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them. I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it. I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I run a lot of hardware older than 8 years.
- ulfw 3y ago
  You're assuming everyone bought it 8 years ago. What about the schools, companies etc that bought it a year or two ago? Still 'not a bad lifespan'?
- bagels 3y ago
  When did they stop selling them?
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  So you would be happy if Tesla were to stop supporting my eight year old Model S?
- supportengineer 3y ago
  There's no need for electronics to be obsolete after 8 years. I have tons of electronic items from the 1980's that are still working fine. Not to mention a 16 year old car jammed with electronics which are all working.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  > Most electronics are obsolete but that age More than thirty years ago I inherited my mothers LED display alarm clock, I think it was at least ten years old then. It is still running in my bedroom. It might well be obsolete but it is in perfect working order, it performs according to its specification, and satisfies my desire for a clock that is always visible.
szundi 3y ago
My project was done and Google killed the whole IoT wtf