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.
I suppose the workaround is to send all your printables to a Google drive folder, and then have an app on your devices that send those printables to the printer whenever the printer is visible on wifi. Not sure if Android offers sufficient APIs for that though.
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.
Isn't Google Cloud Print built into some printers? So some people may have had a purchase decision based on a feature thats going away in a year. Seems like a reason to be upset even with a year's notice.
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]
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 [email protected] 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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
The main reason I used Cloud Print was the ability to print remotely and securely to my home printer without having to worry much about the security implication. I don't really need it that much I guess..
SMS was originally set to pass service messages between phone equipment. The internet was originally used for military communication.
The original purpose should not be the lens to look through for judging something once it’s out, in particular after 10 years where people found countless other uses of it.
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.
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.
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?!
> I just wonder how many companies got conned into basing their printing infrastructure on yet another Google experiment
I would imagine very few, or else Google would be keeping it around. I would guess that Cloud Print basically didn't take with either consumers or enterprises, and as a result Google no longer wants to keep doing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_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.
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]
[+] [-] jacurtis|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] asauce|6 years ago|reply
Google Print was a great way to get around these issues, but not anymore. Crazy how out-of-the-blue Google will kill off certain products.
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Justsignedup|6 years ago|reply
Google services always find a great niche. The problem is google wants MAJOR hits or bust.
[+] [-] rolltiide|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidwparker|6 years ago|reply
Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit silly.
[+] [-] kllrnohj|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Johnny555|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fudged71|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tech234a|6 years ago|reply
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
(Note: I also posted this comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815)
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email [email protected] 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.)
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcchambers|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canada_dry|6 years ago|reply
Python 2 would like a word with you.
[+] [-] m-p-3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrktb|6 years ago|reply
The original purpose should not be the lens to look through for judging something once it’s out, in particular after 10 years where people found countless other uses of it.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] outworlder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfkw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefounder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordleft|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ripdog|6 years ago|reply
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?!
[+] [-] at_a_remove|6 years ago|reply
I am starting to think that I need a similar saying about Google.
[+] [-] asdfasgasdgasdg|6 years ago|reply
I would imagine very few, or else Google would be keeping it around. I would guess that Cloud Print basically didn't take with either consumers or enterprises, and as a result Google no longer wants to keep doing it.
[+] [-] tbodt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathw|6 years ago|reply
But yeah, Cloud Print doesn't seem to have been particularly widely used or supported.
[+] [-] angry_octet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twothamendment|6 years ago|reply
I use it at home and like it, but when it came up as a potential solution for a project at work this the exact reason we didn't go with it.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lxgr|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ilamont|6 years ago|reply
By comparison, AirPrint just worked, quickly recognizing new printers from new devices and running jobs pretty much flawlessly.
[+] [-] markstos|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] areoform|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ianhawes|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mceachen|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
Nobody's gonna pay you to do it tho...
[+] [-] debatem1|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joenathanone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sosuke|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikelward|6 years ago|reply
https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&r...
[+] [-] dudus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geofft|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tech234a|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|6 years ago|reply