Google's 'Cloud Print' Service is Shutting Down Soon (techspot.com) 60
Another service is joining the Google graveyard, for better or worse. As the latest in a long series of Google service shutdowns, Cloud Print will be terminated in just a few short hours, meaning it will no longer be accessible for ChromeOS customers or others. From a report: Most internet users have probably never used Cloud Print a single time -- it was primarily designed for ChromeOS customers who had limited or no access to traditional printers years ago. However, now that ChromeOS boasts much broader support for printing devices, Cloud Print has effectively become obsolete. It still has a few unique advantages, such as the ability to share your printers with friends, but for the most part, there's no reason for Google to keep it around.
Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google products (Score:3)
We rarely get to hear about Microsoft services shutting down - or Apple, or anybody's. Thank goodness for that. But everybody seems obsessed with Google's for some reason.
Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ (Score:3)
If Google doesnâ€(TM)t want a reputation for shutting stuff down a lot, have they tried shutting down less stuff?
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If Office 365 did, I bet all those hostage cloud customers would.
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Because it works well, much better than running an Exchange server for Outlook customers who are invested in the Outlook tools with the long-stable calendar integration. It's why people don't run their own IMAP or SMTP servers: they don't get the calandar integration, and the built-in spam filtering
Re:Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produc (Score:5, Funny)
My wife still hasn't figured out why Excel at work says Office 365 and the one on her laptop says, "LibreOffice."
I'll bet most of those hostages could be freed just by renaming some icons!
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We noticed when Linux users edited Word docs as it screwed up the formatting (docx format), and badly enough that heading numbers were running into heading text.
It took a PM a few hours to fix that problem but the cost to the company would probably pay for several O365 licenses. And yes, the engineers didn't mind, but the
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We noticed when Linux users edited Word docs as it screwed up the formatting (docx format)
That means you're doing obnoxious fiddly bullshit in a weird way. Or that you heard about this sort of problem 20 years ago, thought it still existed, and lied. Yeah, the latter is actually more likely. But neither are impressive.
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People who use it for finding "stimulating" video would.
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If "Bing" shut down, would anybody miss it? or even realize it's missing?
"Bada" would.
Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ (Score:2)
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What's bing? Some sort of smart doorbell?
An alternate front end to google search. It just looks like a door-telemetry-broadcaster.
Definition:. A heaping pile (Score:2)
The dictionary definition of 'bing' is a heap or pile.
So the question for MS is:
Your search engine is a heaping pile of WHAT, exactly?
Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ (Score:2)
Yes. If you're one of those who look for shops that might have a particular firearms in stock, you use Bing because Google censors search results for many firearms.
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Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google products. We rarely get to hear about Microsoft services shutting down - or Apple, or anybody's
Because Google is massive in terms of products being used. Chrome, the dominant browser is a Google product literally the basis for even "rival" browsers. Both Google and Gmail are used far and wide while Android is the dominant smartphone and smartTV platform. To a large extent, Google is behind many of the things that people use all day long both during and after work.
...simple, because we like Google Services. (Score:5, Insightful)
We rarely get to hear about Microsoft services shutting down - or Apple, or anybody's. Thank goodness for that. But everybody seems obsessed with Google's for some reason.
There's a simple reason. Google Music and Google Reader were popular and beloved services. Also, 10 years ago, Google was constantly hyping new and innovative products and most of us, myself included, were genuinely excited when we saw their announcements. Things like Google Music were pretty revolutionary and now they just killed it in favor of YouTube music...why? I really don't know. It sucks. It has a horrible interface, and it didn't really have feature parity, nor did it add anything, from what I can tell. Many of us were intrigued by Google Wave and Google Plus. I think Google+ had some good ideas...and then they quickly killed it. Google had a weird business model of making awesome and innovative services for free (if you watch ads). We were hooked and fell in love...and then they just killed them for mysterious reasons. They used to progressively improve their products, but now they change them with no clear benefit. First I used Google Messages on my Nexus and then they moved me to Hangouts, which I guess was a little better and now they're moving me back to messages...for no good reason. Plus they have like 10 video calling services that I cannot tell apart.
I think the bottom line is google is a total mess. We're all dependent on them and it's fascinating to watch them implode.
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Google seems to be in the business of making Apps, building up a user base then duplicating that same functionality in another product. They then move to "combine" the products, usually by killing one of them entirely.
Either that or they build apps, decide the millions of people using them daily aren't enough and then just kill it. Seems to be their primary business model actually.
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Re: ...simple, because we like Google Services. (Score:2)
Re: ...simple, because we like Google Services. (Score:2)
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Google Music was killed because they were paying licencing fees for it, and also paying licencing fees for YouTube Music. So instead of paying twice they decided to kill the good one and tried to migrate everyone to the inferior YouTube Music service.
Google's problem seems to be that they launch services and then lose interest in them immediately. If they kept improving them and listening to user feedback they would get more and more popular, but instead they stagnate and are eventually killed off. Seems li
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Google stopped giving people the 20% time allotment way back in 2013.
That’s why new great products from Google have all but stopped since 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: ...simple, because we like Google Services. (Score:2)
They may have been beloved, but popular isn't the right word. If they were popular, they would still be...
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Because us geeks have to support these products with end users and other things. Oh so many times, I've steered users in directions away from google as it's not a core platform and I feared that whatever I'd recommend would be shutdown.
We do hear about MS shutting down services, like when they shut down Cortana on some devices, or MSN Messenger, or when they shut down Zune and the DRM related servers that allowed people to play their tracks. We also talked about Slingbox shut down, freedb shut down and all
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MS bought Skype in 2011 and everybody said they would shut down the Linux client, but instead they still support it.
In the same 9 years, Google has shut down their voice app like 6 times, and I guess every time another department says, "Oh, but we need that service" and builds a new one. Every other replacement is called "Google Voice," too. They love the name, they just hate services.
Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ (Score:2)
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This is not to say the Apple and MS does not do this. Aperture is certainly a good example. MS over time made a series of incompatible Office products which requires expensive and complicated upgrades to maintain mass compatibility.
The reason it is important to publicize the changes at Google, much more than others, is that they are used by common people who foolishly think it is reasona
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We rarely get to hear about Microsoft services shutting down - or Apple, or anybody's. Thank goodness for that. But everybody seems obsessed with Google's for some reason.
Because Apple and Microsoft are pretty good about not-shutting them down.
More to the point, while both companies are moving more to the services model, their reputation is based on more transactional products. You can grab a first-gen iPhone off eBay and play music from iTunes on it. 8GB is relatively small and the battery life is probably crap, and 2G cell signal is likely to be very spotty and you're certainly not loading modern apps onto it...but as a music player and crappy camera, possibly even as an i
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That's the difference between a service and a product. Office and Exchange are products, you have physical copies of them and can keep using them. In the case of Exchange, there is support for standard protocols which have not changed (SMTP, IMAP etc). You could also use an early 90s unix box with sendmail and wu-imapd to do the same thing.
If you use someone else's service, you need to know and accept the risks.
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That's the difference between a service and a product.
Yes, I understand that. However, Google services involve data, and data entry involves investment.
"The Risks" are understood by Slashdotters, which in turn provides the reason people are 'obsessed' with Google sunsetting those services. Google doesn't have a fantastic track record of helping streamline a succession path, leaving users of those services holding the bag. Both MS and Apple are better in this regard, hence the focus on Google who seems to continue and discontinue services at a whim, and commonl
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With Stadia even if they gave you codes you buy those games elsewhere the point of streaming them was so that you could play them anywhere and without an expensive high end PC or console. If they just give you the Steam codes you will need to buy a lot of hardware simply to use them, and then only in one place and on one device.
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With Stadia even if they gave you codes you buy those games elsewhere the point of streaming them was so that you could play them anywhere and without an expensive high end PC or console. If they just give you the Steam codes you will need to buy a lot of hardware simply to use them, and then only in one place and on one device.
Agreed, but Google having both the subscription for the service and requiring game purchases is the problem.
If Google embraced the all-you-can-stream Netflix model, no problem. If Google allowed users to integrate Steam accounts to play already-purchased games, no problem.
Since Google is doing neither of those things, there is an investment in the games purchased on Stadia, which can be taken away if Google decides to discontinue the service. Providing reassurance that at least I would get Steam codes to us
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Apple shuts down products all the time, often also products that aren't their own.. It is news, but only among macOS fans.
Microsoft rarely shuts software products down, especially not without a replacement. They have services that only a few companies use that are easily 30+ years old. And when they do shut down hardware, it does reach the news.
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That's because Google has a history of shutting down services all the damn time.
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We rarely get to hear about Microsoft services shutting down
They call it a BSOD. It happens more often than a person who didn't know might guess.
You insensitive clod (Score:2)
Google shutting down services is a running gag on /.
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We rarely get to hear about Microsoft services shutting down.
- Sent from my Windows Phone
FTFY.
Google steals a copy of each printed document (Score:2)
What a stupid design.
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Dataraping seems to be a profitable business model for Google.
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Stupid for whom?
Maybe the NSL bothered them more than the data mining was worth.
Some convenience but flaky (Score:4, Interesting)
I used it maybe three phones and one or two printers ago. It was kinda cool to be able to print at home from anywhere, but at the time few apps permitted printing, and there aren't a lot of printer settings available.
I've had better results from Epson's Android app. Good settings support, good apps support.
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There's plenty of other ways you could set up your home printer to allow remote printing without having to rely on a third party service. It's not really worth the effort however unless you have print jobs which take a long time to print - since you can just print once you reach home.
Re: Some convenience but flaky (Score:2)
It was sometimes nice to print something out for someone at home and tell them to just get it from the printer. But I think I've only done that once or twice ever with GCP. However, I do occasionally print things from my phone *while at home*, and that too is set up to use GCP, so I need to reconfigure it, as well as my wife's Chromebook.
Google will have to start cremating projects (Score:5, Funny)
Another service is joining the Google graveyard, for better or worse.
That place is already as crammed as Arlington.
Oh ya ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most internet users have probably never used Cloud Print a single time ...
I remember specifically not enabling / configuring that on my printer ... 'cause making my printer accessible from Internet seemed really dumb. I mean what is it, a fax machine?
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I mean what is it, a fax machine?
Yes. Yes it is my fax machine. Thankfully, that e-fax shit always worked fine, but the asshole on the other end was always scared it wouldn't be a real legal document if I used a "fake fax." If I use a printer to fax, they don't get scared, because their printer says "fax" on one of the buttons, too.
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Why not? I use Google Cloud Print. It is supported by my Samsung networked printer. I wasn't actively shopping for that feature so it seems many common network printers supports it. Now all those printers are not going to be upgraded to support the latest printing protocol.
My mother in law doesn't have a printer and doesn't need one as she doesn't print often. But when she does she can print from her place and pick up the paper next time she passes by. Much better than having to send me her files and asking
Google culture (Score:5, Insightful)
Google product managers get ahead by inventing a new thing, not by keeping someone else's old thing going.
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Most of my comments seem to be either rated 5 Interesting or -1 Troll.
I take little pleasure or annoyance from either, because it is clear most people use Mod points to vote on things they agree or disagree with, and facts are not a democracy.
Handoff (Score:2)
Instead of nuking these services why can't they hand it off to a foundation to run? I mean there are hundreds of respectable ones to choose from: wikimedia, Mozilla, LSF, FSF, OSI, Apache etc.
They never did right by it. (Score:4, Informative)
I have many times in the past tried to use Cloud Print in various incarnations on Android. It never, ever worked and never told me why. In the end you know what I used? The apps distributed to work with the multicopiers in convenience stores. One chain uses Print Smash, which temporarily creates a WIFI hotspot in the copier, then you connect to that from your phone and painfully upload one file at a time to it. Another chain has their own netprinting domain. You upload your files via a web browser, then access them from the copier in the store (though for high resolution you should bring a USB stick). Google could have solved the cloud printing problem and worked with copier manufacturers that businesses use so that wherever you go, you can "cloud print". And have it be secure. Well, they never did shit. But there were a bunch of cloud print apps available and the only thing you were guaranteed is that it wouldn't work.
Should have told us. (Score:1)
I had no idea they had a service. If they produced great prints there is a market for it. Weddings, other events where you want great prints.