Google's 'Cloud Print' Service is Shutting Down Soon

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• Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ

  Maybe itâ€(TM)s because Appleâ€(TM)s AirPrint is still going strong, perhaps because it doesnâ€(TM)t rely on a cloud service but is basically just IPP+Bonjour.
  
  If Google doesnâ€(TM)t want a reputation for shutting stuff down a lot, have they tried shutting down less stuff?
  • 2 hidden comments

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  If "Bing" shut down, would anybody miss it? or even realize it's missing?

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    If Office 365 did, I bet all those hostage cloud customers would.

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      You do realize businesses PAY for Office 365? Microsoft makes $$$ off of it. Google is in the business of making money so if one of their services isn't driving people to their ads or making money on its own, it sayonara!

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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

    • 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!

      • Re:

        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!

        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

        • 1 hidden comment

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    People who use it for finding "stimulating" video would.

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    "Bada" would.

  • Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ

    What's bing? Some sort of smart doorbell?

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      An alternate front end to google search. It just looks like a door-telemetry-broadcaster.

  • Re: Why is /. so obsessed with sunset Google produ

    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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    I use Bing's (and DuckDuckGo's) image search because I hate the new(-ish) Google image search UI.

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  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.

• 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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    Google Earth (the desktop version) is still one of my favorite applications, that I rely on a lot. Why did they even make it? I don't really know. Now I can hardly imagine them doing something cool just because they could and people would like it. And I just dread the day they shut it down.

    • Re: ...simple, because we like Google Services.

      They didn't create it, they bought it (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109888284313557107). Like most of their major products, actually.

    • Re: ...simple, because we like Google Services.

      Google earth gave them mapping data, business and street numbers which gave them streetview which in turn gave them in car navigation on android which in turn gave them vital tracking information on where you travel to and where you are. it also gets you to keep gps on on your phone so they can pin gps locations on wifi ssids.

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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.

    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

    My mother in law is obsessed with printing from her smartphone. I don't know what the hell she prints, probably nothing. Whatever, years ago Google had force-installed this nonsensical cloud print app on her phone, and I had thought how to use it. Now I had to teach again the Hp printing app, which is even worst.

• Re:

  Because Google tends to shut things down quickly and with no alternatives. Like the current changes to Google storage.

  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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  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

  • Re:

    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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      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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      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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  That's because Google has a history of shutting down services all the damn time.

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  They call it a BSOD. It happens more often than a person who didn't know might guess.

• You insensitive clod

  Google shutting down services is a running gag on/.

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  FTFY.