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.<p>0: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol</a>
1: <a href="https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en</a>
Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are <i>destroying</i> your hiring pipeline.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.
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.
Printing is a horrible experience these days. Even in a managed office environment, you're not safe from all the rough edges.<p>- Drivers. Why does this still feel so difficult? Just define a public bytecode API (no, not PS) and be done with this already.<p>- 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).<p>- Protocol/tech stack straight out of the Old World. Cloud Print seemed like the Dropbox to printing's SMB. Proprietary but less terrible.<p>- 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?<p>The whole process feels only slightly less finicky than using a 3D printer.
Announced a year ago:<p><a href="https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-2020/amp/" rel="nofollow">https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-20...</a>
Meanwhile Microsoft are doing the opposite: <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/windows/universal-print" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/windows/univer...</a>
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”<p>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!<p>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.<p>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 :)
Another tombstone goes up: <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://killedbygoogle.com/</a><p>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.
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.<p>It seems as if this "sunset" approach unnecessarily alienates the user community and reflects badly on Google.
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.
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
This has been discussed almost a year ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815</a>
I already couldn't print to my local brother printer despite it showing up on a chromebook. Just silently hung.<p>I found out from searching online I had to configure a generic printer instead??
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.
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.
That's too bad because this give lot of opportunity to share internal CUPS printers over internet:
<a href="https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector</a><p>Anyone knows workarounds?
Great!<p>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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud" rel="nofollow">https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...</a>
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.
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.
Okay what's next in line for the Killed-By-Google ?<p>GMail ?<p>Google Duo ?<p>Google Keep ?<p>Google Contacts ?<p>Google Calendar ?<p>Google Health / Fit ?
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.