Google Ending Support for Jamboard

How does Google not recognize the doom loop they’re entering with these decisions?<p>1. Google has already made it tremendously difficult for any product of theirs to succeed. They could have a product that’s extremely successful by any reasonably measure, but not at Google scale, in which case they kill it. So the standard of success a product needs to reach at Google is already ridiculously high.<p>2. Because Google makes so many products and has such high standards, they also kill a lot of products (and services). Which means they’re surely forming a reputation of introducing products to the market that will not survive. Which surely must be a drag on the initial uptake of every product as many people aware of Google’s history are unwilling to invest their time and resources using it. So in addition to the high standards to succeed, there’s also a significant drag in usage caused by the high likelihood of the product being killed.<p>Both of which lead to more products being killed which leads to future products being less likely to reach success and more likely to be killed and so on.

This is a bummer, I use Jamboard (the software not the hardware) to draw diagrams during Zoom calls and send the link to participants after. I mostly use a Wacom tablet to do the actual drawing.<p>Any good free alternatives out there ?<p>Edit: The proposed alternatives they mention in the update (FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro) really don&#x27;t fit that workflow.

We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don&#x27;t find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I&#x27;m at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, <i>no</i> whiteboard is a first-class citizen in VTC world. Partially, no one else knows how to use whatever is in use today.<p>I actually have a slate chalkboard my dad got from an old schoolhouse in Nebraska. He built a frame for it, gave it me when my kids were young, and I have moved with that all over the world. I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do <i>that</i>.<p>I love chalkboards so much, I really, really miss them.<p>If I&#x27;m ever in charge, I&#x27;m buying chalkboards.

I can&#x27;t imagine they sold <i>that</i> many of these.<p>The correct move here would have been to offer a buyback&#x2F;refund, starting at say 50% of the sales value for those that bought at launch 7 years ago going up to 100% for those that bought just before they stopped selling them (as far as I can tell: quite recently).<p>They already got those $600&#x2F;year &quot;management and support fees&quot;.<p>My take: Google simply doesn&#x27;t care about its reputation any longer. They are firmly in the customer milking phase in the stereotypical giant company lifecycle.<p>Also: This kind of behavior in the B2B field influences (lack of) faith in e.g. GCP&#x27;s long-term commitments.

It&#x27;s about time we had legislation (at least in the EU) that mandated an option to be able to use physical products in an offline mode. Features that require a connection to the Internet should only be an augmentation at most and not the core without which the product cannot work.

This touches on a fundamental problem with the current electronic-whiteboard market: poor cross-vendor compatibility.<p>It adds seriously risk to a widespread deployment in any organization.

I knows schools and businesses that bought these. Should have just bought normal 4k touchscreen displays with rolling stands. Then you can use whatever software you want on it. Could even run google&#x27;s browser-based jamboard on the non-jamboard display.

I bought a Jamboard for our small 20 person half remote company before Covid.<p>Jamboard was definitely ahead of its time. Giant (bigger than your living room TV) touch screen monitor with a camera, speakers and microphone built in.<p>I think this is an example where the market need is clearly there (does anyone like the state of remote brainstorming&#x2F;remote whiteboarding?) but Google is deciding not to capture the market.<p>It looks like their strategy here is to promote Miro. They’ve been pushing the Google Meet + Miro native integration heavily for the past couple of weeks. Seeing this announcement, it makes sense why.

My employer owns hundreds of those across all our offices. I hope they auction them. I’ll buy one for $50 on the off chance it gets hacked&#x2F;jailbroken.

It is not that expensive to set up a team of engineers to keep a product working for 10+ years. Microsoft had&#x2F;has this. They called it &quot;sustained engineering&quot;. They don&#x27;t do any new feature work, just bug fixes and security issues on legacy software. The product team gets disbanded, and ownership is moved to sustained engineering. And they keep it running for years.<p>One of the reasons Google has so many failed product launches is because consumers don&#x27;t trust them to provide long-term service and support. At some point they will need to realize that this behavior is inhibiting their ability to become more than just an ads company.

I wonder in these situations: why don&#x27;t they spin it off &#x2F; sell it to some other smaller company that doesn&#x27;t need a Billion Users to succeed?<p>Never used it myself, but it looks like a useful product. Shame to have it disappear if there are still enough people who would buy it.

It&#x27;s crazy to me that people keep willingly buying hardware that requires a service to work. You have a high up-front cost, yet you&#x27;re at someone else&#x27;s mercy. That&#x27;s the worst of buying and renting combined.<p>Obviously it isn&#x27;t very profitable to keep supporting a product you&#x27;ve already sold at the moment, so something must be done to make it more attractive.<p>At the very least there should be a support commitment which marks the life time of the device. Stated upfront and comparable before purchase, a bit like those EU energy efficiency labels.<p>8 years might be a fine life span for some customers. But they should be aware of it in advance. And they should be motivated to ask &quot;and what do we do with it afterwards?&quot;.

The amount of people here saying it&#x27;s ok or even a long lifespan (?!) is shocking.<p>At college, around 2008 I had electronic circuit labs where we used Soviet oscilloscopes dating back to the 70s. They worked perfectly well (we couldn&#x27;t read the Cyryllic, but after 10min intro you understand the knobs). And why wouldn&#x27;t they work?<p>Stockholm syndrome of some is unbelievable. And then when I say that I don&#x27;t want any cloud-controlled devices, people tell me I&#x27;m paranoid...<p>If Google is to retire hardware like this, they should either open source the full stack, write new OSS version of it, or refund the customers plus be fined in tens of millions for e-waste. (While they green wash).<p>PS. I used Jamboards at Google and they were cool for meetings or job interviews.

<i>The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls.</i><p><i>Jamboard was a pricey item, but $5,000 was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a $600 &quot;annual management and support fee,&quot; plus subscriptions to Google Workspace for every user, plus an optional $1,350 for the rolling stand. A one-year total with a single Workspace user is around $7,000.</i><p>Looks like most go for around&#x2F;under $1,500US on the secondary market. The NVIDIA hardware looks interesting although EOL: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;embedded&#x2F;jetson-tx1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.nvidia.com&#x2F;embedded&#x2F;jetson-tx1</a>

They are ending support, but they still own all the associated patents around it, correct?<p>What if there was a corporation that bought out every entrant involving new technology (not necessarily monopolizing their already dominant verticals, but other new inventions&#x2F;ideas)? They either have a winner, or they stifle innovation in corresponding area for the lifetime of any associated patents.

This has been a long time coming. My company owns a Jamboard (the hardware). They were selling it hard when we bought it. We got to use it for a year before the service contract expired. All the major features stopped working, there was no way to renew online and the salespeople were no longer answering phone calls or emails.<p>So now we have an expensive, heavy albatross on our hands. Really makes you want to avoid depending on Google for anything again.

How people continue to trust buying anything from Google is just beyond me. I am glad that they are doing something for schools, but this is just ridiculous.<p>Shutting down a free service that you didn&#x27;t have to buy into, fine whatever. It still sucks but at least you didn&#x27;t invest in a platform.<p>But if you are going to make a physical device you cannot treat it like you treat everything else.

&quot;Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is &quot;Never get involved in a land war in Asia&quot;, but only slightly less well known is this: &#x27;Never bet the business on a Google product, when <i>death</i> is on the line!&#x27;&quot;

I use Jamboard because MS Whiteboard is impossible to share in a corporate environment, especially to outside users. Jamboard at least works under Google Drive sharing policy&#x2F;folders without going insane...

I won’t comment on the wisdom of the business decision here, but more on the fact that I don’t see a great solution to the in-person + remote whiteboarding collaboration problem on the market.<p>Unless your company is 100% remote and is forced into fully digital whiteboarding, my experience is there will sometimes just be a critical mass of people “in the room”, and there’s nothing the remote participants can do to stop them from drawing on a whiteboard. And once that starts happening, the remote participants become second class citizens. This fundamentally limits the remote folks from being part of ideation, design, and decision-making. It’s a handicap that would require executive buy-in to remedy, which you mostly won’t get because execs favor in-person work anyway.<p>People buy these smart boards thinking it’ll help - they go totally untouched. The barrier to use is too high and nobody wants to look like a fool fumbling around with some proprietary interface, eating into valuable meeting time.<p>Short of a major revolution in touchscreens + conferencing tech, the only way to keep the playing field even is for remote people to assert that they will do diagramming and visual notes on e.g. Lucidchart on their end, and you’d better be quick at it.

We have one of these at work. I&#x27;ve never seen it used. Not even once. Mostly it gets in the way of seeing the traditional whiteboard behind it, which does get extensively used. Maybe we can use the $600 a year licensing fee toward buying some fresh dry erase markers, I&#x27;m pretty sure my employer has not bought any office supplies since the beginning of the pandemic.

A week after Microsoft announces their new version of Surface Hub<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcommunity.microsoft.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;surface-it-pro-blog&#x2F;surface-hub-3-bridging-workforce-collaboration-with-microsoft&#x2F;ba-p&#x2F;1669718" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcommunity.microsoft.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;surface-it-pro-blog&#x2F;s...</a>

I have one of these in our office that&#x27;s been passed from company to company. We don&#x27;t pay for it and just use it as a (very nice-looking) rolling TV (it has an HDMI input on the back, thankfully).<p>Any Android exports out there have a sense for how hard it&#x27;d be to get root access to something like this?

It&#x27;s like Pablo Escobar looking for higher margins than offered by cocaine, and being constantly disappointed. Fix the search, Google, before you lose your cash cow. I now append &quot;reddit&quot; to all of my searches to make the results tolerable.

I don&#x27;t know what the success rate is so far, but it has to be low single digits of Google products&#x2F;services that stick around? Has anyone ever done that math?<p>EDIT:<p>Based on this list: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Google_products" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Google_products</a><p>I didn&#x27;t do any editing of the list, just ran wc -l on the 2 lists, so all of those phones are still considered production. That&#x27;s probably not correct, but I&#x27;m not energetic enough to fix it.<p>Looks like it&#x27;s right around 50&#x2F;50, so about 1&#x2F;2 their products are discontinued&#x2F;failed.

I wonder if products like these are a dying market with distributed work.<p>What’s the benefit of a digital whiteboard when I have drawing tools on my computer for a fraction of the price, and the amount of time spent in the office has been cut by 50-100%?

Couple questions.<p>1. There are plenty of android based large displays with a touchscreen&#x2F;camera&#x2F;mic&#x2F;speaker combo on the market (though I&#x27;m sure there weren&#x27;t as many in 2016.) Why did Jamboard need to be an integrated solution instead of an app you could install on these displays? Maybe limit it to certain devices that you are sure it can run on.<p>2. I get that they are shutting the software part down, but you should be able to still use it as a dumb display for videoconferencing, right?

Innovation means more duds than hits and it should be encouraged at every level. For business critical applications, yes, there should be a well defined path, and in this case, I am sure there is.<p>People lose their head every time Google sun sets service. In some cases the criticism is well deserved but not in all. In this case, I am sure there is a path forward for the customers. Heck, they even refunded all costs for Stadia. Google goes well above and beyond what is expected in most cases.

Can someone please clarify: even the software version is winding down? If so, can they simply make all the whiteboards read-only via bitmaps&#x2F;SVGs instead of migrating them elsewhere?<p>Edit: From reading the post properly it seems that it will be view-only for a temporary duration before they may be deleted&#x2F;migrated:<p>&gt; Between October 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024, the app will be placed in “view-only” mode, during which time you will still be able to backup your Jam files.

I would like to see some law in the EU along the lines: if you stop supporting any HW, you have to open source all, so that the HW has a chance of not ending in a dump.<p>I think should not be a lot of trouble, because like in this case for google, they will ahut down everything, and will not be making any more money with it.

Most of the comments are talking about the hardware product, but Jamboard is also a software app that is being shut down. I’d never heard of the hardware, but I have made a few Jamboards in Google Drive.<p>It’s kind of ridiculous that Google is going to delete that user data with barely a year of notice.

Jamboard aside, I&#x27;ve really hesitated buying <i>any</i> Google product because it could be bricked any day, including Nest devices. Understand the business logic behind it, but sooner than later this is going to catch up to them.

This device, like Stadia, was actually pretty great&#x2F;amazing. Just incredible to see Google fuck these things up from a marketing&#x2F;sales&#x2F;strategy perspective. Amazing technology turned to (expensive) dust.

With all this &quot;AI&quot; hype, where is the ultimate diagram tool, in which you draw a diagram like you would on a whiteboard, and then press the button &quot;make it look nice&quot;?

A $5000 price tag with $600 annual fee would mean oh my god, why am I still using whiteboard now? Apparently jamboard is not that good yet.

FFS extremely out of order to do this to the education sector.<p>They should be obliged to provide an open source off ramp for these and not make them e waste.

Can they at least continue working as 55 inch monitors or is Google going to deliberately contribute to global warming?

A more responsible company might have open-sourced the hardware&#x2F;software so people could still use it.

Kind of DCEU doom loop - no one will watch the last trickle of movies as all are set to be cancelled :D

Never heard of it and not surprised.

Anyone working on jailbreaking these devices? Might be fun.

I can predict the whining already, but 8 years is really not a short lifespan for a product. That&#x27;s an honest effort at getting a market, which failed. That&#x27;s life.

Too big to win, too big to fail.

My job is all in on google. Gmail, meets, gcp, everything. Never heard of jamboard. We&#x27;d probably have been using it too, if we ever knew it existed! How is it that closure announcements are when we find out about these things? Especially from a company whose revenue comes from advertising?

[stub for offtopicness]<p>(come on you guys, anything this repetitive is off topic on HN. we want <i>curious</i> conversation here...)

Interesting how the term &quot;Auto Update Expiration (AUE)&quot; shifts the focus to being about the device rather than about Google. Something about giving it an initialism too, makes it sound like Google are describing some fundamental law of the world to you (like MTBF) where their hands are tied rather than it being an arbitrary business decision. How many psychologists do they have on payroll to come up with these things?

Haha, wow, I picked up one from the Twitter liquidation sale this Monday. HAHA! What a sucker I am!<p>It appears to run Android, so I think we can probably pull something off here.

Oh goddamnit - I really liked Jamboard and used it tons for myself and my team. Guess we have to actually Google for alternatives.

My PM will be in shambles. How will we ever do retrospectives now???

Sigh. My team uses this quite a bit but it has always been my least favorite of the popular &quot;digital whiteboard&quot; tools. Super limited in capabilities, but at least it was convenient and easy to use.<p>And the de-googlification of my life continues...one app at a time.

lol - I remember when Fairfax Media (now Nine) got these. Apparently revolutionary. And like all Google things, fizzled out.<p>Why invest in new Google technology?