
Google Kills Cloud Print - ryandvm
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006
======
jacurtis
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.

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596003)

~~~
lonelappde
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.

~~~
taco_emoji
Yeah or have that folder synced to a PC running at home, and then have a
service running on that machine that prints anything that shows up in that
folder.

~~~
vorpalhex
Probably easy enough to throw this together in python and host it on your
choice of cheap, lower power hardware (Raspberry pi, etc).

~~~
tjohns
It'd also be very trivial to script with a Mac using Folder Actions and a 5
line AppleScript.

(I wish Linux had an equivalent to Folder Actions. They’re really nifty.)

~~~
RunningDroid
The Linux equivalent of Folder Actions would probably either be inotify¹ or
inotify-tools².

1:[https://linux.die.net/man/7/inotify](https://linux.die.net/man/7/inotify)

2:[https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-
tools/wiki](https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki)

~~~
noodlesUK
A much easier to use tool that works using inotify is incron. It's basically
like cron except for inotify events. I have a one-liner that OCRs all of my
incoming scans, and it's immensely helpful.

~~~
wibble10
What do you use to do the actual ocr?

~~~
noodlesUK
A python package called OCRmyPDF. It has same defaults and works very well for
my use case.

------
davidwparker
The product has been around 10 years, and they're giving over a year notice
before killing it.

Sure, Google kills off another product... But the comments here are a bit
silly.

~~~
kllrnohj
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.

~~~
JAlexoid
It's not free to run and it is not generating revenues.

Have printer manufacturers pay for it's maintenance, then it's a reasonable
argument for jut keeping it up.

~~~
chenning
I saw it as a counterpoint to AirPrint. I'd like to know what changed that
made Google think they don't really need this anymore. Maybe they think WiFi
Direct is going to be the future?

~~~
danans
Local wifi-based printing and printer discovery (same as Airprint) is already
available on Google devices. No Cloudprint required.

~~~
scarface74
But you still need individual print drivers.

~~~
danans
Not for CUPS compatible printers.

Also HP provides its own apps and integration for local printing from Chrome:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-
chrom...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hp-print-for-
chrome/cjanmonomjogheabiocdamfpknlpdehm?hl=en-US)

------
tech234a
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]

[1]:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170](https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170)

(Note: I also posted this comment on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815))

~~~
dang
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 hn@ycombinator.com 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.)

~~~
PascLeRasc
Would it be possible for you to preserve the highest-scoring dupe when you do
this? I was reading through one of them with around 350-400 points, and now I
can't find it but this has around 100. It makes it unclear that it's the same
original discussion moved, and I doubt this was your intention, but it could
come across like you're trying to downplay the significance of a topic when
the main discussion loses points and frontpage ranking.

~~~
dang
I'm not sure what you mean by "preserve"? I don't think it's fair to leave the
highest-scoring story as the winner; we usually try to privilege the one who
posted first, i.e. the true original discussion. I think the community prefers
that and it provides a better incentive.

The story didn't lose front page ranking because I rolled back the clock on
the original submission (the one we're currently commenting on) to put it more
or less where the other submission had been.

------
dcchambers
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.

~~~
canada_dry
> 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.

Python 2 would like a word with you.

~~~
zymhan
Except Python is a widely used language, and this is a simple service for end-
users. You don't need to rewrite an app because they're shutting down cloud
print.

~~~
downerending
Or, put another way, if the new way of printing doesn't work for you, you
don't need to rewrite anything because you can't. You're screwed. :-)

[I for one remain convinced that we are totally going to figure out printing
once and for all any decade now...]

------
jfkw
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.

~~~
thefounder
Expect Chromebooks to get killed as well.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Yeah, especially after that google graveyard website, and all the services
axed with no good replacements...

You'd have to be a fool to trust any google service for anything.

~~~
drdeadringer
What, if any, alternatives are there for Google Voice?

------
lordleft
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.

~~~
jtreminio
My 13 year old son can no longer play a large part of our Steam library
because many of the games he enjoys are 32-bit only (Geometry Dash, for one)
and we've upgraded to MacOS Catalina.

My old copy of Adobe Photoshop CS6 also cannot be installed because the
installer is 32-bit, although there's reports if you had it installed before
upgrading you can force it to run.

I can rollback my son's laptop, but I am on the new 16" MBP which ships with
Catalina. Annoyed is putting it mildly.

~~~
ec109685
You can install a VM and run an older copy of the OS on your Mac for games.

~~~
wila
VMs do not have direct access to the physical GPU. Worse even is that the
virtual GPUs on macOS are not accelerated. So for a VM your rendering will
fall back on software based (CPU based) rendering. Apple does not expose the
APIs which are needed to be able to write a GPU accelerated driver for VMs.

IOW a VM is no good for playing games when using macOS.

~~~
rsfinn
You should probably let Parallels [1] know this, so they can stop wasting
their time advertising Parallel Desktop’s support for DirectX and OpenGL (via
Metal) as a way to play Windows games on the Mac.

(Disclaimer: I don’t actually use it for this purpose. And while it may be
true that macOS guests can’t use accelerated graphics, someone looking to play
older Steam games presumably has access to the Windows versions.)

[1]
[https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/](https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/)

~~~
wila
I am talking about macOS guests, you are talking about Windows guests. It is
not exactly the same thing.

Yes, you can have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your Windows
guests on your macOS host.

No, you cannot have accelerated virtual graphics adapters for your macOS
guests on your macOS host.

It is true that I could have worded that a bit better.

------
ripdog
>It's enterprise-ready

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?!

~~~
mathw
Sadly not for all printers, my printer requires an awful app that does
everything itself. Not acceptable!

But yeah, Cloud Print doesn't seem to have been particularly widely used or
supported.

~~~
manderley
Try out the "Mopria print service" (mobile printing alliance), most big
manufacturers are part of it. They provide a generic driver app for Android
that works for mobile printing with models from multiple manufacturers.

~~~
mcguire
It "powers the Samsung print service." The one that always says my printer is
offline.

"Your document may pass through multiple servers. Is that ok?"

Sigh.

And it printed simplex.

~~~
angry_octet
And the Samsung printer group was sold to HP and all support vanished. I guess
they fired everyone.

------
lxgr
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.

~~~
novaRom
The damage is real. It was one of the arguments against Google Cloud in my
company.

~~~
irrational
Hah! Same with us! We had a meeting where we talked about should we move to
Google Cloud, AWS or Azure. Google Cloud was crossed out within 5 minutes of
the meeting starting because we have absolutely no confidence that it won't be
killed. I don't care how much Google says it won't be. I don't believe them.

------
ilamont
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.

~~~
hsivonen
To print to an AirPrint printer over LAN from Android, one needs to install
the Google Cloud Print apk from Play Store. (I witnessed just this week that
it didn't work on a newly set up Android One device running Android 9 before
installing Cloud Print from Play Store.)

With the cloud part of Cloud Print gone, will Google continue to provide the
AirPrint-compatible Android software so that Android users won't have to
install software from printer vendors like Windows users have to?

~~~
angry_octet
No.

------
markstos
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.

~~~
dazc
I bought a cloud enabled printer for my Dad, who uses a Chromebook. The only
way I could get it to print reliably was to connect it to my Windows machine
via a cable and have my dad email me whatever he wants to print.

In other words, I now have two printers in my office to do what I was doing
already with one.

~~~
ben_jones
Counterpoint, I bought my dad a chromebook and he bought a random printer on
Amazon. Works fine after connecting both to the same wifi.

------
areoform
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.

~~~
rgbrenner
Their leadership has no vision. They don't know what to build, where they're
going, or what problems they need to solve..

So they encourage these random projects hoping one of their employees will
have a vision for them.

So the organization just flails around hoping to win the lottery. Each new
project is a new lottery ticket.. saving the leadership from making any hard
decisions.

~~~
konschubert
Google is basically a startup builder. And a really good one.

How many companies manage to stay so innovative after having found their
rainmaker product?

However, they should probably sell their successful startups instead of
killing them.

But I guess they don’t need the money.

~~~
scarface74
How are they a really good startup builder? What have they built in house that
has been a success since Gmail?

After flailing around for a decade, almost all of their profit is still based
on ads. They are less diversified than any of the big tech companies besides
Facebook.

~~~
derefr
Google is a startup builder but also a bureaucracy that serves as a startup
killer. I have a feeling that a lot of the projects Google creates would
thrive if Google had budded them off, and only end up dying _because_ they
keep them living within the company. (For example, Google Reader, if budded
off, would have just been Feedly a decade earlier, which is a fine standalone
company.)

~~~
panopticon
I think Google's scale is a problem here. They're always talking about the
"next billion users". With that mindset, nothing short of hundreds of millions
of users is a success.

------
ianhawes
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.

~~~
HEHENE
Will tack QZ Tray ([https://qz.io](https://qz.io)) onto this list. I've
actually used it at my last two jobs for everything from dot matrix printers,
laser printers, shipping label printers, and scales (Mettler Toledo.)

Worked great and support was phenomenal.

------
mceachen
Good news: they give you a year to transition.

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
A year is plenty of time to learn to code and write yourself a CUPS plugin...

Nobody's gonna pay you to do it tho...

------
debatem1
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.

------
joenathanone
Investing in Google's ecosystem is a risky proposition, as a sys admin I can't
in good conscience recommend Google's products to my client's.

------
NicoJuicy
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.

~~~
contextfree
How was it the right decision? Silverlight was cross-platform, then they made
a Windows-specific fork which is WinRT XAML/WinUI (most people don't realize
this but this stack originated as a repurposing of the Silverlight codebase
directly, it wasn't a rewrite), now they are apparently hoping to make it
cross platform again (see e.g.,
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/winui_winrt_windows...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/winui_winrt_windows_api_webassembly/)
)

It seems like they could have taken a less roundabout route to get there.

~~~
NicoJuicy
WinUI is based on .net core. Silverlight on .net framework.

At the time, it was not easy to port WPF to core ( mostly because of
System.Drawing), they did it now and it's a new framework.

~~~
contextfree
Silverlight wasn't built on the full .NET Framework CLR, it was built on
CoreCLR which was the direct ancestor of today's .NET Core.

From
[https://docs.microsoft.com/enus/dotnet/standard/glossary](https://docs.microsoft.com/enus/dotnet/standard/glossary)
:

"Originally, CoreCLR was the runtime of Silverlight and was designed to run on
multiple platforms, specifically Windows and OS X. CoreCLR is now part of .NET
Core and represents a simplified version of the CLR. It's still a cross-
platform runtime, now including support for many Linux distributions. CoreCLR
is also a virtual machine with JIT and code execution capabilities."

------
sosuke
Cloud Print is how I print from my Chromebook right? Do they have a
replacement? I use this service daily.

~~~
mikelward
You can use CUPS locally.

[https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&r...](https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en&ref_topic=3399712)

~~~
jessaustin
At that link, we're told to select "Printers" under the heading "Printing".
The only item I see under that heading is "Google Cloud Print".

I sort of like this idea, of just making changes and waiting for users to
complain when those changes screw them over... I do hope that someone is
paying attention to those complaints.

------
dleslie
That's a bummer; it was a god send for accessing printers without drivers on
the client.

~~~
geofft
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...](https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting#Driverless_Printing_and_Printers)

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.

~~~
akrulino
You mean like Postscript 20 years ago?

~~~
appleflaxen
Can you elaborate on the similarities? I don't really understand PS, CUPS, or
GCP, but I think an overview of how they relate would be really interesting.

~~~
geofft
PostScript is a programming language that lets you describe how a page looks.
(It's a real, Turing-complete programming language, and you can do things like
print a fractal with a couple of lines of PostScript.) It was popular with
high-end printers like the Apple LaserWriter, and it required a real CPU
inside the printer in order to evaluate the PostScript and render it into an
image of the appropriate resolution, which could then be printed. So it was
completely out of the question for consumer-level printers like cheap inkjets.
Today, of course, adding a real computer to a cheap inkjet is entirely doable
(a $5 Pi Zero is far more powerful than the LaserWriter), but in the past you
basically needed a driver that ran on your computer that converted a high-
level document (e.g., a page from a word processor) to physical instructions
for the printer.

CUPS is a program that implements the Internet Printing Protocol, basically a
way to send, view, and cancel print jobs over an HTTP API. If you have a local
printer connected with a parallel port, you can run CUPS and have other
machines send to it. The other thing CUPS does is conversions: you can send a
PDF to CUPS, and it will run the driver to convert it to whatever format the
printer needs. So an application that talks to CUPS only needs to know how to
generate PDFs. CUPS also supports talking to remote print servers, e.g., other
CUPS servers, printers that natively speak IPP, or printers that speak some
other protocol.

Google Cloud Print is a service which has the unusual property that _printers_
connect to _it_ , not vice versa. Therefore you can print a document to a
Google Cloud Print printer without being on the same network, which IPP
doesn't let you do. (For printers without direct GCP support, you'd need to
leave a computer plugged into it and running, but some newer printers with
built-in networking know how to talk to Google and let you register it to your
Google account.)

~~~
jabl
To elaborate a little, "IPP Everywhere" / AirPrint, "Driverless printing" or
whatever it's called, is basically having the printer run a CUPS server and
broadcast itself on mdns/bonjour, and then clients can print to it directly
without having to install manufacturer-specific printer drivers (the IPP
protocol itself has the necessary features so that you don't even need PPD's).
The only thing the client needs to be able to do is support IPP and a few file
formats mandated by IPP (PWG-raster (a simple raster format) and JPEG, even
PDF is optional IIRC).

(There's something called the "IPP sharing extensions" (IIRC) for supporting
things like central print servers with auth, proxying and whatnot for
enterprise deployments)

------
tech234a
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]

[1]:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170](https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179170)

------
Rebelgecko
Bad timing for an announcement considering the (IMO valid) concerns about
Stadia's lifetime.

~~~
IAmEveryone
In an industry where 80% of startups disappear, it's inevitable that they have
to shut down products at a rate not much smaller than their introduction of
new products. And if "Google Cloud Print" is considered significant, then that
will result in frequent headlines of "Google is shutting down <x>".

Considering how annoying I find this meme even though I have absolutely no
stake in it, people on the inside are probably telling their therapists about
it. The better part of a decade has passed since Google Reader was shut down,
and it's still the go-to reaction of people who want to seem oh so unique,
rebellious, and cynical.

~~~
anoncake
You would have a point if Google had become more reliable since Reader was
shut down.

------
anderber
And Google wonders why their products don't gain momentum? Should I trust them
when I buy a Chromecast, Stadia, or anything else? I mean even their probably
most successful product, the Chromecast, doesn't get many updates and
sometimes I wonder if they put much effort into it. It seems like they are
very good at the initial launch but slowly and surely they remove resources
from that product and things go downhill.

------
gtirloni
That thing almost nobody used? Seems fair.

EDIT: At this point, is there any value in comments about how Google kills
things? I feel like it's a waste of time for a knowledgeable crowd like HN.

~~~
NilsIRL
I use it and it is very useful.

It allows to print documents even when you're not on your network.

------
EricE
BTW CUPS on a raspberry pi make a great little print server and can extend
features like AirPrint to printers that otherwise don't have them. One of the
better write-ups:
[http://ventures.tpedersen.net/errata/raspberrypi/homepiv3](http://ventures.tpedersen.net/errata/raspberrypi/homepiv3)

But there's lots of this out there. You can set it up on any machine you have
- if you leave a desktop on all the time or have a NAS that lets you run VMs
too you can put this functionality there too.

~~~
ukyrgf
Unless you have a Brother printer. It's been a year so maybe this information
is outdated, but last I looked they had absolutely no support/drivers for ARM.

------
sanxiyn
Already in [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/), that's
fast.

~~~
codyogden
I got pinged minutes after this dropped. :) Happy that KBG is open source and
we can get it updated quickly.

------
printitout
Cc'd here from the other thread:

What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between
computer and printer (that work with many operating systems)?

Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with
e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and
authorization support in _actively maintained_ firmware?

Could Cloud Print support (with private servers and an _open standard_ ) just
be merged into CUPS now?

------
detuur
I mean, why wouldn't they? With all the people out there using it without
complaints.

------
hoffs
It's very funny that the article itself calls out most people commenting here
> Regardless, Google is getting savaged by bloggers for killing yet another
service, one that most of them never even tried, let alone used regularly.

~~~
hiccuphippo
I used it, not regularly, but was the only way to print from my Linux machine
at my company, the printer had it built in even. I wonder what will happen to
printers like that next year when the servers disappear.

------
projektfu
I didn't see anything about the migration path for servers using the
CloudPrint API. My medical records/pharmacy/invoicing software uses CloudPrint
to reach printers. What are the alternatives for SAAS?

~~~
januzis
PrintNode, only had good experience with them, migrated from cloud print after
I could not get some thermal printers working properly

------
awill
This is terrible. I use Linux at home, and Linux has always had difficulty
printing. I deliberately bought a Brother laser printer with Google Cloud
Print to avoid these issues. It also makes it easy to print from my phone. Had
I known this, I might have bought an HP printer, which are known to have
better Linux drivers....

------
martin1b
Add that to the Google Cemetary.

[https://gcemetery.co/google-product-lifespan/](https://gcemetery.co/google-
product-lifespan/)

~~~
codyogden
We’ve already got it on killedbygoogle.com

Open Source moves quick. :)

------
EricE
Looks like IPP Everywhere could be a self-hosted alternative that has much of
Google Cloud Print functionality including the ability to print securely from
the public cloud

[https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html](https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html)

------
johnmaguire2013
This sucks. I loved Google Cloud Print. I've never had good luck configuring
CUPS on Linux, and Google Cloud Print gave me a nice way to not have to deal
with it.

~~~
brutt
Turn off firewall.

------
markstos
My experience with the opposite of the author's. Cloud Print rarely worked for
me and generated more work setting up and managing relative's newly wireless
printers when the old method of direct USB printing worked reliability and was
largely "plug-n-play". Good riddance.

------
vngzs
(2013-2019) Gwern did a statistical analysis predicting Google product
closures. It's useful context for discussions such as this:
[https://www.gwern.net/Google-shutdowns](https://www.gwern.net/Google-
shutdowns)

~~~
jayvanguard
I followed this link to a SlateStarCodex article on Google Correlate. At the
top of the Google Correlate page was:

"Google Correlate will shut down on December 15th 2019 as a result of low
usage. You can download your data under Manage my Correlate data in the top
bar, or right from here"

Good timing! Get your correlations in while you can.

[https://www.google.com/trends/correlate](https://www.google.com/trends/correlate)

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/16/google-correlate-
does-...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/16/google-correlate-does-not-
imply-google-causation/)

------
jlawer
I think this again points to why google struggles with consumer products. It
appears that google's strength in technology sometimes lets them leap frog
competitors by bringing a better product to market, they seem to screw up
getting the whole of business behind it. Sooner or later the competitors catch
up with the technology and do the other things right.

I really don't understand why they didn't keep this announcement under wraps
and extend the service for another year, as this is exactly the kind of story
they don't need with the lackluster launch of Stadia. Google really can't
bring large parts of the business together to focus on a strategic goal which
seems to result in this flailing around product to product.

------
m712
Whatever happened to good old CUPS? Why did they have to introduce so many
layers including Google's servers between the user and the printer?

~~~
geofft
CUPS is exactly what Google is switching Chrome OS to, as a replacement for
Cloud Print.

But the reason to have Google's (or someone's) servers involved is so that you
don't need to be on the same network (e.g., you can print to your home
printer, behind a firewall/NAT, while you're at a coffeeshop, also behind a
firewall/NAT).

~~~
darkwater
Buuuuut, is that really a valid use case? how many people do actually want to
remotely print from another network to a printer, beside print shops without
dedicated WiFi networks? How many people do actually want to use it as some
sort of fax-machine replacement?

~~~
toast0
It's like sort of useful. In the old days, I would print my lab reports to the
college printer from home (using smb based print spooling, which dates me,
because smb over the internet was allowed then). You could also use cloudprint
to send a document to a print shop before you got there; not the worst way to
print things if you don't have a printer at home.

~~~
tedunangst
Most of the people I know who tried that in college seemed to always send the
first copy to the wrong printer. So you print you report on the physics
printer. Walk over. Nothing here. Walk back to dorm. Realize you printed in
chem building. Print again in physics lab. Walk over again.

------
peterwwillis
Here is an Epson page on setting up Google Cloud Print with their printers:
[https://epson.com/Support/wa00605b](https://epson.com/Support/wa00605b)

As you can see, it was really valuable to just set up a printer once, and
everything internet-enabled could just print to it. When this goes away,
everyone in the world who relied on this setup will need to dig out manuals
and figure out a custom solution for every device and user, because nothing
replaces the Cloud Print functionality. (DNS-SD discovered Driverless Printing
isn't even necessarily supported on such printers, and is local-only)

------
cptskippy
I for one am not going to miss this. It always struck me as a very poorly
designed response to AirPrint that never worked right.

~~~
scarface74
What’s the alternative for printing from Android devices?

~~~
welly
To your own printer? Bluetooth or Wifi. I've got a Canon TS9150 printer and I
can connect to it from my phone via wifi, either directly - phone to printer -
or if the printer is on your wifi network, that way. Canon have an app for
android phones that help you connect to your printer which works quite well.

~~~
scarface74
Is this really a better user experience?

On a Mac or any iOS device you just connect to a network and all of the
printers just show up. You don’t need an app. I have a newer iPad but even my
old first generation iPad that hasn’t seen an operating system update since
2011 will print to any of my three AirPrint printers.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last time I had an Android device in my house
(my son’s) don’t you still have to install separate printer drivers for
printers if they don’t support Google Cloud Print?

~~~
giggles_giggles
I have an Android and have never, as far as I can remember, tried to print
from it. For you, I opened a random web page and chose "print" and it somehow
detected the HP printer on my home WiFi. No required apps, nothing special.
It's just there.

------
CraigJPerry
Don't worry it'll be OK, we still have HP ePrint.

Said no-one ever.

------
felipelemos
I wish Google could at least release the code of killed projects as
opensource.

~~~
londons_explore
Generally, Googles infrastructure is so unlike existing opensource systems
that even if you had the sourcecode in-hand, the effort required to get it
compiling and running while re-implementing all dependencies would be almost
as much as starting from scratch.

The opensourcing of Bazel and absl:: is a big start - but there are a lot of
core Java libraries you'd be missing, and all the loadbalancing, identity,
config and storage systems would all need shims to slightly-incompatible
opensource solutions.

------
undoware
I'm reading a lot of commenters above chime in with explanations for why it's
logistically hard for GOOG to maintain these scut-work keep-lights-on projects
because they are so unappealing to their engineers and often involves e.g.
boring, non-promotable work. This gave me a Radical idea.

So, I'm one of the lucky few trans folks who have managed to survive and
flourish. I'm vividly aware of at least one reservoir of brilliant people who
don't get a crack to show the world what they can do.

Instead of just shuttering projects that aren't sexy enough, or are too
difficult to maintain, or don't contribute to your OKRs or promotions. Why not
give them away? Why not give them to a team of folks with: disabilities,
barriers to professional advancement; etc. Google could quality-ensure and
knowledge-transfer, meanwhile doing social good, and getting ongoing support
for a product that they would otherwise have to add to the increasingly
embarrassing pile of abandonware?

I'm not saying it would be easy -- I can think of any number of places where
this could go horribly wrong -- but it is quite obviously a step in the right
direction to try.

There are lots of great minds that would _kill_ for a chance to do something
boring for a change, because financial (and then food, and then shelter)
instability is anything but.

------
netwanderer3
Everyone is criticizing Google for ending many of their services lately.
However, are we being biased? Considering a very high amount of various
different services Google is offering (much more than any other typical
company), it would make sense that their discontinuing rate would be higher
than others as well. Someone should do a statistics check or comparison vs.
other big companies for a more accurate assessment. The fact that Google gets
reported on the news more often may make their service cancellation rate
appear with a higher frequency as well.

It's fashionable to blame Google for most things these days, but in honesty,
if Google were truly evil they could have done much worse things. Considering
all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power to destroy
any companies or competitors if they really wanted to.

For example, throughout all these years I could never understand how Google
allowed Yelp to become what they are today. Google own all the core
technologies in that space: search, map, mobile OS. They literally have all
the home fied advantages, yet Google decided to take a step back and allowed
Yelp to take the lead. They could have easily destroyed Yelp anytime they
wanted to but they never did that.

To me personally, Google is probably the most reasonable and undervalued
company out there. With similar power in their hands, other companies would
have just gone all out and probably be extremely evil for a crazy amount of
profits in return, but for Google they have always refrained themselves from
doing exactly that. Too bad most people just never considered this angle.

~~~
scottlocklin
> Everyone is criticizing Google for ending many of their services lately.
> However, are we being biased?

I dunno; I don't really care about any of it; I've never trusted them enough
to use any of their products I wasn't actually giving them money for.

>Considering all the data and technologies they possess, Google has the power
to destroy any companies or competitors if they really wanted to.

Lolwut? No, actually, they don't. They didn't beat Yelp in the early days
because they weren't in the game. They may eventually do so, as Yelp
degenerates into a stupid protection racket, but hopefully this entire idea
goes away, as until they solve the sibyl problem, its a horse shit idea.

And if they started doing crap like this (for no reason, mind you: google is
an ad company), they'd very likely end up lots of little baby googles the way
ATT did. They probably will anyway. And good riddance to bad rubbish.

Of course they've long since jumped the shark, and even removed the "don't be
evil" part of their corporate motto.

------
tibbon
That's relatively annoying. I just got a new HP printer that uses cloud print,
and I was enjoying using it to make printing from anywhere/my phone easier. Oh
well.

------
tmaly
I use cloud print weekly to print off some homework for my child on the
Chromebook. What is the alternative?

~~~
efficax
ChromeOS has native print capabilities:
[https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en)

I use it all the time.

~~~
skykooler
Does this work on older Chromebooks? The only way I was able to get a two-
year-old Asus chromebook to print was to share the printer via cloud print
from a raspberry pi.

~~~
freefal
I'm interested in any responses as I had to do the exact same thing.

------
Squithrilve
Google is closing on of their perfectly working services? Who could've
imagined such a conundrum!

~~~
zamadatix
I'm amazed someone out there found it a perfectly working service.

~~~
rootsudo
It worked for me perfectly. I'm going to miss it. :(

------
jonahbenton
So mad about this. I am a paying google customer and this is a feature I use
all the time.

------
gravypod
This would be a great time for someone to implement a version of this that's
paid and has other SaaS features (print-to-mailed-letter, etc). I bet if you
streamlined it you could get some customers pretty easily.

------
asveikau
Network protocols for printing on a LAN are quite old. LPD and SMB are two
that I use at home. I know I am an advanced user and this won't solve it for
the masses, but if I combine that with ssh I can already print anywhere.

So I don't completely understand why you need a proprietary Google "cloud"
service that they can sunset some years later and break. When I heard about
this I wondered why someone can't build a consumer-friendly solution on these
older protocols.

Of course, printing itself is less relevant than it was 20 years ago, so it's
not exactly a booming industry.

------
EricE
IPP Everywhere looks like a viable and open alternative:
[https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html](https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html)

------
branon
I'm confused on what the replacement is. Historically, ChromeOS hasn't been
able to print at all unless using Google Cloud Print in some form. To my
knowledge there are two existing forms:

* a Google Cloud Print-ready printer, or

* a computer that can run Chrome and bridge non-Google Cloud Print-ready printers to Google Cloud Print.[0]

So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without
deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and
registering a "classic printer". To combat this, I made a simple Python script
that runs an HTTP server, accepts file uploads, assumes cupsd is running on
the same host, and throws jobs at my printer. This has worked nicely, and over
time I've added additional features, such as the ability to specify double-
sided printing or number of copies.

The wording in this link is the source of my confusion. The first paragraph
states (somewhat brusquely) that users should "identify an alternative
solution and execute a migration strategy" without giving any suggestions on
how this might best be accomplished. What's more, the first link[1] on the
page claims "native printing" is getting better, but upon clicking this link
I'm directed to a page about Chrome Enterprise.

So... what am I supposed to make of this? I have to pay for an enterprise
edition of ChromeOS to use printers now? Google's own infographics[2] seem to
suggest so. How is this an improvement? The article goes on to bullet-point
several of the specific features that will be available by end-of-year. It's
not clear if these apply to everybody, or to only those persons who are paying
for Chrome Enterprise.

Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS? What is Google angling for by
intentionally crippling software and systems that work _perfectly fine_
elsewhere?

I will keep on trucking with my tiny "print proxy" script, while continuing to
not give a shit about Google's inane antics regarding printers.

The only saving grace for this article is the very last link[3] which appears
to detail a _suspiciously_ simple process for adding a networked printer. I'll
have to commandeer my wife's Chromebook the next time I get a chance, and test
this process out. I've never seen this particular article before, and to my
knowledge adding a printer like this was previously not a supported operation
on ChromeOS.

Hang on, though. We're not out of the woods yet. Because of course, the only
helpful page I've found so far links[4] to _yet more instructions_ for adding
a native printer. The first step is "sign into some Google service" and the
steps seem geared towards an "organizational unit". No. Not happening. What
the hell is all this? I just want to add a local printer. I'm not sending
print jobs to Google first, and I don't want support articles that assume I'm
administering an organization.

[0]
[https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/1686197](https://support.google.com/cloudprint/answer/1686197)
(see also the header "Connect a printer that’s not cloud-ready")

[1] [https://www.blog.google/products/chrome-enterprise/chrome-
en...](https://www.blog.google/products/chrome-enterprise/chrome-enterprise-
now-offers-native-print-management/)

[2] [https://www.blog.google/topics/connected-
workspaces/introduc...](https://www.blog.google/topics/connected-
workspaces/introducing-chrome-enterprise/) (image a bit of the way down.
IDKWTF "printer management" is supposed to mean but it seems like something
I'd want)

[3]
[https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252](https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252)

[4]
[https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en&ref...](https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en&ref_topic=4413914)

~~~
scottlamb
> So the ancient WPS printer in my garage is entirely unsupported without
> deploying a computer running Windows or macOS, installing Chrome, and
> registering a "classic printer"

I think the support text is wrong—you could do this on Linux as well. It'll be
a moot point though when Cloud Print shuts down.

> Why is CUPS gimped so badly on ChromeOS?

Have you tried recently? I don't think it is anymore. Yesterday my Chromebook
seemed to just see my printer on my local LAN (via Rendezvous, I assume).

I agree these product/support docs you linked are pretty alarming. But I think
the actual situation is (or if not is, will be) much better for basic ChromeOS
in simple situations:

* auto-discovered network-connected printer on the same LAN as the Chromebook

* network-connected printer where you know the hostname and it's reachable from the Chromebook

* USB printer connected directly to the Chromebook

Hopefully those docs will improve soon...

Note that while I work for Google, I don't have any inside knowledge of this.

~~~
branon
I have not tried recently. The new support articles I've uncovered seem to
suggest that the situation has vastly improved. I'm still salty though, and
I've put too much work into my Python script to really be concerned about
switching to the more "correct" process that was previously denied to me.

The sad fact is that once a consumer realizes the device they've bought is
encumbered with artificial limitations, they might not trust it even when
(if!) these limitations are lifted later.

------
reportgunner
I would understand the need for a "Cloud" print if you'd need to print in
another country that you never visit, but what does someone need a cloud print
for otherwise ?

~~~
johnmaguire2013
\- Printing from Chromebooks

\- Printing easily from Linux

\- Printing from your phone

\- etc.

~~~
leonlag
> \- Printing easily from Linux

This is as easy as it can be without needing cloud print though

> \- Printing from Chromebooks

> \- Printing from your phone

This is an artificial restriction created by google. There is already a
network printing protocol that works without the "cloud". You just have to
support it.

~~~
johnmaguire2013
I've always struggled to set up network printing on Linux.

------
yegle
This is just such a convenient feature: you can remotely print something on
the go from your phone and your parents/spouse/kids at home can pick it up.

Is there any open source alternatives?

~~~
nevf1
PrintNode is a great alternative and a well refined product - definitely
recommended. However, it has one major drawback as compared with Google's
Cloud Print and that's its lack of iOS & Android printing support.

[https://www.printnode.com/en/faq](https://www.printnode.com/en/faq)

------
willemgroen
PaperCut made Mobility Print free on the same day as Google's announcement:
[https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-
pri...](https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/)

PaperCut Mobility Print is an alternative to Google Cloud Print.

------
AdmiralAsshat
I wonder if they gave any of the hardware vendors who proudly advertised,
"Google Cloud-Print Ready" on the side of the box more advanced notice than
this.

~~~
londons_explore
A years notice is quite a lot...

I doubt many printer manufacturers go more than a year without revising the
designs at least a little.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
> A years notice is quite a lot...

For a device you _already bought_? Not really. How often do you replace your
printer?

If you rely on GCP for your home/home-office/small business, you might be a
little peeved to discover that your several-hundred-dollar printer might be
reduced to a "dumb"/local-only printer next year because the manufacturer
decided to rely on a closed-source third-party service for what you consider
core functionality of your printer.

------
taco_emoji
So is there any REAL alternative out there? Yeah yeah, ChromeOS supports CUPS
now, which is great if your printer connects to the network, but what about
those of us who have an older printer that's USB-only?

Moreover, how do you print from Android now? Go ahead and search for
instructions how to do that which don't involve either A) Google Cloud Print
or B) a vendor-specific app (which probably only works with network-connected
printers).

------
willemgroen
PaperCut made Mobility Print free this week:
[https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-
pri...](https://www.papercut.com/products/free-software/mobility-print/)

We are also adding off-network printing support early 2020, also 100% free.
Our gift to you. With Mobility Print you can print from BYO Windows, Mac,
Chromebook, iOS and Android. devices.

------
sytelus
So, why these companies can't look for other avenues then just killing
products?

Alternatives:

\- Put it in maintenance mode and outsource it. A 5 person team offshore for
this mode would cost ~$250K.

\- Open source it

\- Sell it to a startup

\- Sell it to an equity firm

\- Make a cloud service out of it

\- Add advertising/data collection to it that might benefit other products/AI
efforts (with user agreement)

I am of the firm believer that all code that gets written should be
_preserved_. Someone out there sometime would be looking for it.

------
inception44
[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/) <\-- List of all products which
Google buried.

~~~
rafaelvasco
Wow. Never knew it was so many; And many of them died a slow death. If you're
going to fail, fail fast.

------
jonstaab
We very nearly built our app's printing subsystem on Google Cloud Print, but
went with PrintNode instead. So glad, PN has been great to work with.

------
printitout
What are some other solutions for securing the network connections between
computer and printer?

Are there any good and reasonably-inexpensive network-enabled printers with
e.g. LetsEncrypt SSL/TLS certs and SSO/LDAP/AD/WebID/DID authentication and
authorization support in _actively maintained_ firmware?

Could Cloud Print support (with private servers) just be merged into CUPS now?

------
outworlder
Google, what the heck?

Cloud Print was THE main reason why I never fully switched away from Chrome.
It was more reliable than even the "native" printing capabilities of my
printer, which would randomly refuse to print, but over Cloud Print it worked
every time.

It was also very convenient to send print jobs even while not at home.

Well, thanks for allowing me to get rid of Chrome entirely, I guess.

------
harikb
People rely on a lot of "free" Google services, but don't realize that it
takes an enormous amount of people to keep things running without security
issues. Another point is that, it takes hundreds of thousands of paying
customers to get something to a point it is self sustainable. Just because a
few random users are ready to pay $50 for the service, if at all, does not
make it successful for Google or any other company.

Short of "regulating" these companies to open-source or sell the infra to a
caretaker entity when services are shutdown, there is no other option. Even
then, it is a massive ask of Google (that every service be separable from
anything proprietary Google infra provides), and it also unrealistic to expect
another company / governing body to run it without issues.

At this point, it is what it is. If you use a free service, expect it to die
at some point in the future. This happens to many services where the entire
company disappears. The fact that Google survived 20 years shouldn't be held
against them if products went down and the company didn't. Numbers are enough
to sway the stats and make Google the bad company that shuts-down services too
often.

------
cmurf
I wonder if they'll replace it with IPP Everywhere support? Totally dropping
the ability to print out of the box would be disappointing, but I suppose
someone could package up an app that enables IPP Everywhere printing. Google
Cloud Print might have had more sophisticated discovery.

------
Mikeb85
Well it seems like it's more or less being replaced by Mopria printing, which
is a platform agnostic wireless printing service and already incorporated into
recent versions of Android. Not a bad thing IMO, replacing Google services
with new industry standard services.

------
etxm
It interesting to me when I see people passionate about google killing a
service.

If you’re that passionate and people will miss the service, then that sounds
like a business opportunity to me.

Just because it’s not revenue positive (enough) for google, doesn’t mean it
couldn’t support a smaller start up.

------
dmix
> Regardless, Google is getting savaged by bloggers for killing yet another
> service, one that most of them never even tried, let alone used regularly.

I’ve got to agree here, this feature got replaced by a native ChromeOS
printing feature and probably wasn’t being used much.

It’s not as bad as others.

~~~
jessaustin
I find the service to be _very_ convenient when I have something my parents
need to see. It's _so_ much easier to just print the damn thing on their
printer, than to walk them through the process of navigating to a particular
site, opening a particular attachment on a particular email, etc. That's often
when I'm using a chromebook, but not necessarily. All you need is a browser to
use this service.

------
markstos
I'm glad to see Google is dropping their closed-source, "share a copy of
everything you print with Google" service. Instead, they are doubling down on
supporting open source printing standards and projects like CUPS. That's a
win.

------
jdlyga
I loved Google Cloud Print. It made printing from various computers I have a
lot easier, since I didn't have to install drivers on each one. It's the only
reason I have Chrome installed still. Why does Google always kill useful
products?

------
zarriak
Why doesn't Google just charge for this? This is the only thing that makes
printing off of an Android phone even ok. I have a Pixel and for the life of
me I cannot print easily from it, and I have tried multiple different printer
manufacturers.

~~~
inapis
Revenue generated from charging for products such as this would be probably
chump change for Google.

Google is a mass market company thus chump change is irrelevant to them.

Plus they are used to operating at a scale by providing products for free.
Consumers are used to Google providing products for free. Thus it’s jarring
for a lot of users to suddenly pay for basic functionality. Enterprises
probably don’t need this because they’ve already figured out network printing
decades ago.

Plus when you start charging people “money,” you’re expected to provide
“human” support. Google won’t come near products where “human” support is
necessary even with a 10ft pole unless you’re spending gajillion dollars with
them.

In a strategic sense it makes sense for “Google” to shut it down. Companies
like Readdle will probably fill in the spots

~~~
hinkley
But Google isn’t Google anymore. They’re Google, an Alphabet Company. So there
_should_ be more space for this.

The problem is that Page and Brin, the authors of the perverse incentives at
Google, are still in charge. Alphabet would have been a great place to bring
in some people who are good at maintaining projects. Hell Google could learn a
thing or two via osmosis about efficiency from them. Maybe cut the ageist
bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come with experience instead of
making the same mistakes over and over.

But no, it’s still the Larry and Sergei show.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Maybe cut the ageist bullshit down a notch and hire some people who come
> with experience instead of making the same mistakes over and over.

Hey, they're more than happy to hire anyone who can pass a four-hour CS
undergrad final as a mid-level engineer, regardless of age or experience.

~~~
hinkley
Fairly sure that was sarcasm, in which case I approve.

One of the things that people learn in college is that college is way harder
than high school and a bunch of things that didn’t matter much in high school
are super important. Same thing happens when you leave college.

College teaches a bunch of skill that will absolutely save your ass once a
month, maybe once a week at first. Then you have to learn a bunch of skills
that save your ass every single day.

It is rare that I compliment Microsoft, but somehow they managed to hire
people right out of college and _not_ give them Peter Pan syndrome, while
Google has failed at this. And I think it starts with the interview process.
MS looked for improvisation. Google focuses on book learning.

------
isawczuk
I will try to defend their decision. In era of avaliablity of cheap screens,
paper is used mostly as a temporary storage eg. tickets. If we could encourage
using more eco solutions this would be one of the steps forward.

------
forgingahead
I had never heard of this product before this HN post. While I agree Google
kills off many useful products, perhaps there is a deeper reason that many
products were birthed without any real long-term plan or ownership?

------
thrillgore
Just another day that ends in Y. Meanwhile, game developers have lost faith in
Stadia and it's been out for a week at best. The reason? Google kills its own
products.

It's time for a management change at Google and Alphabet.

------
scarface74
Isn’t Google Cloud Print the standard way you print from an Android device?

~~~
ProZsolt
Yes, it is.

~~~
scarface74
When they abandon Google Cloud Print, then how would you print from Android
devices?

------
irrational
I'd like the Unicode Consortium to add a surprised (but not really surprised)
emoji that we only use when Google kills a product. I think this will be okay
since we will be using it constantly.

------
bpodgursky
99.5% of the people upvoting this article had neither used nor heard of Cloud
Print before seeing this headline.

Look, I too got annoyed when Google killed Reader. It sucked for a couple
days. I moved on.

This doesn't even register as a product. It was an experiment that wasn't
needed, so they killed it.

Holding onto every silly project you ever worked on doesn't make you
responsible, it makes you a directionless hoarder. Even Google doesn't have
infinite bandwidth (heh) to work on pointless side-projects.

They aren't killing Gmail. Or GCP. Or Maps. Or anything else you ever used.
Let it die. Don't upvote this post just to use it for ammunition on some
overly-generic tirade against Google product management. You are just adding
noise to the world.

~~~
endorphone
I imagine everyone has heard of cloud print -- it's emblazoned on the
marketing materials of a bunch of printers. It was the single way of printing
from Android -- a couple of billion devices sold -- for the longest time,
though it was pretty lame having to send a print job to Google so it can be
printed on the device you're standing beside. Android 9 added Wi-Fi direct
printing which is much more rational -- on a small minority of devices thus
far -- but why not just sunset GCP as deprecated (countless GCP printers and
devices that only supported out there) instead of outright killing? Because
Google doesn't care.

So yeah, a lot of people think "Oh damn they are shutting down GCP" because it
legitimately impacts them. This bizarre notion throughout this discussion that
it was some weird fringe service is not supported by reality.

And Google has a poor product record for good reason, so the criticism is very
well deserved. They made their bed and now they lie in it. Someone would be
incredibly foolhardy to seriously "buy" games on Stadia, for instance, which
is a service that has an incredibly high probability of being Googled.

~~~
kllrnohj
> It was the single way of printing from Android -- a couple of billion
> devices sold -- for the longest time

Cloud print was added to Android at the same time Android added support for
generic printer drivers. Cloud Print is, in fact, just a generic printer
driver as far as the OS is concerned. There are, and have been, native print
drivers, though. HP, for example, has Android drivers:
[https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04024231](https://support.hp.com/us-
en/document/c04024231)

~~~
endorphone
Google Cloud Print was released in 2010, and was _the_ way of printing on
Android as of 2011. Native print drivers were added to Android in __2017 __. A
print "framework" was added in 2014, where manufacturers could build hacked-
out targets, which a couple did, although most are relatively newer.

This is a far cry from "same time". Indeed, most manufacturers STILL pitch
Google Cloud Printer up front, most electronics store put it as a primary
selection criteria, and it's always a feature on the box.

I'm not defending Google Cloud Print. It was always a terrible solution that
was poorly thought out from the outset. But it's classic Google that so many
are put in this situation.

------
jaredhansen
Well, it finally happened: we outlasted Google!

Hi, founder of Breezy here (www.breezy.com), a secure cloud / mobile print
infrastructure that actually _is_ "enterprise-ready". (For example: we have
tens of thousands of active users across thousands of retail branches for one
of the top 3 banks in the US, plus thousands more across dozens of countries
around the world.)

I started Breezy in 2009 because, as a corporate lawyer at the time, I needed
a way to print from my BlackBerry and couldn't find one. I applied to the 2010
YC batch with Breezy, got rejected, went through Founder Institute instead,
raised a 750k seed round in 2011, almost ran out of money, pivoted to an
enterprise focus, raised a bit more money, barely survived a BS patent lawsuit
from a Canadian competitor now owned by HP, went through lots of other ups and
downs, and here we are.

We're never going to be a unicorn, but it's a neat little business in a niche
that while "nice to have" for most companies, is critical to some. If you need
quality cloud print infrastructure, hit me up.

\---

Meanwhile, a few thoughts from a 10-year industry veteran:

\- GCP was never enterprise-class in any way. "Utterly unreliable" was the
most common complaint we heard from customers.

\- The core problem for a lot of enterprise use cases isn't driver
incompatibility; it's network routing. Your MFPs are on this network segment
over here, but your users (especially mobile devices) are on that one over
there. Cloud printing can save you a _lot_ of network headaches.

\- "Driverless printing" doesn't work very well, and never has. This goes
double for Mopria, which while by far the most successful of attempts, is
pretty shaky in real-life usage, and lacks most basic capabilities around
security, audits, encryption etc etc.

\- AirPrint is pretty good and is consistently getting better, but it's always
been very consumer-focused and remains so today as far as I can tell. One of
the really great features they could add to simplify enterprise adoption would
be to enable querying "Print Servers" (which the AirPrint spec does recognize)
for lists of printers served by them. Right now there's no way to do this, so
in order to reach an AirPrint print queue that's not bonjour-routable from
your current IP, you have to have a config profile that points you to that
specific queue, rather than to a server that returns a group of queues.

\- The other major improvement opportunity there would be the ability to use
certs to completely identify the user, thereby enabling (say) an Intune-
provisioned iPad to print natively to a Xerox-managed enterprise pull-print /
badge-release system, so that users get a native experience of printing via
one queue, to any printer in the org. This is possible with Breezy today but
there are a number of hoops to jump through on the admin side.

------
JadeNB
Currently one of two on the front page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606049)
.

------
JadeNB
Currently one of two on the front page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188)
.

------
inesprimibile
Anybody have any good recommendations for alternatives? We use Cloud Print as
a printing solution to allow users in our app to authorize us to send print
jobs programmatically to their printers.

~~~
yellowapple
I've seen QZ Tray used for this sort of thing to great effect. It entails
installing both Java and QZ Tray itself, though.

Most companies just roll their own "print client" programs, in my observation.
Not _that_ difficult to do (the hardest part is actually sending the document
to the printer, which is relatively trivial for macOS/Linux/anything-else-
with-CUPS and not-trivial but reasonably-documented to do with Windows; those
two should cover your bases).

------
rcostin2k2
Possible duplicate thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606188)

~~~
JaimeThompson
This one was posted a few minutes before but the other one has a better tile.

------
MisterOctober
Not sorry to hear this. GCP never worked reliably and was absolute hell to
support for the several months I had to do. Rood giddace to rad bubbish, see
ya never Cloud Print!

------
NicoJuicy
So, i won't be able to print my shippings label to my mom from another city
anymore :(

It's still an easy solution for using a tablet and printing from it.

------
QueridoGuy
I do believe that right after the event of the first google pixel, all google
products were “failure” by their standards. they haven’t created anything big
ever since. Same goes to Microsoft and their latest product kills. At least
their new products are getting better now. Google never created anything
significant. That’s why I wouldn’t trust their new products. They really need
to stop publishing products that feels like beta.

Their plans always seem like: Beta-final release > take long time to finalize
it > kill stage

~~~
ben_jones
Same goes for Microsoft? Looking through [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/allproducts](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/allproducts) thats a real
stretch.

------
rpmisms
FUCK. This was my only good solution for making all the printers in my office
work together. I'm glad I'm leaving next week.

------
ryanmercer
So how do they expect us to print from Chrome OS (or our phones and tablets
for that matter)? I mean, my daily driver is a Chromebox.

------
tyingq
Would be nice if they could open source it, though I suppose it depends on
Google internal frameworks and services none of us has.

~~~
londons_explore
I think they should opensource it in a non-compiling, non-working state, as a
gesture of openness.

I bet someone would go to the effort of patching it up and getting it to run.

Only disadvantage is probably that "cloudprint.google.com" is probably
hardcoded into millions of printers worldwide, so even if you could run it on
your own server, your printer will never work with it.

~~~
tyingq
Smart DNS relay at the router...

~~~
londons_explore
Would Google be happy to sign HTTPS certificates for anyone to spoof
cloudprint.google.com though?

~~~
tyingq
Ahh, yeah. But I wouldn't be surprised if many printers skipped client side
validation.

------
novaRom
There are rumors Google will close Stadia soon.

~~~
jasonvorhe
If they handle Stadia like they did Cloud Print it'll live on for 10 years and
then you'll be informed a year before the scheduled shutdown.

That's pretty great service.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Except it will be in beta for the whole period.

------
nickhalfasleep
I have this setup for my parents to allow them to print to their chromebooks.
This will be annoying as heck to replace.

------
Teknoman117
That's a shame. It's the only way I could get my printer to consistently work
across platforms. Oh well...

------
branon
There was a discussion about this yesterday, I've got a pretty long rant
posted on the other thread[0] that participants here might want to read

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815)

Edit: apparently pointing to a previous comment on a related thread is ...
bad? For ... some reason?

------
zelly
Crazy thought, what if Android and/or ChromeOS is next? Android always seemed
like another "charity" project that didn't directly generate profit (before
Nexus/Pixel phones). Most of the value from Android is captured by Chinese
phone manufacturers and carriers, not Alphabet.

Probably not a good idea to invest too much into the Android ecosystem tbh.

~~~
kllrnohj
Android is the largest OS on the planet. Google would only ever give that up
if they were going bankrupt, and you know there are companies that would buy
that up in an instant and keep it running. Such as, say, Microsoft. Or Amazon.

------
alexnewman
Yet another reason to switch to hcaptcha.com. Just wait for google to turn off
your homepage.

------
agumonkey
Google got loved by offering tiny things like these... I don't get it.

Why stop there, just shut maps.

------
erikbye
Just got an email saying they are shutting down Google Translator Toolkit,
too.

------
qazpot
Why don't they open source the projects instead of shutting them down.

------
jdofaz
On the bright side, for me, this is a product I never used. Not even once.

------
fybe
Another one bites the dust

------
ben_jones
> We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution
> and execute a migration strategy.

Something enterprise customers love hearing. Ooof imagine being assigned to
sunsetting the service and explaining to what enterprise customers it still
has.

~~~
geofft
Are there _paying_ enterprise customers of Cloud Print? Even today,
[https://www.google.com/cloudprint/](https://www.google.com/cloudprint/) has a
"(beta)" in the logo.

Enterprise customers need to figure out that if you're paying $0 for
something, you get $0 in support.... if you want something that works, either
pay someone enough money to support it, or find an open option and pay your
employees enough money to support it in-house.

~~~
jedberg
That leads to warped thinking though. When I worked at ebay we weren’t allowed
to use open source software for this exact reason. If we wanted open source
software we had to find a vendor we could pay for support.

For that reason we could only run RedHat or Solaris and whatever they
supported.

~~~
geofft
Having to find an external vendor is definitely warped thinking. Saying "You
can't depend on open-source software in production unless you have budgeted
for internal support for that software _or_ there's an external vendor" seems
entirely fair to me, though. If you find a critical bug, having a $10B company
with ten thousand employees sit around waiting for some hobbyist (possibly not
available until the weekend because they have a day job with a _competing_
$10B company) to investigate some issue on GitHub is a bit unreasonable both
for the company and for the hobbyist.

For lots of software, you can either trust that it's well-supported upstream
and such bugs are likely to be rare, or you can say that your internal use is
something you can work around (e.g., if you want to use an open-source IDE,
knock yourself out, if it breaks you can find another text editor). But you
should explicitly consider that.

Also, the only reason open-source software works as well as it does is that
_someone else_ is investing in making it work. Oftentimes that's Red Hat and
Oracle. If you're a $10B company and you're expecting open source to magically
work with no investment, besides being a jerk, you're also the reason people
keep saying "how do we solve the open source sustainability problem" \- it's
your own fault that support resources for your critical software don't exist.

------
m0zg
Chromebooks can't be that far behind after this one.

------
xyst
Coincides with the slow death of the printing industry

------
j45
It would be nice if this tech was open sourced.

------
vkaku
Well, this one had more value than Stadia.

------
mancerayder
New motto: Print No Evil.

------
swills
Google: We recommend that you identify an alternative solution and execute a
migration strategy.

------
epx
Pity, I really liked this

------
Hitton
And that's an example why I think that it's stupid to jump on Stadia
bandwagon.

~~~
numlock86
I think Stadia is different as they sell actual hardware (controller +
Chromecast Ultra) and not only a service. Same with Pixel phones ... sort of.

------
gowld
"quietly".

------
blantonl
I wonder what this means for the Google Chrome hardware ecosystem...

~~~
geofft
[https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006](https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9633006)

Chrome OS now has basically full-featured support for CUPS like a normal Linux
machine, so you no longer need Cloud Print to print to local printers, and
they're adding features to let you use a remote CUPS server.

~~~
toast0
Since the post says they're gonna finish things by the end of this year and
there are already plenty of Chromebooks that they stopped updating... my big
unanswered question is, of the Chromebooks they stopped updating, how many of
them have a usable enough version of CUPS to still be able to print.

Ignoring, of course, those users that were using Cloud Print to network enable
their printer.

------
lousken
Stadia is next

------
tech234a
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]

[1]:
[https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179](https://support.google.com/a/answer/3179)

(Note: I also posted this comment on
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600206))

------
mraudiobook_com
Wow, amazing! This was the last reason I was using Chrome. It was literally
the one thing they had I couldn't get on other browsers and they kill it.

What an amazing company. Guess I should be happy that I'm now officially done
with Google.

------
wehrkeoruw
Has anyone tried buying these sunsetting projects from Google? I'd definitely
pay like $3-$5/mo to have this service, and the implementation is involved
enough that it'd be a hassle to duplicate.

------
penneyd
Ridiculous - who on earth is making these kinds of decisions?

~~~
dang
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying
for a bit better than internet default here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
_nickwhite
” We recommend that over the next year, you identify an alternative solution
and execute a migration strategy.”

Another Google product killed, another migration strategy to execute. What's
next?

~~~
dleslie
Quit Google and start paying for services that you value.

~~~
663e1b
I thought that service was part of the Google Enterprise suite (i.e. a paid
service)

~~~
hoffs
No it was beta all the time

~~~
ben_jones
Most Google Cloud Products are in Beta for years, with many enterprise
customers using them in Beta...

------
ifthenelseend
anyone in their right mind will use any product from Google? They deprecate
like 90% of their services...

[https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)

------
akhilcacharya
Im guessing there are still lots of people that require physical printing that
use Chromebooks and the like. Is there a built in printing solution for them
now? Because when the Cr48 was out the Chrome team recommended using Cloud
Print.

~~~
themagician
I know with a lot of HP printers you can just send whatever you want printed
to a special HP email address as an email attachment and it will print.

------
officeplant
I can see why people will miss it, but cloud print is always on my short list
of things I remove/disable when setting up a phone. How many average people
still own/need a printer often enough to not just go use one at the
library/kinkos?

~~~
marklyon
We set it up at our condo building lobby on a nice MFP for anyone to use. Was
a great, easy to use solution.

~~~
lonelappde
Can your printer be accessed via local wifi network / rendezvous?

And does Chromebook support that?

------
JustSomeNobody
I don't know why people expect anything more from Google.

Google has no customer facing support and they offer "free" services so they
_can_ kill them at will.

General rule of thumb: If you're not paying for it and you don't have access
to a live person, don't expect it to last.

