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.
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.
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.
Had Stadia only offered subs without having to buy the games, I'm sure it would still be around.
Any good free alternatives out there ?
Edit: The proposed alternatives they mention in the update (FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro) really don't fit that workflow.
[^1]: https://excalidraw.com/
Disclaimer: This is my side project.
Mural has a free tier. I did not used it much but was nice.
As is Excalidraw
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 that.
I love chalkboards so much, I really, really miss them.
If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards.
When I worked at a place with Jamboards, it was actually super useful doing meetings with virtual post-it notes that remote participants could move around. And it meant the meeting's facilitator could be remote as well.
You gotta be sure to get the super special chalk mathematicians are hoarding, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8
Cheers to Walter Lewin :)
You should check out Huddly Canvas -- it's a USB whiteboard camera designed for just this use case.
Without the whiteboard we would have been sketching on paper and would have been buried in waste paper within the hour.
A bit different now with remote-first or hybrid... If one person isn't in the office, it's basically dead in the water.
The correct move here would have been to offer a buyback/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).
They already got those $600/year "management and support fees".
My take: Google simply doesn't care about its reputation any longer. They are firmly in the customer milking phase in the stereotypical giant company lifecycle.
Also: This kind of behavior in the B2B field influences (lack of) faith in e.g. GCP's long-term commitments.
Honestly, people buying these products should be smarter. They bought an expensive chalkboard that they knew depends on someone else's computers (unless they didn't even bother to look into how the products work), without any guaranteed server support period anywhere to be found.
Anyone who cares about their purchases suddenly no longer working will simply avoid this hardware. The people who do purchase this stuff don't really care. They may act outraged in hopes of getting enough people worked up to start a class action lawsuit they can benefit from, but they failed to even consider "what if the servers shut down" before spending five grand on a glorified touchscreen and hooking themselves up to a $600 per year subscription. To make things worse, they bought this stuff from Google.
Screw Google and their e-waste factories, but banning all online products seems like an unnecessary hampering for innovation to be honest.
I suggest an alternative solution: for up to x years after a product is sold by retail stores, the servers must be up or the consumer must be able to get all of their money back from the sellers. This adds risk to the businesses launching and shutting down IoT stuff willy-nilly and helps consumers. Products sold in third party stores will have to be pretty reliable for stores to take the risk stocking this crap.
In a perfect world, I'd like the law to mandate that online-only products like these must put their server source under escrow (to be opened when the service shuts down) and must provide the user with an option to pick an alternative server address. Sadly, I don't think that idea is going to survive even a single day of IT lobbying.
With Availability as a critical part of the cybersecurity CIA acronym, I think it may just be possible that the EU's Cyber Resilience Act will include something to solve this problem.
I get your point but making calls is no longer the principal reason to own a smartphone. I have made no calls in the last two months and have received just one. But I have spent hours on Skype via WiFi, recorded tens of hours of video and taken hundreds of photographs, as well as read lots of books, sent and received money for goods that I have used the phone to list for sale online. Not to mention email and dozens of other applications.
Almost none of my use needed the cellular network.
Cell phones use globally standardized, government regulated network protocols with many providers. Not a private, locked down, super-duper encrypted, single provider SAAS.
I think the legislation should be that if you shut down a device's backend you must open up the protocol so someone else can implement it.
It may be worth tracking down if any stores still stock these things and what companies have invested in many of them, so you can try to get a deal on the hardware after the sunset date.
It adds seriously risk to a widespread deployment in any organization.
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.
I think this is an example where the market need is clearly there (does anyone like the state of remote brainstorming/remote whiteboarding?) but Google is deciding not to capture the market.
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.
Not this one obviously as google are shutting it down, but if the tech works someone else is probably selling the same thing. Or will be shortly.
However - recent changes in "management" and direction with Surface hardware products/division may impact this in the near future.
One of the reasons Google has so many failed product launches is because consumers don'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.
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.
Google internal services are always being rewritten, and code migrated from the old version of the service to the new one. If nobody is willing to migrate an externally visible product, it has to sunset at the same time that the internal service does.
This philosophy does wonders for internal code quality and consistency. It also makes people outside the company wonder whether they should trust Google's public offerings.
Obviously it isn't very profitable to keep supporting a product you've already sold at the moment, so something must be done to make it more attractive.
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.
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 "and what do we do with it afterwards?".
Imagine if private organizations built their own road network and then sold you a car that can only be driven on that road. Once that company goes out of business, the road vanished and your car is now a very heavy paperweight that literally cannot turn on. This would be totally unacceptable to us, yet we tolerate home automation vendors selling garbage that is locked to their propitiatory systems and will happily brick itself once those systems go offline.
The less you have in the cloud (generally) the better the economics for the manufacturer.
Vowed to make sure that never happens again. All my smart switches now have local control.
The internet should add functionality, but not gate it.
That the Pebble app has the option to connect to a third-party service provider (and that the Pebble works indefinitely without any connection to a phone, apart from some time drift) will probably keep my beloved watch alive over a decade past its official life span, maybe even longer.
It actually feels like something I own now, which makes a hell of a difference to me.
That it is like that probably comes down to a combination of tiny decisions during the development process in which the right people were in the right place.
Somehow this isn't an expectation with IoT, probably because they're shiny new toys in the experimental phases.
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't read the Cyryllic, but after 10min intro you understand the knobs). And why wouldn't they work?
Stockholm syndrome of some is unbelievable. And then when I say that I don't want any cloud-controlled devices, people tell me I'm paranoid...
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).
PS. I used Jamboards at Google and they were cool for meetings or job interviews.
Jamboard was a pricey item, but $5,000 was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a $600 "annual management and support fee," 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.
Looks like most go for around/under $1,500US on the secondary market. The NVIDIA hardware looks interesting although EOL: https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-tx1
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/ideas)? They either have a winner, or they stifle innovation in corresponding area for the lifetime of any associated patents.
There are companies like this: patent trolls. That's why the big tech companies all have patent sharing agreements now.
So now we have an expensive, heavy albatross on our hands. Really makes you want to avoid depending on Google for anything again.
I'm pretty intimately familiar with Android hardware devices having launched some myself and planned on creating for some sort of "jailbreak" (really you'd want to break into the Jamboard MDM system, not the OS) but it hasn't been a priority.
You can pick these up for cheap sometimes when people realize it needs a $1000 a year license to function...
For use as a whiteboard, I really want low latency from (a) dragging the stylus to (z) the display catching up with what I've drawn.
Their built-in Android app is great in that regard, but it's proprietary so it's not good for collaboration.
Unfortunately, there's much worse input-to-update latency if I use it as an external touch display, or if I use it's built-in Chrome browser with whiteboard websites.
Without the ability to root the device, I can't really investigate the source of that extra latency.
And it's not Google Play certified, so I can't install native whiteboarding apps from some the well-known vendors I've tried. (Those vendors require installation via Google Play.)
It's been a frustrating and expensive experiment.
Shutting down a free service that you didn't have to buy into, fine whatever. It still sucks but at least you didn't invest in a platform.
But if you are going to make a physical device you cannot treat it like you treat everything else.
Everybody remembers the old saying, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Well, there should be a reciprocal saying: "Anybody who ever buys google should be fired".
If the lesson here is "caveat emptor", then the real lesson is this: don't buy google.
IBM never cut us off, was happy to certify stuff to work with them and so on.
There seemed to be a general understanding of "people are running their business off of this stuff so we need to make it work".
Google? Naw they'll just quit development and hit the light switch who knows when. Hard stop.
Say what you will about Apple, they play the long game.
And it isn't like this is the first hardware that Google has abandoned, but they turn it into ewaste since it's tied to the cloud.
This company needs better management. It seems like its being run entirely by MBAs with zero vision or guts.
Edit: nvm, my CISO just confirmed me that this apparently “only” affects first generation users. We have the newer Board 65 types that will continue to be supported for the things we use it.
Microsoft Office still exists, and can still open Word / Excel / etc files from 25+ years ago.
Adobe Photoshop still exists, and can open PSD files created 25+ years ago.
Microsoft Xbox One X still exists, and is backwards compatible with titles from the OG Xbox release, as far back as 22 years ago - https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/backward-compatibility?cat=...
Microsoft Zune (launched 2006) is still supporting and fixing compatibility issues, all the way up through Windows 11 now 17 years post-launch - https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-just-fixed-a-zune-compatib...
Warframe (Canadian MMO-lite third-person action video game) still supports every purchased piece of digital content ever sold, on all platforms, from the very first purchase, over the past 10 years. (I believe the same is true for Final Fantasy 14 which launched in the same year, but I'm less familiar with that one)
Vanilla accounts from World of Warcraft (now 19ish years old) still work and function today.
---
I don't think anyone expects things to last forever. I think they're just expecting things to last longer than "a few years", and there's no technical reason why we couldn't ensure that.
In fact, just about most 'owned' software that does not depend on the cloud can be run for ever. Especially software that was sold as a perpetual license.
Google Reader. Never forget.
Most cloud-supported hardware is pretty fragile, but services in general can last much longer. Google's excessive churn with chat/social services is probably what earned their bad reputation. They also screwed up Nest. 8 years is a lot for them.
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.
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.
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.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...
It's very hard to understand why they'd be going in such different directions.
Microsoft has the organizational ability to get their workers to give a shit about maintenance and polish, and take it seriously. They have plenty of trouble of their own (I am far from a MS fan) but they don’t suffer that particular pathology—they’re not consistently perfect at it, certainly, but they’re also not consistently totally unable to do it, as Google seem to be.
[edit] to head off nitpicks, google does show an ability to focus on one big area, of course: ads/search. Though, ask anyone who uses their ad platform and I expect you’ll get a pile of complaints about shit that absolutely should not be as broken as it is. The parts that get ongoing attention are service reliability and anything that makes the revenue line measurable go up-and-right the instant it’s enabled.
Google hardware is developed and sold like as if it was software. If an idea doesn't work, shut it down and migrate to something that may do the trick. I suspect the fast turnover rate of Google employees to have something to do with it as well; after five years, most people working on a product will have left the company.
Any Android exports out there have a sense for how hard it'd be to get root access to something like this?
EDIT:
Based on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
I didn'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's probably not correct, but I'm not energetic enough to fix it.
Looks like it's right around 50/50, so about 1/2 their products are discontinued/failed.
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%?
1. There are plenty of android based large displays with a touchscreen/camera/mic/speaker combo on the market (though I'm sure there weren'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.
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?
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.
Edit: From reading the post properly it seems that it will be view-only for a temporary duration before they may be deleted/migrated:
> 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 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.
It’s kind of ridiculous that Google is going to delete that user data with barely a year of notice.
They should be obliged to provide an open source off ramp for these and not make them e waste.
Imagine if Honda decided to stop selling the Accord and on the same day their dealerships stopped carrying parts for it. Would you be willing to buy any model from them knowing it can be abandoned at any moment?
It'd cut down the constant increasing rate of e-waste, rehashes of the same product that contain nothing innovative other than a new camera.
And if $app isn't supported on the older hardware, that's then up to the user to upgrade rather than an path where your forced to upgrade.
Better yet allow the user to swap-out the old device for the new version. I paid €900 outright for my iPhone XR. If Apple want me to use their new device then allow me to trade-in.
Google could easily open source the software needed to run this without their cloud services.
Our kid actually uses Jamboard daily, I expect all schools of the area to be doing so, and I'm sure the admins are pretty pissed right now. I wonder if the chromebook sales have been taking too much of a hit and they're cutting losses as usual.
(come on you guys, anything this repetitive is off topic on HN. we want curious conversation here...)
And now today [as of 9/28/2023 at 3:18 PM ET] we celebrate the 290 products they brought to market and then unceremoniously dumped away.
Frank Slootman (CEO of several public companies, now Snowflake) talks about this in his book. He basically says "don't try to build new products, you aren't going to catch lightning in a bottle twice". There are a few great counter examples, (amazon with AWS being the most obvious) but not many.
A classic Google cancellation title if I've ever seen one.
Just terrible since I dont want to deal with anything YouTube.
Never buying a Google product again. This is beyond ridiculous at this point.
It appears to run Android, so I think we can probably pull something off here.
Both handle it in different ways
And the de-googlification of my life continues...one app at a time.
But it was already "there" because we're on GSuite/Workspaces/whatever they call it these days and everyone had access to it without needing to jump through any hoops or agree on a separate application to start using.
Am I going to mourn the loss? Absolutely not, except for the inevitable 60 minute meeting we'll have where we decide on a replacement tool before all ultimately winding up disappointed in whatever we agree on.
Why invest in new Google technology?
