Google Sunsets Google Cloud Print

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1069693?p=cloudprint&visit_id=637396497759142658-95133053&rd=1

by franze • 6 years ago

129 174 6 years ago

support.google.com

mobilio• 6 years ago

That's too bad because this give lot of opportunity to share internal CUPS printers over internet: https://github.com/google/cloud-print-connector

Anyone knows workarounds?

anaganisk• 6 years ago

Put your connected printer pc on wire guard vpn, or use a service like tailscale, that way you can securely use "cloud" print, with any device.

oefrha• 6 years ago

This has been discussed almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598815

fs111• 6 years ago

ah ffs, why do they have to do this all the time?

tonyedgecombe• 6 years ago

Meanwhile Microsoft are doing the opposite: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/windows/univer...

pgt8• 6 years ago

Long Microsoft! Satya is making good decisions.

What I've learned from 15+ years of solving problems is that problems have Lindy properties: Problems that have been around for a long time will be around for a long time. And printing is a problem as old as computing.

izacus5• 6 years ago

This is literally the same thing Google is adopting as a replacement for GCP.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

levosmetalo• 6 years ago

Finally one shutdown that is clearly positive for users. I hope Goole will also make sure that cloud print app is also removed from all android phones.

bryanrasmussen2• 6 years ago

if it's so positive, why are the other people in this thread so upset? (early thread, not lots of responses yet)

nvr219• 6 years ago

Other people in this thread will be upset because hn loves to get mad whenever Google shuts down anything even if they don't use it.

swiley• 6 years ago

Most of them are probably upset about all the other stuff google got rid of that people actually used.

corobo• 6 years ago

Last time Google killed something someone pointed out that we're still mad that Google killed Reader and honestly that was dead on for me

tsjq• 6 years ago

Okay what's next in line for the Killed-By-Google ?

GMail ?

Google Duo ?

Google Keep ?

Google Contacts ?

Google Calendar ?

Google Health / Fit ?

w0utert• 6 years ago

Stadia, probably >_<

scotth2• 6 years ago

Stadia is great, and I think people are starting to see that.

scrollaway3• 6 years ago

"Google killed a thing nobody used! What's next? GMAIL?!"

pgt8• 6 years ago

Do you pay for Gmail? I don't think this is an unreasonable concern.

interestica• 6 years ago

Google Keep, Google Tasks, and Google Shopping List have a weird overlap. I suspect one will go or they will be merged. For some actions on a Google device, voice commands will create a list in either and it's not always clear which one.

rhamzeh• 6 years ago

Add Google Assistant Reminders and Google Calendar to this list.

Which of these 5 would you use to set a reminder to get milk?

(Note: Bonus points if you say you'd send yourself a delayed email through Gmail)

intellirogue• 6 years ago

Keep is part of GSuite/Workspaces but didn't get a new logo in the redesign, so it's probably next on the chopping block.

howlgarnish• 6 years ago

Announced a year ago:

https://9to5google.com/2019/11/21/google-cloud-print-dead-20...

blantonl• 6 years ago

My understanding what this was the only way to print via Chromebooks?

What is the new way to print from ChromeOS?

whereistimbo• 6 years ago

Chrome support printing with printer that support IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol

quaffapint• 6 years ago

If you have access to a Windows printer share you could use that too. That's how we did it. It often broke though and you would have to re-login to your chrome account on the Windows machine to re-connect it.

izacus5• 6 years ago

No, ChromeOS ships CUPS for awhile now.

edent• 6 years ago

Sort of. There are still lots of USB printers which just won't work with ChromeOS - despite working fine in regular Linux.

pgt8• 6 years ago

Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

I have stopped using Google search (DuckDuckGo is great), Google Chrome (Firefox is great), Google Domains (use Gandi / Route53). The most difficult products to shake are Gmail, Docs and Sheets, but I am gradually weaning myself off.

The only signal that seems to get through to corporates is to vocally withhold your funds. PMs at Google probably underestimate the % of people on HN who control the company purse for software spending. Personally, there is no way I can risk locking myself or my employer (that just raised a Series B) into any Google products at this point.

If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.

pgt8• 6 years ago

Actually, let me put my money where my mouth is. Just signed up for Fastmail. Email and privacy is worth way more than than $5/month. I know not everyone is in that position, but I pay more for Spotify and GitHub already.

duiker1013• 6 years ago

Getting a Fastmail was my first step toward de-googling myself. Have been super happy with them. They are really stirring email in the right direction. Their effort on JMAP is also very much appreciated.

isoprophlex• 6 years ago

Get a fun custom tld while youre at it. Fastmail has very good and convenient custom domain support.

I did that when getting rid of gmail (have firstname@lastname.email), it still makes me feel cool and defiant every time I enter it somewhere.

sdan• 6 years ago

Fastmail is amazing. I have like 20 domains I have from old side projects I can easily setup email + catchall addresses from and go wild with them. So much customization + UI doesn't look bad as Gmails (I switched after Gmail's horrid design update to include all that padding) and a ton of functionality with Apple/etc. devices.

And you can host websites directly from fastmail! Can't ask anything more from fastmail.

beardedetim• 6 years ago

This was the first and best step I have taken in getting off Google services. And, as a plus, Fastmail is _freaking awesome_. I cannot believe I allowed myself to have ads in my _email_ client.

coldpie• 6 years ago

Switching email addresses is somewhere between very hard and impossible. I have a Fastmail, which I now use for new sign-ups, but I have lots of accounts on my Gmail address which I don't want to lose. So effectively I'll have two email addresses forever. Worse things have happened, I suppose.

emdowling• 6 years ago

On email providers - I moved away from Gmail for my personal email address a few years ago, and now use iCloud. I've had very few issues with spam, and there are no ads. My personal email has much less volume than work, so I haven't really missed the advanced features of Gmail.

From a privacy perspective, how does iCloud compare to others like Fastmail?

Dirlewanger• 6 years ago

You're not getting any privacy with Australian services. They require by law backdoors into everything.

xvector• 6 years ago

Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

Not really, as long as the pay is there, devs will come.

Retric2• 6 years ago

Spending a lot of money helps less than you might think. You can definitely get well qualified people, but ‘qualified’ is only a proxy for what you want. For example if people leave after 2-3 years you lose out on massive amounts of institutional knowledge. But, more importantly you select for people that are very good at hacking your processes rather than your problems.

Which I suspect is why their search for example has gotten so bad. Google is doing a great many things that look good internally that make search less useful.

pgt8• 6 years ago

Some people are willing to take a principled stance. I have personally turned down significant offers at a cost to myself, including:

  1. Building an HTTP proxy that inject ads into open WiFi networks, e.g. hotel lobby WiFi.
  2. Forking a browser project for a gambling company that would hide their competitors' ads in return for providing free data to East African gambling addicts.
  3. Building a website for a health quack with completely made up medical claims.

DC-3• 6 years ago

You're not using YouTube?

gpvos2• 6 years ago

For business?

madeofpalk2• 6 years ago

serious about building product consider working at Google

my view is that if you're serious about "building product", then you wouldnt work at google, or Facebook, or for anyone else. You would build and run something yourself.

If you like the "building" part but are indifferent about "product" then somewhere like Google seems great.

ako• 6 years ago

Maybe google lets you focus more on the product part? If you run something yourself, most of your time will be building company, not so much product.

generalk• 6 years ago

  > if you're serious about "building product" [...] You 
  > would build and run something yourself.

Perhaps as a side project, something useful just for yourself. Lots of developers scratch itches they can't scratch at their day job that way; new tech, greenfield ideas instead of maintaining someone else's garbage, etc.

And sometimes those devs go into business for themselves and realize that they don't get to spend all their time building product -- now they've got to build the marketing page and write a bunch of copy and take a ton of screenshots (of features they know they're going to change), and figure out how sales funnels work, and all the other things that go into running a business.

Building and running your own company is the fastest way to get out of pure product development I've ever seen.

pgt8• 6 years ago

Generally agree, but building product for a wealthy established company can give you an opportunity to reach a wide audience of users with your work.

nine_k• 6 years ago

Why, if you want to keep building an already successful product, like Kubernetes, or Golang, or Chrome (or React, PyTorch, or VSCode, etc) you can join a megacorp and go on. These are going to be around for probably a decade or two.

If you want to build an original product, then yes, it can happen not to align with a megacorp's priorities, even if reasonably successful. Found a startup, try to sell it to a megacorp (if it's Google, it will likely discontinue the acquired product anyway), or keep it to yourself if you can afford it.

dsr_• 6 years ago

The things that make Docs and Sheets and such attractive aren't really the ability to create and edit documents -- we all have perfectly adequate versions of that on our laptops and desktops already -- so much as the availability of those documents on a shareable networked infrastructure. "Here's the URL to see my doc, here's the URL to edit the same copy in place" are the most powerful features.

If, say, Backblaze or Dropbox wanted to put a higher-value service on top of their storage infrastructure, I think that would be a good way to go.

froh• 6 years ago

Like onecloud or nextcloud with libre office plugins? Or office365?

sfifs3• 6 years ago

Have you used Office 365 and OneDrive? You actually get a nearly full blown Word and Excel with the same file sharing features :-)

criddell• 6 years ago

Dropbox does have Dropbox Paper.

tephra• 6 years ago

I switched from gmail to mainly using protonmail. I can highly recommend them so far.

ralph87• 6 years ago

Docs and Sheets

Try out Office online, insanely more featureful. Scold anyone mailing Docs share links by saying you can't open it, insist on a file instead

googleintta2• 6 years ago

Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

I actually had a former college approach me about an opportunity to work at gcloud and feel like I am a great fit for the position. The work seems fun and the pay is right...but my single biggest concern is the future of the product in terms of longevity. I am strongly considering rejecting any possible offers just for this reason.

deskamess2• 6 years ago

Is gcloud = GCP? think GCP is a longerm product. It would be CEO suicide to announce you are not going to compete with AWS or Azure.

nyxtom• 6 years ago

My understanding is that Google tends to have internal metrics around all of this stuff, if the data is coming back that usage is declining enough - they usually re-prioritize their efforts. Not necessarily saying I would do the same, but I believe that's how it's supposed to work

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

Sure, but even if every product closure they only annoy 1% of their users, a hundred product closures in, that's everybody.

Their data-based model fails to account for the fact that they're getting a reputation for not being dependable.

pgt8• 6 years ago

The biggest cultural weakness at Google seems to be the No Human support policy and outsourced regional distribution which fuels a growing divide between engineers and customers.

The myopic salarymen who shut down entire product lines based on usage metrics that seem to pale in comparison to Google Search metrics do not understand complex systems, do not understand startups (and the fragility of growth) and certainly don't understand branding or hiring. If these nerds had ever run a business themselves and spent time talking to the customers who pay their salaries, they would spin out these companies instead of sunsetting them.

silicon24012• 6 years ago

you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

why do you think everybody working at a software company cares about building products? I'm in this field to make a living. The only thing that would turn me off from a company that compensates like Google is a bad work life balance.

As a user though, I'm definitely turned off. This year I've started detaching from google as much as possible, and it's great. the main sticky point for me is how to replace Google Photos.

pgt8• 6 years ago

You say you're turned off enough as a user to divest your personal life from Google.

Who do you think funds the salaries at Google that feeds the compensation? It's you - the customer. Some of these customers are slow-moving businesses, but as an individual you are living in the future.

A decline in revenue will follow a decline in product - the question is by how long for a Titanic the size of Google.

blinding-streak• 6 years ago

It's not just Google:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

It's $GIANT_CORPORATION value drift.

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

Well, working at Google has clear benefits - insane money + Google on your resume.

sf_rob• 6 years ago

I love Google sheets but I also work with large enough data sets that it regularly freezes up which is always associated with a frustrating “lost connection” message. I’ve been shifting more and more to Excel because of this. It’s pretty funny to move away from Google because my data is too big.

jlkuester72• 6 years ago

I have totally replaced Drive/Docs/Sheets with Nextcloud [1] + OnlyOffice [2]. You still get online cloud storage and online editors with the bonus of using the widely popular (OOXML standard).

1. https://nextcloud.com/

2. https://www.onlyoffice.com/

As far as Gmail goes, I have heard really good things about Fastmail (as others have mentioned) or if you want to host your own, I highly recommend checking out mailu.io.

part1of2• 6 years ago

What do you use to host nextcloud?

patwolf• 6 years ago

I don't necessarily think the Google graveyard is that much bigger than other companies, it's just more visible to the public. Any large software company is going to have a lot of projects that were sunset early or canceled before the first release. I don't have statistics for this, but Cloud Print lasted for 10 years, and that seems like a fairly typical lifespan for any product.

It can be painful seeing the fruits of one's labor killed off by an unsympathetic executive, but it is the nature of the work.

woofie11• 6 years ago

It's not about bigger, so much as about more sudden, arbitrary, and capricious. In most companies, products which consistently don't show a profit are phased out, usually with transition paths.

At Google, products that don't show exponential growth are wack-a-moled, offloading costs on customers and dumping them on the ground.

gpvos2• 6 years ago

Nextcloud integrates with Collabora or OnlyOffice. Can anyone here tell if either of them is usable and compare them with the Google offerings?

thethethethe• 6 years ago

If I were in charge at Google, I would put engineers and PMs / POs on call immediately so they start talking to customers again.

SWEs at Google are certainly on call for pretty much every product. Not really sure how you expect PMs to be on call considering their general lack of technical knowledge. However, PMs and T/PMs are constantly grooming and organizing bug hotlists.

Disclaimer: I work at Google opinions are my own

nunez• 6 years ago

As long as new grads can continue to make $200k out of college, Google's hiring pipeline will continue to be fine.

mraza0072• 6 years ago

I hope they don’t end up killing gmail one day. I was really surprised when they killed there inbox app and it was killed after few years. I was basically using it as a primary email app for the phone

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

Actually it sounds great - build whatever you can dream up, but never have to worry about supporting it.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Given the growing Google graveyard, why would anyone who is serious about building product consider working at Google? Guys, you are destroying your hiring pipeline.

Given that Google is known for using filtering methods with a high false negative rate because they have a great surplus of qualified candidates that they need to weed out, even if it was true, that's probably not a concern for them.

amiga-workbench• 6 years ago

It was nice when it worked, but my Brother monochrome printer would regularly un-pair itself from my Google account. And since I only print documents once or twice a year, it was unpaired every time I went to use it.

wffurr• 6 years ago

As a bonus, Brother (often the top-recommended printer model) has decided to entirely drop support for ChromeOS.

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/153313/...

"Google has announced the end of support for the Google Cloud Print service, effective December 31, 2020. Currently, we do not have any additional information to provide regarding Brother machines' future compatibility with Google Chrome OS."

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/7225252?hl=en

Note that Brother is conspicuously absent from the list of compatible printers at the bottom.

jchallis2• 6 years ago

In case someone from Google is reading this: - I am a real person who really manages IT decisions for a real company. - I use Google Cloud Print to keep our zoo of devices happily talking to our Japanese printers in the US and Asia. - You made my day hard by killing this product. There is time that I could have spent with my family or on my health that I will have to divert elsewhere to fix a problem that didn't exist for me yesterday. - My memory is long.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

Why does changing vendors impact your family and health time? Sounds like your employer's expectations may be more of a problem.

alextheparrot• 6 years ago

Presumably they now have a new business necessary project with a maximum 2 month delivery timeline, over the holiday season. It seems completely reasonable that an IT decision maker needs to keep the printers running?

A sudden, new project during the holiday season would definitely impact my family time at least.

Edit: Apparently they announced this last year, so that seems to make the current situation acute by choice or lack of knowledge.

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

Many companies have an attitude of "when the work is done, you can go home".

Since the cloud print migration will be more work, rather than OP going home at 4pm to see family and go for a jog, now he'll be staying in the office testing printer setups and going home at 9pm after his children are in bed.

dmortin• 6 years ago

It's known for a year. Why didn't you act since then?

jchallis2• 6 years ago

I did not get the memo last year that it was running out.

Steltek• 6 years ago

Printing is a horrible experience these days. Even in a managed office environment, you're not safe from all the rough edges.

- Drivers. Why does this still feel so difficult? Just define a public bytecode API (no, not PS) and be done with this already.

- Ink, paper, etc. Even if you shell out $Texas for a laser printer, you still have to manage paper and then it's probably not any good for photos (probably the only thing I want to print).

- Protocol/tech stack straight out of the Old World. Cloud Print seemed like the Dropbox to printing's SMB. Proprietary but less terrible.

- The waiting for anything to happen. If I have to go to the trouble of using your proprietary driver to do anything, can't the printer at least leverage more of the host computer to speed things up?

The whole process feels only slightly less finicky than using a 3D printer.

ccozan• 6 years ago

Using IPP isn't that bad. There are no drivers involved. And printing can work via a cloud ( but some software involved to manage your printers ).

TBH businesses that do serious printing do no buy low end inkjet, but mid to hi end printers that have this features ( and many more) and mostly are covered thru some service contract with a 3rd party which manages them.

donatj• 6 years ago

My work makes a big deal about setting up a printer. IT needs to add each printer by request and they come around with a flash drive of drivers.

It hasn’t actually been that hard for a while, I’ve added the printers I’ve needed myself via AirPrint, no drivers necessary. I feel like the printer world got easy and no one told anyone.

remir• 6 years ago

Airprint is pretty neat. Used it on my iPhone a couple of times and it's a pretty painless experience. No apps/driver to download. You press "print" and it discover the printer and does its thing.

code4tee2• 6 years ago

Another tombstone goes up: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It’s a legit risk to be basing anything on a Google product or service. Know too many stories of people or companies getting burned when Google wakes up one morning and decides to abandon another product.

duhast• 6 years ago

The Google Graveyard is a Myth: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stadia/comments/hximz7/the_google_g...

code4tee2• 6 years ago

Half true. While they do merge old concepts into newer things in the process they tend to kill APIs that were in use and other key components that wrecks integrations with it uses of the original product.

falcor843• 6 years ago

One of the first examples there of not killing a product is "Inbox -> GMail Features" which is almost entirely misleading. The biggest productivity benefits from Inbox, such as bundles and leaving notes directly in the inbox have not been ported. And of course the biggest benefit of Inbox was the clean interface itself. I still curse Google under my breath every day about them killing it off.

totaldude87• 6 years ago

I dont know which is worse, killing a product that you are using or asking you to switch to another new product which does almost same thing :(

crocodiletears• 6 years ago

The first example (GPM -> Youtube Music) is a great example of why 'merged into other products' doesn't delegitimize complaints about Google killing products.

YTM (last time I checked) lacks feature parity with its predecessor, has a questionable migration path, and seems more interested in music videos that you can incidentally play as songs. It integrates messily with its host platform (hn comments on the last thread I read about it indicated that Google's algorithms were inadvertantly tagging unrelated content as 'music'), and dilutes focus on the prior project's core feature-set.

Just because another product's abstract contains some of the product I'm using's core doesn't mean I want to switch over to it because Google's got a short attention span, and wants to reimplement the product I'm using in the most approximate manner possible.

Narretz• 6 years ago

There should really be a "succeeded (in spirit) by ..." for many of these.

adontz• 6 years ago

I used Google Cloud Print myself, so I've started a project to resolve printing problem and some other ones. It was inspired by sunset of Google Cloud Print. I believe we should have a cloud printing solution which will not disappear suddenly.

grej• 6 years ago

killedbygoogle++

whoevercares2• 6 years ago

Being able to sunset services is not necessarily a bad thing to the dev teams —- it might just make developers happier so they don’t have to maintain unpopular services and do boring work. In contrast AWS/Amazon has a huge “no one way door” culture (so sunset decision rarely happens since people will point fingers) which could impose maintenance and ownership burden for teams. IMO DNA is different —- Amazon still has the retailer’s DNA

sfifs3• 6 years ago

You realise this is one of the main reasons AWS is an order of magnitude bigger than Google Cloud in revenue right?

whoevercares2• 6 years ago

Sure, I’m just trying to guess why Google choose to do things this way. What’s more, they dare to do this for some reason.

On the other hand, Google’s work life balance might be order of magnitude better than Amazon. I would like to be the Boss of Amazon or an employee of Google :)

sofixa• 6 years ago

That and the fact they had like 5 years of a head start.

ianhawes• 6 years ago

PrintNode is an excellent alternative (superior IMO), though for some printers that used the embedded Cloud Print app, you will need to setup a server.

gegtik• 6 years ago

I already couldn't print to my local brother printer despite it showing up on a chromebook. Just silently hung.

I found out from searching online I had to configure a generic printer instead??

red2awn• 6 years ago

2030: Google Sunsets Search

tinus_hn2• 6 years ago

2040: Google sunsets users

dazc• 6 years ago

You are being optimistic.

I expect 'Google Search' to become 'Google Ads World' within the next 4 years.

api• 6 years ago

Great!

I love when these inherently panopticon enabling cloud-backed device services are sunsetted, making bricks (or partial bricks in this case) out of stuff people bought. It harms the public's trust in this computing paradigm.

blisterpeanuts• 6 years ago

Rather than retire products like Cloud Print, why not spin them off as separate companies, or sell them? If there's a couple million users of a niche product, that would seem to argue for its continuation.

It seems as if this "sunset" approach unnecessarily alienates the user community and reflects badly on Google.

jbellis• 6 years ago

there's a couple million users of a free niche product.

gumby6• 6 years ago

One consequence of Google's monorepo is that even small services like this might depend on all sorts of google infrastructure and thus be effectively impossible to spin off.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing: the point of the monorepo is to make it easier and faster to write things like this in the first place.

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

In fact, I believe Cloud Print depends on Google Talk/XMPP!

supergirl• 6 years ago

it's not because it's a monorepo. that affects just version control. it's the fact that is may be deeply dependent on other google services. would have been same problem with many repos

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

Cloud Print still depends on some Google Talk internal API's. Google Talk went away long ago, and all it's infrastructure was still running for cloud print, making it very expensive to keep going for a small number of users.

easton• 6 years ago

Before you get spooked by another project going to the Google Graveyard(tm), they are sunsetting this in favor of Internet Printing Protocol[0][1], the same open protocol that AirPrint and Microsoft's new Universal Print uses.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol 1: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7276100?hl=en

tinus_hn2• 6 years ago

This is for ‘Chrome OS’. Is this also being introduced for Android devices?

As AirPrint is a reasonable protocol I tried looking for how to print to it from non Apple operating systems but all I found was ways to make Linux servers present their printers as AirPrint printers. Great but how to print to them from Linux/Android/Windows?

gumby6• 6 years ago

It's not that complicated. The protocol is defined here https://tools.ietf.org/html/std92 but if you don't feel like doing the plumbing yourself, just use CUPS.

izacus5• 6 years ago

I think Android has it in "Default print service", although there's certanly printers that will be left behind.

E.g. my Cloud Print compatible Oki doesn't have a way forward for Android anymore.

the_pwner224• 6 years ago

It works great under Linux. I got a new Brother printer recently and in CUPS using the autodetected IPP printer actually gave better results than trying to install the Brother drivers (stuff like double sided printing, margins, DPI options all worked out of the box on IPP and not so well with the drivers).

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

they are sunsetting this in favor of Internet Printing Protocol

Which matters not at all to people who spent hundreds of dollars on internet connected printers and scanners that support Google Cloud Print.

Firmware update? Nope. Chuck it in the landfill and write another check.

ehutch79• 6 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that these same printers support ipp.

VikingCoder• 6 years ago

I follow your [1] link, and it doesn't work for me. It tells me to sign in to admin.google.com, but that says:

"admin.google.com is used for G Suite accounts only. Regular Gmail accounts cannot be used to sign in to admin.google.com."

Is there a way to use Internet Printing Protocol without being a G Suite account?

EDIT: Okay, I see that maybe I can do it myself. Looking up the IPP/IPPS instructions from my printer (Canon TS9120).

lincolnq• 6 years ago

Funny story about this. A few years ago, someone wrote an @channel, something like “SF office be careful which printer you select, several items from your office have ended up printed in Boston”

To which I replied “this sounds impossible” and started trying to figure out how this person could be so confused about printing that documents might magically make their way across the country from office to office!

At which point I discovered, to my great embarrassment, that Cloud Print existed, and that it was necessary to set up printers this way because of Chromebooks. Oops.

Not sure yet whether I am happy that it’s gone, or sad that other old-school techs like me won’t be able to have similar experiences going forward :)

aikinai2• 6 years ago

This has nothing to do with Cloud Print specifically; printers have had support for IP printing for years. And don't most major companies have their printers set up so you print from and to anywhere?

benhurmarcel2• 6 years ago

It's not specific to cloud print, it's quite usual. In large companies several sites are on the same internal network, and you can send your print job to any printer.

In my company I can easily print my document on another continent.

tobltobs• 6 years ago

When I recently had to make a decision about which Cloud provider to use, Google, although looking fine technically, wasn't even an option because of their killing everything attitude. Reading stuff like [1] I am not assured they will never kill their Cloud offerings.

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

clankyclanker• 6 years ago

Almost makes me wonder how long until they kill GMail.

werber• 6 years ago

I didn't know what cloud print was but I think I'm convinced I need fast mail now, haven't seen something so lauded in a minute

dole• 6 years ago

I've got a native Google Print option on my Canon printer; makes me wonder how much manufacturers spent on development and how many devices it got shoehorned into.

hi41• 6 years ago

We have a chromebbook and all four members of my family cannot print to a Brother hl-3170cdwv printer. To print, we log into a windows computer which recognizes that printer. Why can’t the chromebook do printing when both are on the home wifi? For this reason I am not going purchasea chromebook next time. It will be a windows computer.

seized• 6 years ago

Depending on your skill, Chromebook will print just fine to CUPS running on a tiny Linux VM or Raspberry Pi.

mraza0072• 6 years ago

Why is google famous for killing their services is it because they run out of funding to fund those services

Google Sunsets Google Cloud Print

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