Google Jamboard is winding down

https://support.google.com/jamboard/answer/14084927?hl=en

by wslh • 2 years ago

37 33 2 years ago

support.google.com

shrubble• 2 years ago

"Over the past couple of years, we’ve heard from customers that whiteboarding tools like FigJam by Figma, Lucidspark by Lucid, and Miro help them work better together. As these tools have grown more capable, offering advanced features such as an infinite canvas, use case templates, voting, and more, we’ve decided to leverage our partner ecosystem"

i.e. the vastly-profitable Google couldn't add to or enhance the product while smaller, nimbler competitors were able to ...

throw3452away• 2 years ago

If it's like anything else coming out of Google, most likely those who made it got their cake, I mean pomo package, and moved to something else. Some other folks were left to maintain it until the inevitable sun setting.

sophacles• 2 years ago

I really hope they have this realization about chat soon.

ripjaygn• 2 years ago

i.e. the vastly-profitable Google couldn't add to or enhance the product while smaller, nimbler competitors were able to ...

The real reason is that Google's chart now looks like how Microsoft's used to be[1], while MS seems to have gotten better.

[1] https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000?width=1000&fo...

justrealist• 2 years ago

We will also work directly with educational institutions to compensate them for their Jamboard devices.

Fwiw, I remember reading about this a while ago.

nness3• 2 years ago

Google is losing a lot of ground in the office productivity space. I can see Docs, Sheets and Slides being wound-down in the next few years as the distance between these tools and Office widens.

The only advantage for the above tools is that they are vastly cheaper for an organisation that is already part of Google Workspace — than switching to Office. It is appealing for small businesses and start-ups, but not much else.

tayo422• 2 years ago

No way. Google docs seems so pervasive. I use spreadsheets and docs constantly in my day to day life outside of work.

Isn't there a meme, like, the most important business decisions are made in the 1 inch column section of a Google doc.

I never worked with office online though.

jahewson• 2 years ago

How much do you pay Google to use docs?

browningstreet2• 2 years ago

I think the lack of a unified, platform integrated chat platform, a la Slack and Teams, will hurt a lot. They did great with Google Docs, and then built out a ridiculously complicated but robust Workspace Admin platform, but don't even seem to be thinking about chat anymore.

Office, Office Web, and Teams are a nice fit for business users. Ops/dev still tend to gravitate towards Slack.

Which makes their RCS complaints even more ...amusing (yes, I know it's not really the same space, or the same team, or the same platform -- but it is chat).

Traubenfuchs• 2 years ago

Google Chat apparently is a thing. It can be found in my companies gmail and we used it once, when slack was down.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

The ironic/funny thing about your comment is that Google Workspace does have a pretty full featured chat platform, known as Google Chat. And it's clearly not dead (yet), because I just hit it on my account and get a nice pop-up, "Welcome to the new Chat", "Catch up with all your direct messages, group chats, and spaces - all in one place", and then get some walkthroughs on the new features related to the home screen, filters, etc.

But I agree, Google product management for anything but search and ads is such a cluster-f of afterthoughts, side-of-the-desk work, and the impending feeling that it will all get shut down once whatever engineer championed it leaves or is promoted to something else. Also, a huge part of the entrenchment of Slack is all of its programmability and plugins - lots of companies run "ChatOps". I don't see any of that in Google Chat, and even if it were there I think you'd need to be crazy to actually develop a plugin for it before it likely gets shut down or is migrated to something else.

xnx4• 2 years ago

Google Chat is pretty good and still under active development with the rest of Workspace. A good place to keep up-to-date on new features is their update blog: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/

andrewnicolalde• 2 years ago

I really hope this doesn’t happen. The relative simplicity and reliability of Google docs in my experience has always been one of its major advantages over Microsoft Office, not to mention its near seamless real time collaboration functionality.

xnx4• 2 years ago

Google is losing a lot of ground in the office productivity space.

What makes you think this? Google is huge in schools and universities.

I can see Word being needed for specific advanced use cases (legal?) and Excel necessary for pro-level spreadsheet work, but for everyday business collaboration Google Workspace is fantastic.

nness3• 2 years ago

It's the inter-connection of tools in the workspace. Microsoft is one short purchase of Mural or Miro away from having the complete ecosystem from documents, to meetings and calls, to whiteboarding all wrapped in a single package. They know that its the ecosystem that matters, not the individual tools.

Multi-user editing is now table-stakes. And whilst applications, like Excel, still are behind Sheets in collaborative editing, its still functional.

dr_kiszonka• 2 years ago

Interesting. I really like Google Doc, Sheets, and Slides. Google keeps adding features, which I find to be very useful and innovative. I wish they updated Google Forms too. The only thing I am not a fan of is the AI features, which largely don't work for me.

wslh• 2 years ago

I can see Docs, Sheets and Slides being wound-down in the next few years as the distance between these tools and Office widens.

I don't think so at all. It is clear that there is a lot of brain power behind their products (e.g. the UI/UX in small mobile devices). The collaboration is excellent and much more powerful that the obvious competitor.

If we talk about Jamboard it is clear that the app cannot go everywhere.

richardwhiuk2• 2 years ago

Will I be able to keep my Jam files in Drive?

Surely you can keep any file in a Google Drive? The answer that they are going effectively remove files from Google Drives is ... worrying.

sanderjd• 2 years ago

You can keep any file in a google drive, but you can't (necessarily) keep things that are not files, but rather references to entities inside other applications.

This is why it's important for applications to have some kind of mechanism for exporting their data as files. But many don't.

richardwhiuk2• 2 years ago

Hmm, sounds like Google Jamboard has blurred what file means to the point it's pointless.

dragonwriter• 2 years ago

The “files” of many online services (including Google Docs and Sheets themselves, but this can even be true of third-party, non-Google services) stored in Drive do not have the data content you might think, they are basically hyperlinks to content stored in the relevant services, so if the service were to go away they would be useless even if they still technically existed in the Drive.

pvg• 2 years ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37694154

loosescrews• 2 years ago

I think the concept was fine, but the quality was terrible. When they first launched, my employer at the time bought a bunch of them. Lots of people used them a few times, but then stopped because they were unusable. The software was definitely buggy, but they were so bad there could have been hardware issues as well. I don't think anyone I knew ever tired them again. I'm honestly surprised that they lasted this long. Maybe they eventually got better?

itronitron• 2 years ago

I propose assembling a secret team within Google that will create a product (STOps) solely focused on the successful 'winding down' of Google products/projects/etc. so that when Google ultimately 'winds down' the STOps product it will no longer be able to 'wind down' any currently ongoing or future products/projects/etc...

xnx4• 2 years ago

Google Ending Support for Jamboard

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37694154

6 months ago | 257 comments

BoorishBears• 2 years ago

I still have my 150 lb paper weight of a Jamboard stalking the corner of my living room...

rose1313172• 2 years ago

Why

rose1313172• 2 years ago

Why would jambord be going away

Google Jamboard is winding down

Related Stories