Sigh. My team uses this quite a bit but it has always been my least favorite of the popular "digital whiteboard" tools. Super limited in capabilities, but at least it was convenient and easy to use.
And the de-googlification of my life continues...one app at a time.
I totally agree it wasn't great. As I said, it was super barebones and my least favorite of the major white-boarding apps.
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.
This is a bummer, I use Jamboard (the software not the hardware) to draw diagrams during Zoom calls and send the link to participants after. I mostly use a Wacom tablet to do the actual drawing.
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.
For a tool that combines both, meetings like zoom and embedded Excalidraw, check out https://oorja.io ; You create a room, click on "+" button inside to add Excalidraw.
Seconding Excalidraw! A feature I really like: you can export diagrams in PNG with the scene data embedded in the image metadata. This lets you modify the diagram by opening the PNG image directly.
I built https://flat.social that has whiteboarding functionalities (among others). Not as advanced as Miro or FigJam but useful for quick diagrams during meetings / brainstorming.
Maybe not your workflow but I am so happy that we stopped using Jamboard and switched to Miro. It’s a universe filled with joy and happiness and freedom. Now I am looking for a free Miro alternative with at least two users and nothing is even close. Not sure what’s happening in the industry that makes people produce horrible UX and not being able to see how Miro does it properly.
My job is all in on google. Gmail, meets, gcp, everything. Never heard of jamboard. We'd probably have been using it too, if we ever knew it existed! How is it that closure announcements are when we find out about these things? Especially from a company whose revenue comes from advertising?
We have these scattered around my offices (a large pharma/biotech). They go mostly unused. The idea is good. But it was outside of google's wheelhouse (they have been traditionally weak in consumer hardware except for phones).
Because you're clicking through a HN story when the title is about Google shutting down a product, but did not click through the HN stories when it was announced or when it became generally available. (But those product announcement submissions did actually get a surprising amount of attention on HN, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
I first heard of it when Google sent a couple of free boards for evaluation to a company I used to work at. We were fully on GSuite + GCP, but the hardware was too expensive and not that useful, so we ended up sending them back.
While the (pricy) physical boards were targeted at corporations, the service's main target was probably schools.
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.
This has been a long time coming. My company owns a Jamboard (the hardware). They were selling it hard when we bought it. We got to use it for a year before the service contract expired. All the major features stopped working, there was no way to renew online and the salespeople were no longer answering phone calls or emails.
So now we have an expensive, heavy albatross on our hands. Really makes you want to avoid depending on Google for anything again.
Have one in my living room: 100 lb bright red deadweight. Does get excited questions from guests though!
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...
I've hit a related problem with my interactive display from A.G. Neovo.
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.)
If you have any luck, I’d love to know about it. Our deactivated Jamboard currently serves as nothing more than a mediocre large monitor for a Mac mini.
They are ending support, but they still own all the associated patents around it, correct?
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.
> 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.
It sounds like a corporation could impede the humanity/progress of countries that respect these patents by patent_lifetime * number_of_patents so long as they have the money to do so.
Interesting how the term "Auto Update Expiration (AUE)" shifts the focus to being about the device rather than about Google. Something about giving it an initialism too, makes it sound like Google are describing some fundamental law of the world to you (like MTBF) where their hands are tied rather than it being an arbitrary business decision. How many psychologists do they have on payroll to come up with these things?
Wow! What a bunch of shortsighted people manage Google! First, they launched half-baked products and spend zero effort to evolve them, then, second, they say: "Oh, I didn't attract much adoption." Well, people are NOT stupid - nobody wants to be dealing an agonizing body as it will be a complete lost of time and effort knowing the sure fate in Google's graveyard!
Does anyone have the link showing that many of these now dead projects are just competition projects for Google developers to wrestle for internal status and power, or to escape Google grunthood?
It is the day after Google's 25th birthday, where we celebrated not only 25 years of ruining the Internet, but also the 289 products they brought to market and then unceremoniously dumped away.
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.
Hey, that's not fair. Google spent about ten years being a net positive for the internet. They used to have a program where they'd pay for pizza delivery for anyone who was up late coding. They've been churning out good FOSS for most of their existence. Given they've been more harm than good for several years now, but let's not rob them of their bright beginnings.
Google doing what Google does. Anyone have a good rec for an alternative to Nest doorbell with 24/7 coverage and no monthly subscription? May as well get ahead of that end-of-life notification.
Google is the perfect example of living off just a couple of good decisions made in the past. I wonder how many rich people behave just like Google, i.e. they are touted as being business geniuses but in reality got their wealth from a luckily investment and it has been a struggle ever since
Most companies are this. If you look into detail at the vast majority of successful companies, there is a single product or service that makes the vast majority of their money and it was a combination of hard work, right timing, luck, 6 other things and it's not repeatable.
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.
I use Jamboard because MS Whiteboard is impossible to share in a corporate environment, especially to outside users. Jamboard at least works under Google Drive sharing policy/folders without going insane...
Probably it is too tightly integrated with other google internal services to be able to give the code to a third party and have them operate the business.
The issue though would be the source code. Most projects at Google are developed in the monorepo and this makes it very difficult to split things out (to sell, or in some cases to open source) because the code likely links to all kinds of internal things.
And that also would be why they are shutting it down.
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.
With all this "AI" hype, where is the ultimate diagram tool, in which you draw a diagram like you would on a whiteboard, and then press the button "make it look nice"?
I wonder if products like these are a dying market with distributed work.
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%?
Can someone please clarify: even the software version is winding down? If so, can they simply make all the whiteboards read-only via bitmaps/SVGs instead of migrating them elsewhere?
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.
How does Google not recognize the doom loop they’re entering with these decisions?
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.
The only thing left is stuff that happens in the here and now. You give Google money, they show your ads now. Anything with any permanence gets shut down eventually, so people don't fall for it.
Had Stadia only offered subs without having to buy the games, I'm sure it would still be around.
The best thing they could do is to open source it. I could use it in my projects and I don’t want to start from scratch. Anyone happens to know Jamboard product managers? What do they think about open sourcing it?
It's like Pablo Escobar looking for higher margins than offered by cocaine, and being constantly disappointed. Fix the search, Google, before you lose your cash cow. I now append "reddit" to all of my searches to make the results tolerable.
How people continue to trust buying anything from Google is just beyond me. I am glad that they are doing something for schools, but this is just ridiculous.
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.
It’s being shutdown after 8 years. That’s not a bad lifespan. Most electronics are obsolete but that age and replaced with new ones. Especially at businesses - it’s already amortized by then and reached end of life.
Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.
I'm sure the Jamboard service contains such top secret and critical code that it could never be open sourced in order for those devices to keep functioning with a proxy sever, no no no.
Googles backends are all proprietary solutions. So you’d need to open source a huge swath of google code. Much of which has assumptions of running in Google’s DCs.
Eh. They could just opensource the code but not its dependencies. The opensource world is remarkably good at taking something like that and getting it working again.
I don’t think you get how difficult that is. It wouldn’t build, it would include a ton of internal libraries. For example stubby is not open source. Internal spanner is different than external spanner, including API/SDKs. The code pulls in a ton of internal libraries. Etc.
So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.
I know exactly how difficult it is. I was part of the cleanup crew who stayed back to opensource wave after google decided to pull the plug. My name is all over the opensourced Google Wave ("Wave in a box") codebase. We rewrote the whole data layer so you could run it without google's infra. That took a nontrivial amount of engineering time - a month or two if memory serves.
> So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.
Oh, it definitely wouldn't build. But you'd be surprised how resourceful opensource developers can be when they have a clear scope & clear spec to work towards. This sort of work is akin to making the world's simplest emulator for a video game console - except you only need to get "one game" to run, and you have its source code and you can change the code as much as you like. Its fun, satisfying work.
Obviously you're rolling the dice on whether or not anyone from the community would step up and do that work on your behalf. But the alternative is killing your product entirely. The opensourced wave died because we didn't grow an opensource community who understood & wanted to maintain the codebase. Looking back, we might have done a better job of that if we didn't do all the work ourselves to make it usable first.
Mind you, I have no idea how the community at large would react to google releasing broken source code. They might complain even more than the service just going dark. But I can still dream.
Obsolete, yes. But being obsolete is not equatable to a full shutdown. Cars go obsolete, but we would never allow car manufacturers to prevent a car from turning on just because it's obsolete. Just like we don't accept that with our phones, or our laptops, or any physical consumer electronic.
8 years ? For a display that's essentially a graphics terminal to a remote app? That customers are paying for ongoing service? For hardware that is still 100% working?
Honestly, what is really stopping it from being supported? Can they unlock it so a secondary market can load OSS onto it and keep it going for the next 10-15 years?
That's why I'm asking about the Jamboard in particular. There are lots of comments about cloud-connected hardware in general here, and yes, I know it tends to suck. But the article is about the Jamboard.
Not sure where the 8 years number is from. It was launched in 2017 and CDW was selling it until 2021. That means some people have it for less than 2 years
First this is just yet another bad mark against Google that should be used to discourage buying into any hardware platform from Google of this nature. The single exception I would give is the Pixel line since even if they discontinue Pixel, Android is still there.
But they are treating hardware like they do their other software. Because this hardware is tightly tied to the cloud instead of shutting it down, they should be putting it in maintenance mode. No new features and you can't buy hardware anymore. But continue to keep it up for a longer period of time for those that spent money with you.
Great this product lasted more than 2 years, we have a record! That doesn't mean that they are not handling the shutdown of this product in a responsible manner.
Google is continuing their track record of how they are handling their pet projects and it is a bad decision to buy into any of them. Particularly if there is hardware involved
The lifetime of "appliance" type electronics has always been much longer than that. In my first job, in 2012, I was using electronic test equipment running Windows 95. Anything industrial has a lifetime of 10+ years. Most electronics doesn't need to be cutting edge - and non-cutting-edge electronics hasn't really changed much in the last 15-20 years anyway.
If we want this type of technology to actually be useful, it should have a lifetime somewhere near the thing it replaces. Otherwise schools and universities will get burned once and go back to whiteboards. 8 years isn't really acceptable.
This worldview is fine for running a company and making money, but it isn't the only one that exists. The whole IoT push over the last 10 years is new, and a lot of consumers haven't had to think of questions like "what happens when tech support goes away for my digital whiteboard" or "what happens to my fridge when company is goes bankrupt", so I don't think patting them on the head and saying "This sucks for you, but it could have been worse" is really a compassionate stance.
You're underlying thesis is correct though, you're not legally required to care about other people when you design or sell products.
I have to imagine that these have been for sale throughout that time. I can see an argument that 8 years is a long time, but imagine if you purchased it last year, that's now a 2 year lifespan.
We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them.
I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it.
I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.
There's no need for electronics to be obsolete after 8 years. I have tons of electronic items from the 1980's that are still working fine. Not to mention a 16 year old car jammed with electronics which are all working.
More than thirty years ago I inherited my mothers LED display alarm clock, I think it was at least ten years old then. It is still running in my bedroom.
It might well be obsolete but it is in perfect working order, it performs according to its specification, and satisfies my desire for a clock that is always visible.
I understand outrage, but I think it’s misdirected in this occasion. It’s an 8 year old product, that because of the price, age and small niche like had customers that you can count in hundreds.
Still. Our company only bought it half a year ago, at least 3 of them. So no, we won’t get to enjoy it for 8 years…
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.
This product seems like the kind of thing a company would buy, it would be tried out in a few meetings, then everyone would go back to driving the meeting room's mounted TV with a laptop.
Our CEO later came out to our office for a tour -- something he'd never done -- , and I have a funny anecdote about these. (It's an SF headquartered company; our Atlanta office had ~200 engineering, ~500 total headcount, and we had lots of other remote offices smaller than ours.)
During his visit, our CEO made sure to take time with each team to solicit feedback from us. It was something we were looking forward to -- it was a chance to have a face to face open dialogue with him where we could make asks and air our grievances. While we all got the chance to say our piece, our CEO couldn't help but be super excited about Jamboards. He filled the my team's discussion with notes about them and made lots of excited suggestions, which cut into our time with him significantly. He ultimately spoke with every single team at the office about these things and kept asking us to let him know when, not if, we wanted more of them. He never thought to ask if we liked or wanted them.
I understand our CEO's desire to remove friction between Atlanta and SF and New York and all the other offices, but this was such a peculiar choice that none of us (even leadership) were a party to.
The Jamboards ultimately went completely unused and took up entirely too much space in the office corners. They wasted electricity, too.
That makes it pretty clear that this is a hardware obsolescence issue - the old hardware can't run newer android, and thus can't receive security updates, etc. The only real option is to cut off the old hardware in hopes they won't be left on and become a security problem for the owners. For a $600/month fee I would think Google should just replace the old hardware with a newer model, or they should have originally made the compute part of the system modular and upgradeable. But now it's just e-waste? I hope Google learns something from this, but they probably won't.
I can still run DOS 6.22 right now. Probably even older software.
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.
You can run DOS 6.22 on an emulator. On modern hardware. (Even the latest Mac + their custom processor.) It doesn't have to be the boot Operating System. But it still runs, and can be used usefully if I've built something on top of it.
The point is, 'the cloud' for services + software tied to physical hardware is proving over and over to be a dead end, and effectively a mechanism to create ewaste.
Google could publish a docker image of the server software, and update the Jamboard firmware to provide a facility to connect to it. (DNS-SD, DHCP Options, Manual entry, whatever). And then Google has zero ongoing costs, and people who have bought into this ecosystem now have hardware they can continue to use, and we make far less e-waste.
> But it still runs, and can be used usefully if I've built something on top of it.
That's because somebody else put in the effort to emulate the pieces requires for DOS. The vendor you bought DOS from is not building your VM software so that you can continue to use DOS.
The stack from boot-to-emulator can be 100% owned + managed by an organization or individual (and in fact, can be 100% OSS, except for whatever binary blobs are needed). Doesn't have to be crafted from bespoke bytes + bits to count. The important piece is that once this is running, there no one else that can prevent it from operating, except the organization or individual managing it (and perhaps dubious legal powers). Replacement hardware can be obtained. Backups can be made. Redundant power can be managed. The software can be re-installed. And if the unaffiliated OSS developers no longer want to maintain the software, the organization or individual can independently decide, if it is worth it to update the OSS themselves if no hardware or environment can run that.
We don't have to get rid of old working hardware. We should prioritize not being wasteful. And we should prioritize empowering hardware owners to decide for themselves how to maintain & manage their hardware, even if they want to go it alone.
Say someone provides unofficial Jamboard support, with no cloud. What would that look like, and how many people are going to actually use that vs just changing to a new thing?
Organization keeps a server on-prem that saves + shared boards, and enables collaboration with other people on-prem. Data from the boards are owned by the organization, and can be used as long as they need to.
But google isn't retiring their cloud. They're just kicking the jamboards off it. The jamboards are computers capable of doing local compute. There's no hardware limitation preventing them from being a lot more useful.
What we need is longer minimum warranties for electronics, with support and security fixes for 10+ years.
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.
None of these are managed solutions tied to hardware, so the comparisons are irrelevant. What hardware that [inherently] requires a managed service still exists after 10 years? Jamboard inherently required the cloud for "jams". Google will allow for migration to other services that do the same thing and will compensate for the hardware.
Zune is dead as well as the store and your other comparisons are disingenuous at best.
Furthermore, you will still be able to use the Jamboard as a whiteboard and connect it to your computer. It will not stop working. These comparisons are just terrible.
Meanwhile Microsoft killed my Minecraft account that had been peacefully existing since 2012. Botched migration to MS accounts locked out everyone who no longer had access to their old email addresses.
> I don't have access to the email on my Mojang account
> If you do not have access to the email that is used to log in to your Mojang account, you will not be able to complete the migration. You will need to change the email on your account first. For instructions on how to do this, see:
https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360035056531-Ch...
> If you cannot change your Mojang account email, have your transaction ID or gift code available and contact Minecraft support.
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2 years is plenty of time to migrate.
If someone waited until the very last moment to migrate, then that is not a Microsoft issue, but a diligence issue with the user.
Be more diligent with life, and these types of issues just don't occur with any frequency.
Here's a line from my favorite over-the-window plaque: "A lack of preparation on your part does not equal an emergency for me."
I can't migrate without access to my old email address unless I wrote down my gift code 11 years ago. I knew about this for 2 years, yet there was nothing I could do. I contacted MS support a few times with no response. Email access was never required until now, just the password, so of course a ton of other people had the same issue.
Also, this isn't my job to begin with. Suppose I simply didn't play the game for 2 years; I'd deserve to lose my account? If MS wants to migrate people to a new account system, it's definitely their job to do that automatically (or at least not lock existing users out), like with every other online service.
> Be more diligent with life
Please don't talk down to me. Microsoft created the "emergency" here, not that I take a Minecraft account anywhere near this seriously.
I apologize for talking down to you. The whining seemed excessive for an issue that has had multiple different ways to 'fix' the issue.
Lack of diligence tends to be the case with most of the whining posts.
> Suppose I simply didn't play the game for 2 years; I'd deserve to lose my account?
Yup. It's in the ToS. Most companies reserve the right to shut down services with no notice. At least MS provided you with 2 years of notice. MS also provided multiple solutions for persons without access to their old email, account information, or receipt.
I had zero ways to fix the issue (unless I want to call in a favor from a friend who works at MS), and MS didn't provide support. I have my username and password; why isn't that enough?
And yes, every service's ToS says they can legally terminate at any time, just as Google kills all their chat apps periodically; doesn't mean it reflects well on their reputation. Microsoft broke this game for a lot of paid customers, particularly the early adopters.
The only one I can think of is Ring. Bravo to them.
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.
Android is open-source, we could fall back to one of the alternate distros. Actually, we'd be better off without the Google services crap! The real reason we'd be fucked is that we'd lose mobile access to our Google-stored info, this is where the lock-in is. You can migrate, but it's _work_ and god are we lazy.
I’d expect vendor divergence and lock-in to ramp up almost immediately. It only doesn’t happen now because Google does so much work for them for free, that it’s not worth the cost. If they have to pick that up, they’ll get all shitty and proprietary about it ASAP.
Responding to some of the comments saying that jamboard had a good run and people shouldn't be outraged that google made a decision in their own interest...
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.
I worked for a sorta "satellite" IBM company. There was always a path or solution of some sort in the IBM world. Expensive as hell yeah but there was a path. And if you wanted to do something slightly weird or that IBM just didn't want to do... there were these satellite companies that IBM was happy to work with us to cover other solutions.
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.
Google is 25 years old. IBM is 99 years old as IBM plus 13 years as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. I wonder which one will still be running at the end of the next 87 years that Google will have to run to equal that? And how many more times Google will pull stunts like this and the Nest thermostat business along the way.
Right. I think it all comes down to the fact that with Google, maybe 2/3rds of any product is software running on servers they control. You can never see that software, let alone modify it. Even the decision to keep running that software on Google’s hardware is totally out of your hands - Google could turn it off literally any day, for any reason.
This is the downside of relying on someone else’s cloud software: ultimately if it’s not your code and not your computer, its fate is out of your hands. I think its healthy that our industry is finally coming to understand that.
> Google could turn it off literally any day, for any reason.
Google has SLAs and service contracts that they are contractually bound to. They technically can turn off their services any day, but they won't, for the same reason that they won't liquidate all their assets into cash and drop it out of a helicopter - because it'd be extremely financially stupid.
This comment makes no sense because it's discussing something that is extremely unlikely to happen - far, far less likely than a service failure caused by self-hosting.
Those SLAs didn't seem to help people who bought these Jamboards. Or any of the laundry list of beloved products google has shut down over the years. They have a reputation for killing products for a reason - PMs on Stadia were promising that it definitely wouldn't be shut down just months before it was killed.
I'll grant, Google has SLAs on some of their products (like Firebase). But trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Wave, Inbox, Reader, etc. I still remember - with horror - that time google suddenly announced they were massively increasing GCP (Google Apps?) pricing without warning anyone beforehand.
Is there a prediction market for the life expectancy of google products? Some things will probably be around more or less indefinitely: Docs, Gmail, etc. But the base rate for "this google product, service or API will still be available in 1 year" is probably somewhere between 1% and 10%. I'd consider any "all in" strategy on a lot of google's tech to be a serious business risk for that reason. Especially if losing that bet means you need to rearchitect your entire application.
Similarly I have added “never buy Amazon hardware” to my ruleset. He says as he continues an ongoing battle with my only remaining Amazon device, an Echo Show.
Say what you will about Apple, they play the long game.
The SoC was an Nvidia Jetson TX1 (a quad-core Cortex-A57 CPU attached to a beefy Maxwell GPU), and it had a built-in camera, microphone, and speakers for video calls.
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.
Something about the way the article is written makes it sound like the author thinks $1,350 is speedy for a stand. It seems well in line with other manufacturers like Apple, who charge $999 for a stand and $699 for wheels (that cant be attached together and aren’t nearly as tall as Google stand).
I can predict the whining already, but 8 years is really not a short lifespan for a product. That's an honest effort at getting a market, which failed. That's life.
Nothing wrong with pulling the plug, but there’s a common expectation that unless you go out of business you’ll keep supporting a product for years after you stop selling it.
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?
There is, my device is perfectly functional. You shouldn't need to replace $device because they want to make another quick cash grab. Companies should be forced to support the device until the end of universe.
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.
It’s still yet another instance of an unsolved problem in this industry: what happens when a company gives up the will to provide supporting infrastructure to devices that they release? Traditionally, the consumer had a chance of continuing to run the device, since it was independent of cloud services. Now these devices are necessarily dependent on these companies with no duty of responsibility on their part. The companies demand subscription income to use the device and then kick users to the curb when the costs exceed that income. This is when consumer protection measures should step in to keep company’s “shareholder value optimization” tendencies in check. For example: keep all device schematics and protocols in escrow such that a community could continue to support the device.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadAnd 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.
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.
As is Excalidraw
Mural has a free tier. I did not used it much but was nice.
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.
Both handle it in different ways
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.
It adds seriously risk to a widespread deployment in any organization.
It appears to run Android, so I think we can probably pull something off here.
Why invest in new Google technology?
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.
(come on you guys, anything this repetitive is off topic on HN. we want curious conversation here...)
Just terrible since I dont want to deal with anything YouTube.
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.
A classic Google cancellation title if I've ever seen one.
Never buying a Google product again. This is beyond ridiculous at this point.
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.
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.
https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
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.
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%?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.
And it's time wasted; the SWE working on the Jamboard may prefer to work on higher impact projects;
The PO as well.
For example, an hypothetical PO @ Google may have this possibility to launch a new product instead (e.g. deprecating the Pixel 7);
- New launch = promotion.
- Promotion = better salary.
- Better salary = happy wife.
- Happy wife = happy life.
Indeed, shutdowning Jamboard was the right solution from his perspective.
It's all about alignement of incentives.
They won’t though, unfortunately.
So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.
> So open sourcing just jamboard specific code and nothing else even if possible wouldn’t build or be really useful.
Oh, it definitely wouldn't build. But you'd be surprised how resourceful opensource developers can be when they have a clear scope & clear spec to work towards. This sort of work is akin to making the world's simplest emulator for a video game console - except you only need to get "one game" to run, and you have its source code and you can change the code as much as you like. Its fun, satisfying work.
Obviously you're rolling the dice on whether or not anyone from the community would step up and do that work on your behalf. But the alternative is killing your product entirely. The opensourced wave died because we didn't grow an opensource community who understood & wanted to maintain the codebase. Looking back, we might have done a better job of that if we didn't do all the work ourselves to make it usable first.
Mind you, I have no idea how the community at large would react to google releasing broken source code. They might complain even more than the service just going dark. But I can still dream.
Honestly, what is really stopping it from being supported? Can they unlock it so a secondary market can load OSS onto it and keep it going for the next 10-15 years?
https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled...
First this is just yet another bad mark against Google that should be used to discourage buying into any hardware platform from Google of this nature. The single exception I would give is the Pixel line since even if they discontinue Pixel, Android is still there.
But they are treating hardware like they do their other software. Because this hardware is tightly tied to the cloud instead of shutting it down, they should be putting it in maintenance mode. No new features and you can't buy hardware anymore. But continue to keep it up for a longer period of time for those that spent money with you.
Great this product lasted more than 2 years, we have a record! That doesn't mean that they are not handling the shutdown of this product in a responsible manner.
Google is continuing their track record of how they are handling their pet projects and it is a bad decision to buy into any of them. Particularly if there is hardware involved
If we want this type of technology to actually be useful, it should have a lifetime somewhere near the thing it replaces. Otherwise schools and universities will get burned once and go back to whiteboards. 8 years isn't really acceptable.
You're underlying thesis is correct though, you're not legally required to care about other people when you design or sell products.
We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them.
I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it.
I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.
More than thirty years ago I inherited my mothers LED display alarm clock, I think it was at least ten years old then. It is still running in my bedroom.
It might well be obsolete but it is in perfect working order, it performs according to its specification, and satisfies my desire for a clock that is always visible.
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.
Nobody wanted to use them, and they went completely unused to my knowledge.
During his visit, our CEO made sure to take time with each team to solicit feedback from us. It was something we were looking forward to -- it was a chance to have a face to face open dialogue with him where we could make asks and air our grievances. While we all got the chance to say our piece, our CEO couldn't help but be super excited about Jamboards. He filled the my team's discussion with notes about them and made lots of excited suggestions, which cut into our time with him significantly. He ultimately spoke with every single team at the office about these things and kept asking us to let him know when, not if, we wanted more of them. He never thought to ask if we liked or wanted them.
I understand our CEO's desire to remove friction between Atlanta and SF and New York and all the other offices, but this was such a peculiar choice that none of us (even leadership) were a party to.
The Jamboards ultimately went completely unused and took up entirely too much space in the office corners. They wasted electricity, too.
Google Reader. Never forget.
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.
The point is, 'the cloud' for services + software tied to physical hardware is proving over and over to be a dead end, and effectively a mechanism to create ewaste.
Google could publish a docker image of the server software, and update the Jamboard firmware to provide a facility to connect to it. (DNS-SD, DHCP Options, Manual entry, whatever). And then Google has zero ongoing costs, and people who have bought into this ecosystem now have hardware they can continue to use, and we make far less e-waste.
That's because somebody else put in the effort to emulate the pieces requires for DOS. The vendor you bought DOS from is not building your VM software so that you can continue to use DOS.
The stack from boot-to-emulator can be 100% owned + managed by an organization or individual (and in fact, can be 100% OSS, except for whatever binary blobs are needed). Doesn't have to be crafted from bespoke bytes + bits to count. The important piece is that once this is running, there no one else that can prevent it from operating, except the organization or individual managing it (and perhaps dubious legal powers). Replacement hardware can be obtained. Backups can be made. Redundant power can be managed. The software can be re-installed. And if the unaffiliated OSS developers no longer want to maintain the software, the organization or individual can independently decide, if it is worth it to update the OSS themselves if no hardware or environment can run that.
We don't have to get rid of old working hardware. We should prioritize not being wasteful. And we should prioritize empowering hardware owners to decide for themselves how to maintain & manage their hardware, even if they want to go it alone.
What we need is longer minimum warranties for electronics, with support and security fixes for 10+ years.
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.
Zune is dead as well as the store and your other comparisons are disingenuous at best.
Furthermore, you will still be able to use the Jamboard as a whiteboard and connect it to your computer. It will not stop working. These comparisons are just terrible.
The migration between Mojang and Microsoft took several years to complete.
---
> Since 2021, millions of Java Edition players have switched over from their old accounts to Microsoft accounts.
> https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/sections/12617909134221
> I don't have access to the email on my Mojang account
> If you do not have access to the email that is used to log in to your Mojang account, you will not be able to complete the migration. You will need to change the email on your account first. For instructions on how to do this, see: https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360035056531-Ch...
> If you cannot change your Mojang account email, have your transaction ID or gift code available and contact Minecraft support.
---
2 years is plenty of time to migrate.
If someone waited until the very last moment to migrate, then that is not a Microsoft issue, but a diligence issue with the user.
Be more diligent with life, and these types of issues just don't occur with any frequency.
Here's a line from my favorite over-the-window plaque: "A lack of preparation on your part does not equal an emergency for me."
Also, this isn't my job to begin with. Suppose I simply didn't play the game for 2 years; I'd deserve to lose my account? If MS wants to migrate people to a new account system, it's definitely their job to do that automatically (or at least not lock existing users out), like with every other online service.
> Be more diligent with life
Please don't talk down to me. Microsoft created the "emergency" here, not that I take a Minecraft account anywhere near this seriously.
Lack of diligence tends to be the case with most of the whining posts.
> Suppose I simply didn't play the game for 2 years; I'd deserve to lose my account?
Yup. It's in the ToS. Most companies reserve the right to shut down services with no notice. At least MS provided you with 2 years of notice. MS also provided multiple solutions for persons without access to their old email, account information, or receipt.
And yes, every service's ToS says they can legally terminate at any time, just as Google kills all their chat apps periodically; doesn't mean it reflects well on their reputation. Microsoft broke this game for a lot of paid customers, particularly the early adopters.
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.
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.
I think this is the part that Microsoft gets, at a deep level, and Google doesn't (or, more likely, doesn't care)
This is the downside of relying on someone else’s cloud software: ultimately if it’s not your code and not your computer, its fate is out of your hands. I think its healthy that our industry is finally coming to understand that.
Google has SLAs and service contracts that they are contractually bound to. They technically can turn off their services any day, but they won't, for the same reason that they won't liquidate all their assets into cash and drop it out of a helicopter - because it'd be extremely financially stupid.
This comment makes no sense because it's discussing something that is extremely unlikely to happen - far, far less likely than a service failure caused by self-hosting.
I'll grant, Google has SLAs on some of their products (like Firebase). But trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Wave, Inbox, Reader, etc. I still remember - with horror - that time google suddenly announced they were massively increasing GCP (Google Apps?) pricing without warning anyone beforehand.
Is there a prediction market for the life expectancy of google products? Some things will probably be around more or less indefinitely: Docs, Gmail, etc. But the base rate for "this google product, service or API will still be available in 1 year" is probably somewhere between 1% and 10%. I'd consider any "all in" strategy on a lot of google's tech to be a serious business risk for that reason. Especially if losing that bet means you need to rearchitect your entire application.
Say what you will about Apple, they play the long game.
This company needs better management. It seems like its being run entirely by MBAs with zero vision or guts.
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
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand
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.