9 ms·

Google Ending Support for Jamboard

185 points by nkcmr 3y ago

akomtu 3y ago
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"?
dcchambers 3y ago
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.
- frutiger 3y ago
  It was a pretty bad app. I’m surprised you’ll miss it.
  - dcchambers 3y ago
    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.
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Raed667 3y ago
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.
- BasilPH 3y ago
  I've been enjoying Excalidraw a lot[^1]. It lets you share diagrams without accounts and you can even collaborate in real-time. [^1]: https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/
  - akshayKMR 3y ago
    For a tool that combines both, meetings like zoom and embedded Excalidraw, check out https://oorja.io https://oorja.io ; You create a room, click on "+" button inside to add Excalidraw. Disclaimer: This is my side project.
  - fathyb 3y ago
    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.
- gcr 3y ago
  TLDraw is really nice: http://tldraw.com http://tldraw.com As is Excalidraw
- pawelwentpawel 3y ago
  I built https://flat.social https://flat.social that has whiteboarding functionalities (among others). Not as advanced as Miro or FigJam but useful for quick diagrams during meetings / brainstorming.
- ssivark 3y ago
  Twiddla?
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago
  You can try Milton https://www.miltonpaint.com/ https://www.miltonpaint.com/
- monsieurgaufre 3y ago
  https://mural.co/ https://mural.co/ Mural has a free tier. I did not used it much but was nice.
sailorganymede 3y ago
Oh goddamnit - I really liked Jamboard and used it tons for myself and my team. Guess we have to actually Google for alternatives.
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morkalork 3y ago
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?
- dekhn 3y ago
  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).
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- jsnell 3y ago
  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&query=jamboard&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
- Raed667 3y ago
  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.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  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.
oaththrowaway 3y ago
My PM will be in shambles. How will we ever do retrospectives now???
- monknomo 3y ago
  I like retrium, but it's much more structured than a whiteboard-style tool
- Raed667 3y ago
  My current team uses Miro, a previous one used retrotool.io Both handle it in different ways
  - kgeist 3y ago
    We use Miro as well, it's pretty solid. Our PMs use it for almost everything. Developers, however, prefer draw.io
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
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monitron 3y ago
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.
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- BoorishBears 3y ago
  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...
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    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.) It's been a frustrating and expensive experiment.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
This touches on a fundamental problem with the current electronic-whiteboard market: poor cross-vendor compatibility. It adds seriously risk to a widespread deployment in any organization.
renewiltord 3y ago
Haha, wow, I picked up one from the Twitter liquidation sale this Monday. HAHA! What a sucker I am! It appears to run Android, so I think we can probably pull something off here.
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- monitron 3y ago
  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.
chris_wot 3y ago
lol - I remember when Fairfax Media (now Nine) got these. Apparently revolutionary. And like all Google things, fizzled out. Why invest in new Google technology?
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tareqak 3y ago
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.
- parl_match 3y ago
  > 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.
  - tareqak 3y ago
    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.
    - skinner927 3y ago
      That’s literally a feature
      - thfuran 3y ago
        That's explicitly the opposite of the intent of patents.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      You do realize you are describing the exact thing that's currently plaguing the software industry, among others?
    - 3y ago
Lammy 3y ago
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?
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dang 3y ago
[stub for offtopicness] (come on you guys, anything this repetitive is off topic on HN. we want curious conversation here...)
- half0wl 3y ago
  And one more to the casket - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - havnagiggle 3y ago
    It needs a graph over time. It seems like it's going exponential based on HN headlines.
  - SXX 3y ago
    OMG I completely missed they killing Google Podcasts. Just terrible since I dont want to deal with anything YouTube.
- jchw 3y ago
  Interesting. A full year of notice is actually pretty good for a Google shutdown if my memory serves correctly.
  - ferfumarma 3y ago
    I think it's reasonable to say that shutdowns are their core competency at this point.
    - jiveturkey 3y ago
      [flagged]
- nikolay 3y ago
  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!
internet2000 3y ago
My employer owns hundreds of those across all our offices. I hope they auction them. I’ll buy one for $50 on the off chance it gets hacked/jailbroken.
mey 3y ago
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...
eh_why_not 3y ago
I wonder in these situations: why don't they spin it off / sell it to some other smaller company that doesn't need a Billion Users to succeed? 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.
- changoplatanero 3y ago
  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.
  - travem 3y ago
    In some senses it is a bit of an indictment on Google's cloud offering that their teams don't build it on those.
    - eklitzke 3y ago
      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.
    - btilly 3y ago
      Steve Yegge had a great rant around a dozen years ago that explains why their teams don't. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
  - btilly 3y ago
    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.
dangus 3y ago
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%?
rajnathani 3y ago
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.
addicted 3y ago
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.
- andreif 3y ago
  I would agree about Reader, but Jamboard is not something I will miss. There are a lot better alternatives.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Because the people in charge of recognizing problems in the current system got where they are due to the current system.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Because their real money-makers still make money.
- philistine 3y ago
  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.
- nnurmanov 3y ago
renegade-otter 3y ago
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.
xeromal 3y ago
Never heard of it and not surprised.
deleted 3y ago
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nerdjon 3y ago
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.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  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.
  - gdcbe 3y ago
    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.
    - echelon 3y ago
      My last company bought a bunch of these just before the pandemic to help facilitate working with remote offices. All the big conference rooms had one. Nobody wanted to use them, and they went completely unused to my knowledge.
      - agrippanux 3y ago
        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.
        echelon 3y ago
adolph 3y ago
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. 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://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-tx1
- adolph 3y ago
  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). https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand
justrealist 3y ago
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.
- Retric 3y ago
  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?
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    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.
- teeray 3y ago
  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.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
"Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never bet the business on a Google product, when death is on the line!'"
- jjkaczor 3y ago
  Inconceivable!
23B1 3y ago
Too big to win, too big to fail.
myko 3y ago
This device, like Stadia, was actually pretty great/amazing. Just incredible to see Google fuck these things up from a marketing/sales/strategy perspective. Amazing technology turned to (expensive) dust.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  stadia with take-hands-off-controller before visually updating was amazing? it was one of the quickest plug pulls for a reason
  - myko 3y ago
    I'm guessing part of the problem is that some folks internet just couldn't handle it. I tried GeForce NOW and Stadia and Stadia felt miles ahead in responsiveness.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I found it really responsive, just playing platform games on my phone.
  - throw_m239339 3y ago
    Stadia was amazing, what made no sense is the business model. They should have operated like GeForce Now. You could have paid a subscription only to run the games in the cloud and buy the game on separate shops.
  - rutierut 3y ago
    I played Stadia, then Xbox live, then PC and the truth is it really depended on your geographical location and router. Almost all casual fps have some sort of auto aim built in, the ones that did not were unplayable but the ones that did were pretty good
johnboiles 3y ago
I have one of these in our office that's been passed from company to company. We don't pay for it and just use it as a (very nice-looking) rolling TV (it has an HDMI input on the back, thankfully). Any Android exports out there have a sense for how hard it'd be to get root access to something like this?
krferriter 3y ago
I knows schools and businesses that bought these. Should have just bought normal 4k touchscreen displays with rolling stands. Then you can use whatever software you want on it. Could even run google's browser-based jamboard on the non-jamboard display.
zie 3y ago
I don't know what the success rate is so far, but it has to be low single digits of Google products/services that stick around? Has anyone ever done that math? EDIT: Based on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products I didn't do any editing of the list, just ran wc -l on the 2 lists, so all of those phones are still considered production. That's probably not correct, but I'm not energetic enough to fix it. Looks like it's right around 50/50, so about 1/2 their products are discontinued/failed.
cj 3y ago
I bought a Jamboard for our small 20 person half remote company before Covid. Jamboard was definitely ahead of its time. Giant (bigger than your living room TV) touch screen monitor with a camera, speakers and microphone built in. I think this is an example where the market need is clearly there (does anyone like the state of remote brainstorming/remote whiteboarding?) but Google is deciding not to capture the market. It looks like their strategy here is to promote Miro. They’ve been pushing the Google Meet + Miro native integration heavily for the past couple of weeks. Seeing this announcement, it makes sense why.
- Foobar8568 3y ago
  Microsoft has (had?) a similar product back in 2014, so surely before, my client used them in all their meeting rooms and senior managers offices.
  - jjkaczor 3y ago
    They still do, it's called the "Surface Hub" line, currently at "Surface Hub 2" - integrates with Teams and other apps. However - recent changes in "management" and direction with Surface hardware products/division may impact this in the near future.
    - eddythompson80 3y ago
      Apparently they just announced Surface Hub 3
- slantedview 3y ago
  The Google meet executives must have more internal clout than the Jamboard executive(s). And so it goes.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  I kind of wonder how many companies bought these before COVID and kept paying google throughout the pandemic. And now the accountants are back and wondering why they're still paying.
calibas 3y ago
A more responsible company might have open-sourced the hardware/software so people could still use it.
mmkos 3y ago
It's about time we had legislation (at least in the EU) that mandated an option to be able to use physical products in an offline mode. Features that require a connection to the Internet should only be an augmentation at most and not the core without which the product cannot work.
- cush 3y ago
  This is an incredible idea. It’s very much like mandating the recyclability of electronics but goes one step further - enforcing the reusability of electronics. It would be a game changer for consumer and environmental protection. Literal tonnes of e-wasted iPhones would instead become offline music/game devices.
- deleted 3y ago
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- fragmede 3y ago
  Or some way to force opening up the software upon the product's death. The hardware is great and I'd love to pick one up for cheap for my home office to use for Zoom meetings.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    With the price these things were sold for and the type of companies that bought them, I expect someone to buy these things and hack them to work with Jitsi or some other open source solution not long after the cloud service shuts down. It may be worth tracking down if any stores still stock these things and what companies have invested in many of them, so you can try to get a deal on the hardware after the sunset date.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network. Honestly, people buying these products should be smarter. They bought an expensive chalkboard that they knew depends on someone else's computers (unless they didn't even bother to look into how the products work), without any guaranteed server support period anywhere to be found. Anyone who cares about their purchases suddenly no longer working will simply avoid this hardware. The people who do purchase this stuff don't really care. They may act outraged in hopes of getting enough people worked up to start a class action lawsuit they can benefit from, but they failed to even consider "what if the servers shut down" before spending five grand on a glorified touchscreen and hooking themselves up to a $600 per year subscription. To make things worse, they bought this stuff from Google. Screw Google and their e-waste factories, but banning all online products seems like an unnecessary hampering for innovation to be honest. I suggest an alternative solution: for up to x years after a product is sold by retail stores, the servers must be up or the consumer must be able to get all of their money back from the sellers. This adds risk to the businesses launching and shutting down IoT stuff willy-nilly and helps consumers. Products sold in third party stores will have to be pretty reliable for stores to take the risk stocking this crap. In a perfect world, I'd like the law to mandate that online-only products like these must put their server source under escrow (to be opened when the service shuts down) and must provide the user with an option to pick an alternative server address. Sadly, I don't think that idea is going to survive even a single day of IT lobbying. With Availability as a critical part of the cybersecurity CIA acronym, I think it may just be possible that the EU's Cyber Resilience Act will include something to solve this problem.
solarkraft 3y ago
It's crazy to me that people keep willingly buying hardware that requires a service to work. You have a high up-front cost, yet you're at someone else's mercy. That's the worst of buying and renting combined. Obviously it isn't very profitable to keep supporting a product you've already sold at the moment, so something must be done to make it more attractive. At the very least there should be a support commitment which marks the life time of the device. Stated upfront and comparable before purchase, a bit like those EU energy efficiency labels. 8 years might be a fine life span for some customers. But they should be aware of it in advance. And they should be motivated to ask "and what do we do with it afterwards?".
- samtho 3y ago
  I work in IoT and my single goal working in the industry is to do as much as I can (which will likely still be small) to make devices that are entirely separable from the cloud by enabling the use of different services and by being local-fist. Imagine if private organizations built their own road network and then sold you a car that can only be driven on that road. Once that company goes out of business, the road vanished and your car is now a very heavy paperweight that literally cannot turn on. This would be totally unacceptable to us, yet we tolerate home automation vendors selling garbage that is locked to their propitiatory systems and will happily brick itself once those systems go offline.
  - eschneider 3y ago
    I work in IoT as well and definitely try to implement as much as possible locally as well. What companies seem to forget is that any part of the product that's cloud hosted becomes an ongoing cost that goes up in proportion to the number of devices sold. The less you have in the cloud (generally) the better the economics for the manufacturer.
    - ipsi 3y ago
      It's an interesting one because anyone developing a software-only product has the opposite incentive - putting as much on the cloud as possible reduces support costs - no more "it says it's compatible with Windows, but doesn't run on my 20-year old laptop!" or having to field support requests from ancient versions. Plus it provides cover for charging users monthly, and there's a good chance your hosting costs are less than the cost of supporting a locally installed version. The more complex your software is, the more true this is - self-hosted enterprise software is not only more work to setup (ergo, more support tickets) but installed on a vast array of configurations (e.g., bare-metal K8s, OpenShift, GKE, Docker Swarm, EC2, ECS, etc, etc), only a portion of which are economical to test against and which will generate a steady stream of unique issues. Having an "enterprise-ready" SaaS product is expensive, sure, but probably less expensive than supporting hundreds or thousands of customers setting up their own unique version of your product. On the other side, it's not possible to move hardware to the cloud so the core support costs don't - can't - go away. Adding cloud in that case is adding ongoing hosting costs and support costs and is at best reducing the volume of support requests, but adding "Cloud" won't eliminate whole classes of customer support like it could with a software-only product.
edandersen 3y ago
Can they at least continue working as 55 inch monitors or is Google going to deliberately contribute to global warming?
randorandomson 3y ago
Jamboard aside, I've really hesitated buying any Google product because it could be bricked any day, including Nest devices. Understand the business logic behind it, but sooner than later this is going to catch up to them.
killjoywashere 3y ago
We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I'm at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, no whiteboard is a first-class citizen in VTC world. Partially, no one else knows how to use whatever is in use today. I actually have a slate chalkboard my dad got from an old schoolhouse in Nebraska. He built a frame for it, gave it me when my kids were young, and I have moved with that all over the world. I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that. I love chalkboards so much, I really, really miss them. If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards.
- rmorey 3y ago
  > If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards. You gotta be sure to get the super special chalk mathematicians are hoarding, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8
  - rvnx 3y ago
    Something related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhawwXcQsUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhawwXcQsUs Cheers to Walter Lewin :)
  - AlanYx 3y ago
    Hagoromo ended up not going out of business, so there's no longer any worries about finding Hagoromo chalk. It's worth the cost.
- turnsout 3y ago
  Yes! Not to mention, chalk is a simple nontoxic product made from abundant natural resources, while dry erase markers are plastic waste. It's so unnecessary.
cush 3y ago
A week after Microsoft announces their new version of Surface Hub https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/surface-hub-3-bridging-workforce-collaboration-with-microsoft/ba-p/1669718 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...
- crazygringo 3y ago
  That's so strange. I wonder what makes this product category seem like a good investment for Microsoft but not for Google? Since it occupies the same functional role in the office suite. Not to mention Google had the additional market of schools where it integrated seamlessly with Chromebooks. It's very hard to understand why they'd be going in such different directions.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Microsoft tends to go longer term than Google. Even with smartphones they have multi-year support cycles laid out before devices hit the stores. Google hardware is developed and sold like as if it was software. If an idea doesn't work, shut it down and migrate to something that may do the trick. I suspect the fast turnover rate of Google employees to have something to do with it as well; after five years, most people working on a product will have left the company.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Outside looking in, Google seems nearly entirely unable to get people to work on things that aren’t new and shiny. Maintenance and polish get little or no attention, and half-assed when they give them any attention at all. Even Android suffers from this, though it’s big enough it trundles on regardless—the parts that get attention are things that can be treated as launches (UI overhauls and such—which usually are only half-baked as far as the developer-facing side, and don’t see much improvement after launch) Microsoft has the organizational ability to get their workers to give a shit about maintenance and polish, and take it seriously. They have plenty of trouble of their own (I am far from a MS fan) but they don’t suffer that particular pathology—they’re not consistently perfect at it, certainly, but they’re also not consistently totally unable to do it, as Google seem to be. [edit] to head off nitpicks, google does show an ability to focus on one big area, of course: ads/search. Though, ask anyone who uses their ad platform and I expect you’ll get a pile of complaints about shit that absolutely should not be as broken as it is. The parts that get ongoing attention are service reliability and anything that makes the revenue line measurable go up-and-right the instant it’s enabled.
ta8903 3y ago
Couple questions. 1. There are plenty of android based large displays with a touchscreen/camera/mic/speaker combo on the market (though I'm sure there weren't as many in 2016.) Why did Jamboard need to be an integrated solution instead of an app you could install on these displays? Maybe limit it to certain devices that you are sure it can run on. 2. I get that they are shutting the software part down, but you should be able to still use it as a dumb display for videoconferencing, right?
renewiltord 3y ago
Anyone working on jailbreaking these devices? Might be fun.
tpmx 3y ago
I can't imagine they sold that many of these. The correct move here would have been to offer a buyback/refund, starting at say 50% of the sales value for those that bought at launch 7 years ago going up to 100% for those that bought just before they stopped selling them (as far as I can tell: quite recently). They already got those $600/year "management and support fees". My take: Google simply doesn't care about its reputation any longer. They are firmly in the customer milking phase in the stereotypical giant company lifecycle. Also: This kind of behavior in the B2B field influences (lack of) faith in e.g. GCP's long-term commitments.
bartwr 3y ago
The amount of people here saying it's ok or even a long lifespan (?!) is shocking. At college, around 2008 I had electronic circuit labs where we used Soviet oscilloscopes dating back to the 70s. They worked perfectly well (we couldn't read the Cyryllic, but after 10min intro you understand the knobs). And why wouldn't they work? Stockholm syndrome of some is unbelievable. And then when I say that I don't want any cloud-controlled devices, people tell me I'm paranoid... If Google is to retire hardware like this, they should either open source the full stack, write new OSS version of it, or refund the customers plus be fined in tens of millions for e-waste. (While they green wash). PS. I used Jamboards at Google and they were cool for meetings or job interviews.
- posix86 3y ago
  They are refunding customers. And probably the thought, if we make the Jamboard offline, everyone will migrate to different solutions anyway. They could just open Android for them, and let any app run on it though I guess...
scardycat 3y ago
Innovation means more duds than hits and it should be encouraged at every level. For business critical applications, yes, there should be a well defined path, and in this case, I am sure there is. People lose their head every time Google sun sets service. In some cases the criticism is well deserved but not in all. In this case, I am sure there is a path forward for the customers. Heck, they even refunded all costs for Stadia. Google goes well above and beyond what is expected in most cases.
stuaxo 3y ago
FFS extremely out of order to do this to the education sector. They should be obliged to provide an open source off ramp for these and not make them e waste.
buildsjets 3y ago
We have one of these at work. I've never seen it used. Not even once. Mostly it gets in the way of seeing the traditional whiteboard behind it, which does get extensively used. Maybe we can use the $600 a year licensing fee toward buying some fresh dry erase markers, I'm pretty sure my employer has not bought any office supplies since the beginning of the pandemic.
rsweeney21 3y ago
It is not that expensive to set up a team of engineers to keep a product working for 10+ years. Microsoft had/has this. They called it "sustained engineering". They don't do any new feature work, just bug fixes and security issues on legacy software. The product team gets disbanded, and ownership is moved to sustained engineering. And they keep it running for years. One of the reasons Google has so many failed product launches is because consumers don't trust them to provide long-term service and support. At some point they will need to realize that this behavior is inhibiting their ability to become more than just an ads company.
f1shy 3y ago
I would like to see some law in the EU along the lines: if you stop supporting any HW, you have to open source all, so that the HW has a chance of not ending in a dump. I think should not be a lot of trouble, because like in this case for google, they will ahut down everything, and will not be making any more money with it.
plaidfuji 3y ago
I won’t comment on the wisdom of the business decision here, but more on the fact that I don’t see a great solution to the in-person + remote whiteboarding collaboration problem on the market. Unless your company is 100% remote and is forced into fully digital whiteboarding, my experience is there will sometimes just be a critical mass of people “in the room”, and there’s nothing the remote participants can do to stop them from drawing on a whiteboard. And once that starts happening, the remote participants become second class citizens. This fundamentally limits the remote folks from being part of ideation, design, and decision-making. It’s a handicap that would require executive buy-in to remedy, which you mostly won’t get because execs favor in-person work anyway. People buy these smart boards thinking it’ll help - they go totally untouched. The barrier to use is too high and nobody wants to look like a fool fumbling around with some proprietary interface, eating into valuable meeting time. Short of a major revolution in touchscreens + conferencing tech, the only way to keep the playing field even is for remote people to assert that they will do diagramming and visual notes on e.g. Lucidchart on their end, and you’d better be quick at it.
canadianfella 3y ago
[dead]
MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
Most of the comments are talking about the hardware product, but Jamboard is also a software app that is being shut down. I’d never heard of the hardware, but I have made a few Jamboards in Google Drive. It’s kind of ridiculous that Google is going to delete that user data with barely a year of notice.
kjsingh 3y ago
Kind of DCEU doom loop - no one will watch the last trickle of movies as all are set to be cancelled :D
hintymad 3y ago
A $5000 price tag with $600 annual fee would mean oh my god, why am I still using whiteboard now? Apparently jamboard is not that good yet.

185 points by nkcmr 3y ago

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"?

dcchambers 3y ago

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.

frutiger 3y ago
It was a pretty bad app. I’m surprised you’ll miss it.
- dcchambers 3y ago
  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.
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Raed667 3y ago

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.

BasilPH 3y ago
I've been enjoying Excalidraw a lot[^1]. It lets you share diagrams without accounts and you can even collaborate in real-time. [^1]: https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/
- akshayKMR 3y ago
  For a tool that combines both, meetings like zoom and embedded Excalidraw, check out https://oorja.io https://oorja.io ; You create a room, click on "+" button inside to add Excalidraw. Disclaimer: This is my side project.
- fathyb 3y ago
  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.
gcr 3y ago
TLDraw is really nice: http://tldraw.com http://tldraw.com As is Excalidraw
pawelwentpawel 3y ago
I built https://flat.social https://flat.social that has whiteboarding functionalities (among others). Not as advanced as Miro or FigJam but useful for quick diagrams during meetings / brainstorming.
ssivark 3y ago
Twiddla?
ohthatsnotright 3y ago
You can try Milton https://www.miltonpaint.com/ https://www.miltonpaint.com/
monsieurgaufre 3y ago
https://mural.co/ https://mural.co/ Mural has a free tier. I did not used it much but was nice.

sailorganymede 3y ago

Oh goddamnit - I really liked Jamboard and used it tons for myself and my team. Guess we have to actually Google for alternatives.

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morkalork 3y ago

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?

dekhn 3y ago
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).
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jsnell 3y ago
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&query=jamboard&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Raed667 3y ago
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.
makeitdouble 3y ago
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.

oaththrowaway 3y ago

My PM will be in shambles. How will we ever do retrospectives now???

monknomo 3y ago
I like retrium, but it's much more structured than a whiteboard-style tool
Raed667 3y ago
My current team uses Miro, a previous one used retrotool.io Both handle it in different ways
- kgeist 3y ago
  We use Miro as well, it's pretty solid. Our PMs use it for almost everything. Developers, however, prefer draw.io
- jiveturkey 3y ago
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monitron 3y ago

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.

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BoorishBears 3y ago
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...
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  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.) It's been a frustrating and expensive experiment.

CoastalCoder 3y ago

This touches on a fundamental problem with the current electronic-whiteboard market: poor cross-vendor compatibility. It adds seriously risk to a widespread deployment in any organization.

renewiltord 3y ago

Haha, wow, I picked up one from the Twitter liquidation sale this Monday. HAHA! What a sucker I am! It appears to run Android, so I think we can probably pull something off here.

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monitron 3y ago
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.

chris_wot 3y ago

lol - I remember when Fairfax Media (now Nine) got these. Apparently revolutionary. And like all Google things, fizzled out. Why invest in new Google technology?

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tareqak 3y ago

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.

parl_match 3y ago
> 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.
- tareqak 3y ago
  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.
  - skinner927 3y ago
    That’s literally a feature
    - thfuran 3y ago
      That's explicitly the opposite of the intent of patents.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    You do realize you are describing the exact thing that's currently plaguing the software industry, among others?
  - 3y ago

Lammy 3y ago

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?

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dang 3y ago

[stub for offtopicness] (come on you guys, anything this repetitive is off topic on HN. we want curious conversation here...)

half0wl 3y ago
And one more to the casket - https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- deleted 3y ago
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- havnagiggle 3y ago
  It needs a graph over time. It seems like it's going exponential based on HN headlines.
- SXX 3y ago
  OMG I completely missed they killing Google Podcasts. Just terrible since I dont want to deal with anything YouTube.
jchw 3y ago
Interesting. A full year of notice is actually pretty good for a Google shutdown if my memory serves correctly.
- ferfumarma 3y ago
  I think it's reasonable to say that shutdowns are their core competency at this point.
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    [flagged]
nikolay 3y ago
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!

internet2000 3y ago

My employer owns hundreds of those across all our offices. I hope they auction them. I’ll buy one for $50 on the off chance it gets hacked/jailbroken.

mey 3y ago

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...

eh_why_not 3y ago

I wonder in these situations: why don't they spin it off / sell it to some other smaller company that doesn't need a Billion Users to succeed? 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.

changoplatanero 3y ago
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.
- travem 3y ago
  In some senses it is a bit of an indictment on Google's cloud offering that their teams don't build it on those.
  - eklitzke 3y ago
    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.
  - btilly 3y ago
    Steve Yegge had a great rant around a dozen years ago that explains why their teams don't. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- btilly 3y ago
  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.

dangus 3y ago

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%?

rajnathani 3y ago

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.

addicted 3y ago

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.

andreif 3y ago
I would agree about Reader, but Jamboard is not something I will miss. There are a lot better alternatives.
jjoonathan 3y ago
Because the people in charge of recognizing problems in the current system got where they are due to the current system.
hot_gril 3y ago
Because their real money-makers still make money.
philistine 3y ago
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.
nnurmanov 3y ago

renegade-otter 3y ago

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.

xeromal 3y ago

Never heard of it and not surprised.

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nerdjon 3y ago

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.

justapassenger 3y ago
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.
- gdcbe 3y ago
  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.
  - echelon 3y ago
    My last company bought a bunch of these just before the pandemic to help facilitate working with remote offices. All the big conference rooms had one. Nobody wanted to use them, and they went completely unused to my knowledge.
    - agrippanux 3y ago
      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.
      - echelon 3y ago

adolph 3y ago

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. 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://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-tx1

adolph 3y ago
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). https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MWUG2LL/A/pro-stand

justrealist 3y ago

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.

Retric 3y ago
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?
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  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.
teeray 3y ago
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.

gjsman-1000 3y ago

"Ha-ha, you fool. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia", but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never bet the business on a Google product, when death is on the line!'"

jjkaczor 3y ago
Inconceivable!

23B1 3y ago

Too big to win, too big to fail.

myko 3y ago

This device, like Stadia, was actually pretty great/amazing. Just incredible to see Google fuck these things up from a marketing/sales/strategy perspective. Amazing technology turned to (expensive) dust.

sitzkrieg 3y ago
stadia with take-hands-off-controller before visually updating was amazing? it was one of the quickest plug pulls for a reason
- myko 3y ago
  I'm guessing part of the problem is that some folks internet just couldn't handle it. I tried GeForce NOW and Stadia and Stadia felt miles ahead in responsiveness.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I found it really responsive, just playing platform games on my phone.
- throw_m239339 3y ago
  Stadia was amazing, what made no sense is the business model. They should have operated like GeForce Now. You could have paid a subscription only to run the games in the cloud and buy the game on separate shops.
- rutierut 3y ago
  I played Stadia, then Xbox live, then PC and the truth is it really depended on your geographical location and router. Almost all casual fps have some sort of auto aim built in, the ones that did not were unplayable but the ones that did were pretty good

johnboiles 3y ago

I have one of these in our office that's been passed from company to company. We don't pay for it and just use it as a (very nice-looking) rolling TV (it has an HDMI input on the back, thankfully). Any Android exports out there have a sense for how hard it'd be to get root access to something like this?

krferriter 3y ago

I knows schools and businesses that bought these. Should have just bought normal 4k touchscreen displays with rolling stands. Then you can use whatever software you want on it. Could even run google's browser-based jamboard on the non-jamboard display.

zie 3y ago

I don't know what the success rate is so far, but it has to be low single digits of Google products/services that stick around? Has anyone ever done that math? EDIT: Based on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products I didn't do any editing of the list, just ran wc -l on the 2 lists, so all of those phones are still considered production. That's probably not correct, but I'm not energetic enough to fix it. Looks like it's right around 50/50, so about 1/2 their products are discontinued/failed.

cj 3y ago

I bought a Jamboard for our small 20 person half remote company before Covid. Jamboard was definitely ahead of its time. Giant (bigger than your living room TV) touch screen monitor with a camera, speakers and microphone built in. I think this is an example where the market need is clearly there (does anyone like the state of remote brainstorming/remote whiteboarding?) but Google is deciding not to capture the market. It looks like their strategy here is to promote Miro. They’ve been pushing the Google Meet + Miro native integration heavily for the past couple of weeks. Seeing this announcement, it makes sense why.

Foobar8568 3y ago
Microsoft has (had?) a similar product back in 2014, so surely before, my client used them in all their meeting rooms and senior managers offices.
- jjkaczor 3y ago
  They still do, it's called the "Surface Hub" line, currently at "Surface Hub 2" - integrates with Teams and other apps. However - recent changes in "management" and direction with Surface hardware products/division may impact this in the near future.
  - eddythompson80 3y ago
    Apparently they just announced Surface Hub 3
slantedview 3y ago
The Google meet executives must have more internal clout than the Jamboard executive(s). And so it goes.
joezydeco 3y ago
I kind of wonder how many companies bought these before COVID and kept paying google throughout the pandemic. And now the accountants are back and wondering why they're still paying.

calibas 3y ago

A more responsible company might have open-sourced the hardware/software so people could still use it.

mmkos 3y ago

It's about time we had legislation (at least in the EU) that mandated an option to be able to use physical products in an offline mode. Features that require a connection to the Internet should only be an augmentation at most and not the core without which the product cannot work.

cush 3y ago
This is an incredible idea. It’s very much like mandating the recyclability of electronics but goes one step further - enforcing the reusability of electronics. It would be a game changer for consumer and environmental protection. Literal tonnes of e-wasted iPhones would instead become offline music/game devices.
deleted 3y ago
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fragmede 3y ago
Or some way to force opening up the software upon the product's death. The hardware is great and I'd love to pick one up for cheap for my home office to use for Zoom meetings.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  With the price these things were sold for and the type of companies that bought them, I expect someone to buy these things and hack them to work with Jitsi or some other open source solution not long after the cloud service shuts down. It may be worth tracking down if any stores still stock these things and what companies have invested in many of them, so you can try to get a deal on the hardware after the sunset date.
jeroenhd 3y ago
That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network. Honestly, people buying these products should be smarter. They bought an expensive chalkboard that they knew depends on someone else's computers (unless they didn't even bother to look into how the products work), without any guaranteed server support period anywhere to be found. Anyone who cares about their purchases suddenly no longer working will simply avoid this hardware. The people who do purchase this stuff don't really care. They may act outraged in hopes of getting enough people worked up to start a class action lawsuit they can benefit from, but they failed to even consider "what if the servers shut down" before spending five grand on a glorified touchscreen and hooking themselves up to a $600 per year subscription. To make things worse, they bought this stuff from Google. Screw Google and their e-waste factories, but banning all online products seems like an unnecessary hampering for innovation to be honest. I suggest an alternative solution: for up to x years after a product is sold by retail stores, the servers must be up or the consumer must be able to get all of their money back from the sellers. This adds risk to the businesses launching and shutting down IoT stuff willy-nilly and helps consumers. Products sold in third party stores will have to be pretty reliable for stores to take the risk stocking this crap. In a perfect world, I'd like the law to mandate that online-only products like these must put their server source under escrow (to be opened when the service shuts down) and must provide the user with an option to pick an alternative server address. Sadly, I don't think that idea is going to survive even a single day of IT lobbying. With Availability as a critical part of the cybersecurity CIA acronym, I think it may just be possible that the EU's Cyber Resilience Act will include something to solve this problem.

solarkraft 3y ago

It's crazy to me that people keep willingly buying hardware that requires a service to work. You have a high up-front cost, yet you're at someone else's mercy. That's the worst of buying and renting combined. Obviously it isn't very profitable to keep supporting a product you've already sold at the moment, so something must be done to make it more attractive. At the very least there should be a support commitment which marks the life time of the device. Stated upfront and comparable before purchase, a bit like those EU energy efficiency labels. 8 years might be a fine life span for some customers. But they should be aware of it in advance. And they should be motivated to ask "and what do we do with it afterwards?".

samtho 3y ago
I work in IoT and my single goal working in the industry is to do as much as I can (which will likely still be small) to make devices that are entirely separable from the cloud by enabling the use of different services and by being local-fist. Imagine if private organizations built their own road network and then sold you a car that can only be driven on that road. Once that company goes out of business, the road vanished and your car is now a very heavy paperweight that literally cannot turn on. This would be totally unacceptable to us, yet we tolerate home automation vendors selling garbage that is locked to their propitiatory systems and will happily brick itself once those systems go offline.
- eschneider 3y ago
  I work in IoT as well and definitely try to implement as much as possible locally as well. What companies seem to forget is that any part of the product that's cloud hosted becomes an ongoing cost that goes up in proportion to the number of devices sold. The less you have in the cloud (generally) the better the economics for the manufacturer.
  - ipsi 3y ago
    It's an interesting one because anyone developing a software-only product has the opposite incentive - putting as much on the cloud as possible reduces support costs - no more "it says it's compatible with Windows, but doesn't run on my 20-year old laptop!" or having to field support requests from ancient versions. Plus it provides cover for charging users monthly, and there's a good chance your hosting costs are less than the cost of supporting a locally installed version. The more complex your software is, the more true this is - self-hosted enterprise software is not only more work to setup (ergo, more support tickets) but installed on a vast array of configurations (e.g., bare-metal K8s, OpenShift, GKE, Docker Swarm, EC2, ECS, etc, etc), only a portion of which are economical to test against and which will generate a steady stream of unique issues. Having an "enterprise-ready" SaaS product is expensive, sure, but probably less expensive than supporting hundreds or thousands of customers setting up their own unique version of your product. On the other side, it's not possible to move hardware to the cloud so the core support costs don't - can't - go away. Adding cloud in that case is adding ongoing hosting costs and support costs and is at best reducing the volume of support requests, but adding "Cloud" won't eliminate whole classes of customer support like it could with a software-only product.

edandersen 3y ago

Can they at least continue working as 55 inch monitors or is Google going to deliberately contribute to global warming?

randorandomson 3y ago

Jamboard aside, I've really hesitated buying any Google product because it could be bricked any day, including Nest devices. Understand the business logic behind it, but sooner than later this is going to catch up to them.

killjoywashere 3y ago

We have a few of these in our office. The experience is decent, but, man, I really miss chalkboards. I just don't find whiteboards, physical or virtual, as compelling. I actually make some use of the Jamboard app in meetings occasionally, but usually I'm at a desk with my feet up, using a tablet to draw while everyone else is remote. Not only has Jamboard never been a first-class citizen, no whiteboard is a first-class citizen in VTC world. Partially, no one else knows how to use whatever is in use today. I actually have a slate chalkboard my dad got from an old schoolhouse in Nebraska. He built a frame for it, gave it me when my kids were young, and I have moved with that all over the world. I have actually as productive is a chalkboard and a phone on a tripod, joining the phone to the VTC so people can see the chalkboard. I wish there was a better way to do that. I love chalkboards so much, I really, really miss them. If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards.

rmorey 3y ago
> If I'm ever in charge, I'm buying chalkboards. You gotta be sure to get the super special chalk mathematicians are hoarding, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhNUjg9X4g8
- rvnx 3y ago
  Something related https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhawwXcQsUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhawwXcQsUs Cheers to Walter Lewin :)
- AlanYx 3y ago
  Hagoromo ended up not going out of business, so there's no longer any worries about finding Hagoromo chalk. It's worth the cost.
turnsout 3y ago
Yes! Not to mention, chalk is a simple nontoxic product made from abundant natural resources, while dry erase markers are plastic waste. It's so unnecessary.

cush 3y ago

A week after Microsoft announces their new version of Surface Hub https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/surface-hub-3-bridging-workforce-collaboration-with-microsoft/ba-p/1669718 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...

crazygringo 3y ago
That's so strange. I wonder what makes this product category seem like a good investment for Microsoft but not for Google? Since it occupies the same functional role in the office suite. Not to mention Google had the additional market of schools where it integrated seamlessly with Chromebooks. It's very hard to understand why they'd be going in such different directions.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Microsoft tends to go longer term than Google. Even with smartphones they have multi-year support cycles laid out before devices hit the stores. Google hardware is developed and sold like as if it was software. If an idea doesn't work, shut it down and migrate to something that may do the trick. I suspect the fast turnover rate of Google employees to have something to do with it as well; after five years, most people working on a product will have left the company.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Outside looking in, Google seems nearly entirely unable to get people to work on things that aren’t new and shiny. Maintenance and polish get little or no attention, and half-assed when they give them any attention at all. Even Android suffers from this, though it’s big enough it trundles on regardless—the parts that get attention are things that can be treated as launches (UI overhauls and such—which usually are only half-baked as far as the developer-facing side, and don’t see much improvement after launch) Microsoft has the organizational ability to get their workers to give a shit about maintenance and polish, and take it seriously. They have plenty of trouble of their own (I am far from a MS fan) but they don’t suffer that particular pathology—they’re not consistently perfect at it, certainly, but they’re also not consistently totally unable to do it, as Google seem to be. [edit] to head off nitpicks, google does show an ability to focus on one big area, of course: ads/search. Though, ask anyone who uses their ad platform and I expect you’ll get a pile of complaints about shit that absolutely should not be as broken as it is. The parts that get ongoing attention are service reliability and anything that makes the revenue line measurable go up-and-right the instant it’s enabled.

ta8903 3y ago

Couple questions. 1. There are plenty of android based large displays with a touchscreen/camera/mic/speaker combo on the market (though I'm sure there weren't as many in 2016.) Why did Jamboard need to be an integrated solution instead of an app you could install on these displays? Maybe limit it to certain devices that you are sure it can run on. 2. I get that they are shutting the software part down, but you should be able to still use it as a dumb display for videoconferencing, right?

renewiltord 3y ago

Anyone working on jailbreaking these devices? Might be fun.

tpmx 3y ago

I can't imagine they sold that many of these. The correct move here would have been to offer a buyback/refund, starting at say 50% of the sales value for those that bought at launch 7 years ago going up to 100% for those that bought just before they stopped selling them (as far as I can tell: quite recently). They already got those $600/year "management and support fees". My take: Google simply doesn't care about its reputation any longer. They are firmly in the customer milking phase in the stereotypical giant company lifecycle. Also: This kind of behavior in the B2B field influences (lack of) faith in e.g. GCP's long-term commitments.

bartwr 3y ago

The amount of people here saying it's ok or even a long lifespan (?!) is shocking. At college, around 2008 I had electronic circuit labs where we used Soviet oscilloscopes dating back to the 70s. They worked perfectly well (we couldn't read the Cyryllic, but after 10min intro you understand the knobs). And why wouldn't they work? Stockholm syndrome of some is unbelievable. And then when I say that I don't want any cloud-controlled devices, people tell me I'm paranoid... If Google is to retire hardware like this, they should either open source the full stack, write new OSS version of it, or refund the customers plus be fined in tens of millions for e-waste. (While they green wash). PS. I used Jamboards at Google and they were cool for meetings or job interviews.

posix86 3y ago
They are refunding customers. And probably the thought, if we make the Jamboard offline, everyone will migrate to different solutions anyway. They could just open Android for them, and let any app run on it though I guess...

scardycat 3y ago

Innovation means more duds than hits and it should be encouraged at every level. For business critical applications, yes, there should be a well defined path, and in this case, I am sure there is. People lose their head every time Google sun sets service. In some cases the criticism is well deserved but not in all. In this case, I am sure there is a path forward for the customers. Heck, they even refunded all costs for Stadia. Google goes well above and beyond what is expected in most cases.

stuaxo 3y ago

FFS extremely out of order to do this to the education sector. They should be obliged to provide an open source off ramp for these and not make them e waste.

buildsjets 3y ago

We have one of these at work. I've never seen it used. Not even once. Mostly it gets in the way of seeing the traditional whiteboard behind it, which does get extensively used. Maybe we can use the $600 a year licensing fee toward buying some fresh dry erase markers, I'm pretty sure my employer has not bought any office supplies since the beginning of the pandemic.

rsweeney21 3y ago

It is not that expensive to set up a team of engineers to keep a product working for 10+ years. Microsoft had/has this. They called it "sustained engineering". They don't do any new feature work, just bug fixes and security issues on legacy software. The product team gets disbanded, and ownership is moved to sustained engineering. And they keep it running for years. One of the reasons Google has so many failed product launches is because consumers don't trust them to provide long-term service and support. At some point they will need to realize that this behavior is inhibiting their ability to become more than just an ads company.

f1shy 3y ago

I would like to see some law in the EU along the lines: if you stop supporting any HW, you have to open source all, so that the HW has a chance of not ending in a dump. I think should not be a lot of trouble, because like in this case for google, they will ahut down everything, and will not be making any more money with it.

plaidfuji 3y ago

I won’t comment on the wisdom of the business decision here, but more on the fact that I don’t see a great solution to the in-person + remote whiteboarding collaboration problem on the market. Unless your company is 100% remote and is forced into fully digital whiteboarding, my experience is there will sometimes just be a critical mass of people “in the room”, and there’s nothing the remote participants can do to stop them from drawing on a whiteboard. And once that starts happening, the remote participants become second class citizens. This fundamentally limits the remote folks from being part of ideation, design, and decision-making. It’s a handicap that would require executive buy-in to remedy, which you mostly won’t get because execs favor in-person work anyway. People buy these smart boards thinking it’ll help - they go totally untouched. The barrier to use is too high and nobody wants to look like a fool fumbling around with some proprietary interface, eating into valuable meeting time. Short of a major revolution in touchscreens + conferencing tech, the only way to keep the playing field even is for remote people to assert that they will do diagramming and visual notes on e.g. Lucidchart on their end, and you’d better be quick at it.

canadianfella 3y ago

[dead]

MatthiasPortzel 3y ago

Most of the comments are talking about the hardware product, but Jamboard is also a software app that is being shut down. I’d never heard of the hardware, but I have made a few Jamboards in Google Drive. It’s kind of ridiculous that Google is going to delete that user data with barely a year of notice.

kjsingh 3y ago

Kind of DCEU doom loop - no one will watch the last trickle of movies as all are set to be cancelled :D

hintymad 3y ago

A $5000 price tag with $600 annual fee would mean oh my god, why am I still using whiteboard now? Apparently jamboard is not that good yet.