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.

> There seemed to be a general understanding of "people are running their business off of this stuff so we need to make it work".

I think this is the part that Microsoft gets, at a deep level, and Google doesn't (or, more likely, doesn't care)

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 device cost $6k and $600/yr from the article. Not free but I doubt many people are affected.

It doesn't really matter how many people were affected, the point is that people made an investment (and not a small one) and its being shut down.

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.

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.

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?

It's incredibly wasteful. The tech industry produces prodigious amounts of waste with a deliberate purpose (revenue).

Does the Jamboard cease to be usable without the cloud-based stuff?

Most cloud based items are like this by default, and by design. We throw the environment under the bus, to make our next quarterly profit.

Who's "we" here? I'm sure not throwing the environment under the bus.

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

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.

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.

Internet dependence is the difference. Even consumer electronics that don’t rely on Internet services often last a couple decades, and sometimes more.

You're missing the point.

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

> Most electronics are obsolete but that age

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'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.

Yes, everything is in the soup called /google3.

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.

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.

They won’t though, unfortunately.

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.

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.

When was the last one sold? If it wasn't 8 years ago, then that one has a shorter than 8-year lifespan.

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.

You're assuming everyone bought it 8 years ago. What about the schools, companies etc that bought it a year or two ago? Still 'not a bad lifespan'?

They sold units recently no. So there’s some ppl who might have only gotten a few years of usage

I wonder if the OP is going to complain about all our skype based conferencing hardware that has become obsolete over the last few years?

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34763/which-skype-enabled...

How recently was one of these phones sold?

I run a lot of hardware older than 8 years.

Imagine if you had to purchase new furniture every eight years for no reason other than the vendor decided to render it useless.

PLEASE STOP GIVING CAPITALISTS IDEAS!

So you would be happy if Tesla were to stop supporting my eight year old Model S?

When did they stop selling them?

My project was done and Google killed the whole IoT wtf

It's absurd given how much money Google makes. They can easily afford to support these products but they refuse to.

This company needs better management. It seems like its being run entirely by MBAs with zero vision or guts.

You might even think people who make these decisions at Google would be embarrassed at this point.

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.

A lot of us are in trouble when they kill android.

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.

Thanks for the periodic reminder to do a Takeout today.

what product or service has lasted indefinitely? Google will compensate those who adopted it, life goes on.

Microsoft Windows still exists, and can open executable compiled for it 25+ years ago.

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.

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 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.

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.

Managed solution _makes it easier_ not harder.

No, not really.

I checked the Wii Shop just now... nope, it's dead.

warframe, wow. and xbox probably meets your definition of a managed solution. Especially a mmo

wow is hardware? xbox 1 doesnt work with live anymore

And chances are that any given Xbox 1 doesn't work, period. Probably went red-ring years ago.

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 brand new hardware, with an EFI bios? Or on a pc you pulled from a closet or a VM?

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.

Yes? So?

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.

Jamboard inherently required the cloud, so I'm not sure what your point is.

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.

yes, which is why they will still work as offline whiteboards that can still be physically plugged into a computer and serve as a display.

I understand nothing lasts forever. Google seems to think almost nothing should last more than 10 years.

Google Reader. Never forget.

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.

Sonos does a pretty good job still supporting there old hardware. The ZP100 came out 20 years ago and works pretty well today

Is the zp100 cloud connected though? I thought the early sonos stuff was entirely on your own network