Google Cloud Print

» see cloudprint.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 2010 i was 26, working as a junior engineer in ankara on a windows 7 thinkpad, and printing meant the network laser down the corridor that had been there since the office was built. cloud print was a chromeos answer to a chromeos problem i did not have. the first chromebooks came without any printer drivers because chromeos was a browser pretending to be an operating system, and a browser by itself cannot speak the cups or pcl protocols that printers expect. cloud print existed to bounce that problem off a google server.

google announced cloud print on april 16 2010 ahead of the chromeos launch later that year. the design was simple. a chrome browser somewhere registered a printer with google. any other device on that user's google account could submit a print job to a google endpoint. google held the file and reformatted it for the destination printer. then it handed the result to the registered chrome instance to drop on the wire. the printer itself did not need an internet connection. somebody's chrome did.

cloud print did its job inside the chromebook fleet for the next decade. it never came out of beta in its entire ten-year life, which the chromeos team kept apologizing for. on november 21 2019 google posted that the service would close on december 31 2020 because chromeos had grown native printing support and because the third-party print services market was now large enough to absorb the long tail. the lights went off on schedule.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it solved ~

the problem was specific to chromeos. on windows you installed a printer driver and chose it from the print dialog. on mac you did the same through cups under the hood. on chromeos you had a tab and a kernel that could not reach a usb printer. cloud print let google do the work in the middle. you registered a printer once from a windows or mac machine with chrome installed. that printer became visible to your google account, and your chromebook could now print to it from any tab.

the design extended cleanly to mobile too. android and ios apps from google added cloud print as a target for gmail and the mobile chrome browser. you could print a boarding pass from a phone to the printer at home if a desktop somewhere in the house had chrome registered as the bridge. for a moment around 2014 it looked like cloud print might be the kind of glue protocol the consumer printer industry would adopt out of inertia. the printer vendors mostly added it as one optional cloud target among several.

~ the chromebook era ~

cloud print's actual home was the school district. between 2012 and 2018 the us k-12 chromebook rollout was one of the cleanest market shifts in consumer computing. tens of millions of school chromebooks meant tens of millions of school print jobs that had to go somewhere. cloud print sat under all of them. the it admin at a school district registered the staff printers once with chrome on a windows server. the students printed homework from their chromebooks through cloud print, and nobody had to install a single driver on a chromebook anywhere in the building.

in turkey chromebooks did not reach schools at scale during the 2010s. the local school computer rollouts went to windows laptops or to fatih project tablets. cloud print was a backstage service for a fleet i did not own. by 2019 the schools that ran chromeos already had cups-style native printing in their chromebook fleets and the print services market had matured around papercut and mobility print.

~ the long tail ~

google's deprecation notice on november 21 2019 gave thirteen months of runway. the chromeos team published a migration guide pointing district admins at the native chromeos cups print system and at papercut or mobility print. the printer vendors with cloud print integrations updated their firmware. december 31 2020 came and the public cloud print endpoint stopped accepting jobs. registered printers stopped showing up in chrome print dialogs.

the post-mortem is not very dramatic. cloud print did its job for a decade, and the underlying problem stopped being a problem once chromeos grew up. google closed the service rather than maintain a redundant path. it sits in the killedbygoogle list as one of the few entries that died because the surrounding ecosystem caught up, not because google lost interest. the schools that depended on it never noticed the change because their admins had already moved everyone to native printing by autumn 2020.

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