Google Jamboard

» see edu.google.com/jamboard as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

jamboard was google's attempt to ship a piece of physical office hardware in the chromecast-and-pixel era, when google was trying to be a hardware company across more than one product line. it was a 55-inch 4k touchscreen, mounted on a rolling stand or wall, with low-latency stylus input and a paired ios and android app that let remote participants draw on the same board from their phones. the hardware was sold through google workspace resellers for around 5,000 dollars, with the rolling stand adding another thousand. it launched on may 23 2017.

the pitch was good for 2017. google's competitive position was that the microsoft surface hub existed at twice the price and the cisco whiteboards existed at four times the price. jamboard was supposed to be the cheap collaborative display that made whiteboarding a software feature inside google workspace. the companion app was free. you could open a jam from your phone, save it to google drive, then pick it up in a different conference room with the same hardware. that mechanic worked. the problem was that nobody wanted that mechanic enough to justify the hardware budget.

the actual usage pattern in enterprises was that the jamboards got rolled into a conference room and used for one demo, then sat unused while everybody opened a laptop and shared a screen. the remote-collaboration use case got eaten by miro starting in 2018 and figjam starting in 2021. both of those tools ran in a browser and required no hardware purchase. by 2022 the jamboard hardware was a depreciating asset on enterprise it inventories and the jam app had not received a significant feature update in two years.

google announced the sunset on september 28 2023. the cloud service went read-only on october 1 2024 and the full shutdown happened on december 31 2024. the physical hardware still turns on and still functions as an unconnected whiteboard but the sync layer that justified the product is gone. it sits beside nexus q and stadia on the workspace-hardware shelf of google's graveyard.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was meant to be ~

the strategic logic was straightforward and made sense in 2017. google workspace, then called g suite, was growing in enterprise but lagged microsoft in the conference-room presence layer. microsoft had the surface hub and a long history of selling boardroom hardware through partner channels. google had nothing physical except chromecast. the jamboard was supposed to be the physical anchor that put a google brand on the wall of every conference room in companies that ran on workspace.

the stylus latency was good and the screen was responsive. the integration with google drive and meet was clean. on a product-merit basis the device worked as advertised. the engineering team did its job. the sales motion is what did not happen at the scale the pricing model required.

~ what killed it ~

the remote whiteboard category turned out not to need hardware. miro and figjam both shipped browser-based whiteboards that ran on any laptop with a touchscreen or a trackpad. the collaboration value was in the cloud and the user interface, not in the 55-inch screen. you could draw a wireframe in miro from a 13-inch macbook on a train and the result looked the same as if you had drawn it on a 5000-dollar jamboard. the hardware delta did not buy you collaboration delta.

the pandemic accelerated this by two years. by 2021 remote work had normalized the laptop-only whiteboard workflow and the conference room itself had become an optional venue. the jamboards that had been bought in 2018 and 2019 were now sitting in empty offices. when companies returned to hybrid work in 2022 the hardware was three years old and figjam was free for figma users, while the software ecosystem had moved on entirely.

~ the long tail ~

the physical jamboard units are still out there. some were donated to schools and some are mounted on conference room walls running as offline display surfaces. a few ended up on ebay for a couple hundred dollars after the cloud service died. the jam app is gone from the play store. the saved jams from the cloud service had a one-time export option to google drive before the shutdown, after which any unexported boards became unrecoverable. there is no successor product from google in the conference-room hardware category. the workspace strategy now points at meet hardware partners and pixel tablets instead. the jamboard sits as a discrete chapter in google's hardware history, sandwiched between nexus q and stadia, and not very different from either in outcome.

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