Posted in Corporate Indifference to Humanity, Undependable Support

Google kills off Dropcam and creates an incredible amount of e-waste

This is inexcusable:

In a post on the official Google Nest Community page, Google announced it is shutting down the service for several old Nest smart home products. Most of these have not been for sale for years, but since this is all hardware  tied to the cloud, turning off the servers will turn them into useless bricks.

— Ars Technica

Appropriately, the comments are scathing:

Google has been a farce for years now but it doesn’t seem funny anymore as the shutdowns continue and people loose their investments in money and time when they have to replace things they’re accustomed to using. It’s despicable and sad. I wonder when I’ll lose Waze. It’s a wonderful service but at least I haven’t had to pay for it.

I will NEVER buy or buy into another Google product. I have never recovered from them killing Picasa.

The whole industry is happy to screw us over – five year old S series Samsung phone – still another 5 years life – but no software updates so security software won’t play.

I bought my Nest cameras before Google snapped them up, so what are ya gonna do. When I replace them, it sure isn’t going to be something that depends on some cloud service to keep operating.

I guess this is another good lesson in, “don’t buy into any Google tech that depends on Google maintaining it.” Yes, PCs of course eventually lose support, but you can still use the PC after for plenty of tasks (not even including installing another OS like Linux, etc.)

My rough estimate from my own personal experience for these things has been I get about 2-3 years out of Amazon and Google products, 3-5 years out of Windows/PC products, and about 6-8 years out of Apple products. Mileage will vary based on use case, but in my opinion there’s very good reason to not buy Amazon and Google branded products.

As I’m sure has been stated numerous times (and will be numerous more after this post), this is what happens when you buy devices which only work when connected to a cloud server.

Why did google spend half a billion to buy a company to then just kill the product line. That is no different than taking half a billion and burning the pile of money like the joker.

We reached a point not that corporarions would rather burn money than pay it in dividends instead or reward workers by spreading the half a billion amongst the employees?

what is the reason for this?

Good question!

Posted in Undependable Support

Google’s graveyard is getting bigger (again)

Billions of dollars were spent buying Mandiant for no good reason, while bizarrely, R&D is getting the axe:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at the Code Conference last week, suggested the tech company needed to become 20% more efficient — a comment some in the industry took to mean headcount reductions could soon be on the table. Now, it seems that prediction may be coming true. TechCrunch has learned, and Google confirmed, the company is slashing projects at its in-house R&D division known as Area 120.

The company on Tuesday informed staff of a “reduction in force” that will see the incubator halved in size, as half the teams working on new product innovations heard their projects were being canceled. Previously, there were 14 projects housed in Area 120, and this has been cut down to just seven. Employees whose projects will not continue were told they’ll need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023, or they’ll be terminated. It’s not clear that everyone will be able to do so.

The whims of executives regularly change. Right now, Pichai and his deputies seem to be in cost slashing mode, and that means cutting loose entire teams and disrupting lives. Of course, Pichai will not be doing any belt-tightening of his own. A powerful tech CEO like him stays well compensated no matter what the bottom line is.

Posted in Undependable Support

Another big Google outage leaves a lot of people irritated

It’s a bad day in Mountain View:

In all, it looks like a huge range of Google services were down for about an hour today. That hour crossed into business operation times in multiple markets, leading to a slight drop in pre-market trading for parent company Alphabet.

It’s also an alarming reminder of just how far Google reaches, and how many of our services — productivity, entertainment and home/utility — are tied up with a single, proprietary provider. Coincidentally, Microsoft’s Outlook is also experiencing some problems, too.

Emphasis is ours.

A good reminder, indeed, and hopefully one that spurs people and companies to leave Google behind or at least diversify who they do business with.

Posted in Undependable Support

Google kills off Poly, its 3D model sharing service

We love that first line, Engadget!

Google is showing again that you rely on its products at your peril. The search giant announced that it’s shutting down Poly, its 3D object library and platform that arrived in 2017 aimed primarily and VR and AR creators. The service will end on June 30, 2021, so you’ll need to go here to download any models before then. All uploads will cease on April 30, 2021.

Emphasis is ours.

Once again, the moral of the story: don’t use Google products. Either your privacy will suffer, because the taking of your data is the business model, or the product will not continue to be supported because it does not feed the needs of the beast.

Posted in Undependable Support

Devin Coldeway eulogizes Google Music and ponders moving further away from Google dependence

Google is killing off Google Music, which has prompted one of TechCrunch’s writers to further reconsider their relationship with the company.

The idea of divorcing myself entirely from Google’s ecosystem isn’t a realistic one for me, though I do it where I can (though having moved to iOS, the cure sometimes seems worse than the disease). One of the tattered bindings holding me to Google was the music thing. And while I do plan to take up a hundred gigabytes on one of their databases somewhere for as long as I possibly can, I’m glad the company admitted that what they were giving me didn’t make sense for them any more. It means one less reason that what Google has to give makes sense for me.

Every service from Google now, especially with those new, bad logos, feels less like it’s offering a solution to a problem and more like it’s just another form of leverage for the company. We were spoiled by the old, weird Google that did things like Books because they could, throwing it in the teeth of the publishers, or Wave, an experiment in interactivity that in many ways is still ahead of its time. They did things because they hadn’t been done, and now they do things because they can’t let you leave.

So, RIP Google Music. You were good while you lasted, but ultimately what you did best was show me that we deserved better, and we weren’t going to get it by waiting around for Google to return to its roots.

The best way to manage a music collection is with a tool like Nextcloud, which allows documents, music and other data to be remotely synchronized between devices with no dependency on Big Tech.

Posted in Undependable Support

YouTube goes down, Google scrambles to get it back online

Oops:

YouTube has recovered from a seemingly worldwide outage that prevented videos from loading for roughly an hour. During the outage, many Verge staffers were unable to watch videos, and YouTube confirmed at 7:23PM ET that something was going on:

If you’re having trouble watching videos on YouTube right now, you’re not alone – our team is aware of the issue and working on a fix. We’ll follow up here with any updates.

The issue appeared to affect other services that use the YouTube infrastructure too, including YouTube TV and the movies and TV shows you’d purchase through Google TV (formerly known as Google Play Movies & TV). We couldn’t load them.

Early in the outage, the YouTube website itself seemed to load just fine, but videos themselves would continuously show the loading wheel.

Nothing works all the time, but it’s not a good look for the Big G to have its premier social media platform borked for any length of time.

Posted in Undependable Support

Google doing away with free “unlimited” storage for high quality photos

A reminder that there’s no such thing as “unlimited”.

What Google giveth, Google can taketh away.

In a blog post, Google has announced that it is halting unlimited storage for High Quality photos starting June 1, 2021. Any High Quality photos uploaded after that will be subject to the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google account, with additional storage coming at a fee.

Uploading full-resolution images have always counted against personal storage on Google, but any images that were uploaded and subjected to Google’s compression were able to be stored without limit. From now until June of next year, that will remain the case. But after June 1, any new photos and videos uploaded will count toward the free 15 GB of storage that comes with every Google Account or the additional storage purchased as a Google One member. Google Account storage is shared across Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

If you’re looking for inexpensive photo storage (again, there’s no such thing as unlimited free storage, so don’t trust your photos to any outfit promising that), you can check out SmugMug, Flickr Pro, and Wasabi, none of which are Google-owned.

Posted in Undependable Support

Ars Technica commenter lampoons Google’s undependable product support

A very astute observation:

The giant hulking dumpsters of cancelled Google products, many of which had dedicated user bases, would seem to indicate that not even Google really understands how Google makes these decisions. At this point, nobody with a functioning brain cell trusts any new Google product as part of a long-term project, product or ecosystem…

There’s even a website that tracks products that Google has killed off. It’s rather extensive.

While the odds that Google will pull the plug on its search engine, Gmail, Chrome browser, Android, YouTube, or Google Docs are slim, most of the company’s other offerings are fair game for elimination at any time. By steering clear of reliance on Google’s offerings, you can protect yourself and your data well into the future.

Posted in Undependable Support

Google outage takes down YouTube, Gmail, other Google offerings

It hasn’t been a very good weekend for Google.

YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, Nest, Discord, and a number of other web services are suffering from outages in the US today. The root cause appears to be problems with Google’s Cloud service which powers apps other than just Google’s own web services. Google has issued a status update on its Cloud dashboard, noting that issues began at around 3:25PM ET / 12:25PM PT.

The issues appear to be mostly affecting those on the East Coast of the US, but some YouTube and Gmail users across Europe are also reporting that they’re unable to access the services. Google’s own G Suite Status dashboard shows problems with practically every single Google web service, and Down Detector lists YouTube outage reports in a number of countries worldwide.

The New York Times has more. Companies that use Google’s cloud, including Vimeo, Discord, and Snapchat, are also affected.

The cause of the trouble is “network congestion”, and Google is working on a fix.

Twitter has created a Moment pertaining to the outage.

Posted in Undependable Support

“Killed by Google” gets some love from the tech press

BGR is the latest to profile a site that serves as a reference for what Google has killed off over the years.

We’re still a few months away from the halfway mark of 2019, and already Google has sent some pretty high-profile products to an early grave — products that the company had high initial hopes for, like its Inbox email service and its failed Facebook killer Google+. But this, as we all know, is really par for the course when it comes to the search giant, which has tried so many experiments over the years with products, apps and services that didn’t quite work out as planned that it’s ended up building quite a crowded graveyard of failed ambitions.

“Killed by Google is a Free and Open Source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves to be a tribute and memorial of beloved products and services killed by Google,” says its creator Cody Ogden. It is without question an extremely useful reference and we’ve added it to our blogroll, or link list, or whatever you want to call it.