Google kills Jamboard
Google kills Jamboard
Google's digital whiteboard for schools and businesses lasted 8 years.
Literally, I said on a meeting last week, we should be stopping using it, I feel like Google is going to kill it soon. We are have gotten to the point where we can smell dead.
Awesome.
Everyone has a damn whiteboard / sticky note app these days. Miro, Mural, Figjam, Apple Freeform, Zoom Whiteboards, Lucid chart, etc.
Jamboard is, without a doubt, the worst one of the bunch. I’d honestly rather use Google Slides for Jamboard’s intended purpose.
I do not want to be exposed to Miro. Please, meeting organizer, don’t subject me to Miro. I can’t tell if I hate the actual product or the stream of horseshit it draws out of people.
Obligatory Killed by Google.
At which point will we collectively just understand that cloud-driven hardware is practically just a time ticking e-waste bomb? The board itself is a neat idea, probably useful too, but even if this weren't Google, I'd be dead anyway, the moment the brand is done messing with their software
Guess I'll add that to the list.
In all honesty I'm impressed it lasted 8 years. Google have killed bigger projects in much shorter times.
I am not surprised. Into Google's graveyard it goes.
Another one added to the pile
Lmao I was about to look into using that thing for work
Seems FigJam is somewhat popular in the space? It's an Adobe product now since they acquired Figma. There's also Miro and LucidChart that are popular
Adobe hasn't bought Figma yet - they're waiting for government approval and hopefully the purchase won't be allowed. Adobe is the only large company in the industry and Figma is the closest thing they have to real competition.
Figma deez nuts
Miro is better. I have enterprise licenses for a million of these damn things, and Figma’s licensing / sharing is one of the worst. Guests can only edit for 24 hours, and you have to renew edit access every day unless you give them a paid seat.
Miro also has a slightly more robust feature set, also has lots of fun things in it, and is also fast.
Figma likes to enable free shit, not allow admins to restrict its spread, let an org adopt it, then start charging. Really shady business practice.
That's why Google announces the end of things unlike other companies who will just silently let them fall into obscurity. They don't want to mislead people
When you only hear about a product because of its cancellation, you can understand why.
I deployed a few of these. They were 10 years behind the curve. The monitor weighed as much as a flat panel from 15 years ago, the stand was fucking HUGE making it hard to move. The camera and microphone were an afterthought and not worth using (the mic would pick up every little touch on the Jamboard). The entire thing felt like it was built for design first rather than function
We used Jamboard at a previous job. It was atrocious. Very quickly was replaced with one of the huge Surface devices, which, due to just running a real OS, let people use the whiteboard tools built into other conferencing tools, as well as figma.
And this company was almost exclusively conferencing with Google hangouts (whatever name it was going by that particular day). So it wasn't an issue of mixing services.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The digital whiteboard could be drawn on using the included stylus or your fingers, and it even came with a big plastic "eraser" that would remove items.
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.
People not in front of the touchscreen could launch the "Jamboard app" instead, letting them get in on the whiteboard action remotely, complete with live handwriting.
While Jamboard users make up a small portion of our Workspace customer base, we understand that this change will impact some of you, and we’re committed to helping you transition..." Yes, that's right, "transition" is usually not something you have to consider when a company kills a hardware product, but the whole cloud system is going down, too, so all of your existing $5,000 whiteboards will soon be useless and you won't be able to open the cloud data on other devices.
Google seems to feel particularly bad for the schools that bought into this, saying, "We will also work directly with educational institutions to compensate them for their Jamboard devices."
People often ask about a recurring revenue stream when predicting what products will live and die, but even a $600-per-year fee attached to every sale wasn't enough to keep Jamboard running.
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My last job was all on the Google ecosystem. They bought like 10 of these things and to be honest, they were a blast during Meetings, but that was pre-covid. Pandemic really effed the office and pushed everyone remote, and I think they were lying around gathering dust when I left.
Google has a lot of great products like this. They’re just mismanaged. I’m sure if the marketing could have figured out a way to marry this with the YouTube brand like every other Google product, they would have.
Yeah, I have worked with a few ex-Googlers, great programmers and techies, poor product owners/managers. It's like they forget how humans think.
Damn never heard of this. SMART boards were where it was at many of the schools in my area, and although they are no longer a Canadian company, they seem to at least somewhat believe in the longevity of their products, unlike Google.
The what?
Never even heard of this. Basically every school over here (that I know of) uses ViewSonic Smart Boards that run Android, too, although with a nightmare of a launcher on top... They're probably not even that much cheaper
Lmao my boss just found out about jamboard last week and had started using it on calls. He's about to be so disappointed.
fun name now i can use it