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  • 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.

  • 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.


    The original article contains 630 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

  • 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

31 comments