New York, NY -- Late last year, Google began announcing their new, open source, operating system should be debuting in netbooks by the end of 2010. At the time it was announced, Google had not yet figured out how one could install a local printer driver on a cloud-based OS. Now, however, some progress has been made through a Google Cloud Print System. This system is set to be able to handle the receipt and management of print jobs and then send them back to a local or shared printer, thus no reliance on local drivers.
According to a the Project Manager for Google Groups, Mike Jayazeri, “‘Google Cloud Print is still Google Cloud Print is still under development, but today we are making code and documentation public as part of the open-source Chromium and Chromium OS projects.’” Jayazeri cites transparency, community engagement, and ubiquity as the major reasons for this release.
The overarching goal, as stated by Google on their Cloud Print page is to “ ‘build a printing experience that enables any app (Web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world.’” While standard operating systems require drivers to manage printers and documents, Google is not headed in that direction because it would take development and maintenance of print subsystems for an unending number of devices.
While it would be Google’s ultimate goal to use “cloud-aware” printers that do not require a PC to communicate, no devices like that exist at the present time. Instead, then, Google is concentrating their current efforts on legacy, PC-dependent printers. In this scenario, a proxy would be installed as part of the Chrome OS and it’s function would be to “register your printer with Cloud Print, handle the print jobs, and then alert you on the status of each job.” This presupposes that the user will be online, but at the rate society is going, who isn’t online most of the day these days.
