I wonder what happens to documents that were signed with this thing after they kill the product.
Also, I wonder if the person signing the document has to agree to Google's entire ToS in order to sign the document.
Congress could fix both issues with some well-thought-out legislation:
- Signatures from these things have to support external validation via standard tools (e.g., Google uses PGP or whatever to sign the signature + document + metadata).
- If the act of accessing or signing a contract implicitly incorporates other contracts, then either (a) the signature is non-binding of (b) the incorporated contracts are rendered unenforceable, regardless of whether they were agreed to via other means.
They can even run a marketing/TV campaign around this, lol.
“Google Docs ships with esignatures now… but how long until Google kills another one of their products? Stay safe with DocuSign, import your Google Docs signatures and keep them forever, with or without Google.”
> Yeah wouldn't want it to go the way of Google Toolbar, that thing would've definitely been relevant today.
Hm... I briefly was a part of the Google Toolbar team back in 2008. How would it be relevant today? All of the features that I remember, are now a part of the browser itself (whether it's Firefox, Safari, Edge or Chrome/Chromium).
That said, the eSignature for Google Docs feature would definitely benefit from some strong (preferably, legal & irrevocable) commitment to keep it alive for 40+ years or more. Otherwise, I fail to see how it's useful.
That being said, if they add eSig for Google Docs I agree; I don’t see why nor how they’d kill that individual feature unless they kill Docs all-together. Which, hopefully, they won’t do for many years yet.
A great many of their killed products ended up being merged/evolved into other ones (Duo into Meet). A great many more weren't even "killed"; over the past 20 years their in-gmail chat program has evolved from Talk to Hangouts, and then from Hangouts to Chat. It has kept the same chat history throughout the past 20 years, but "killed by google" lists Talk and Hangouts as two killed products.
> It has kept the same chat history throughout the past 20 years
So how come I can't access chats from before mid-2013? Not even by Google Takeout?
(It so happens that some of the most important conversations in my life happened in 2012, so I'm to date super annoyed that, for no good reason, 2013 is some kind of cut-off date.)
You seem to be right. I'm pretty confident in my memory that the history persisted from Talk to Hangouts, but the Talk history may not have persisted again from Hangouts to Chat. That would line up with your data, as the Talk to Hangouts switch/rename happened in 2013.
Much of the listed "casualties" were throwaway wrapper apps that have perfectly fine webapp replacements, apps for platforms that no longer exist, duplicates, and stand alone apps that are now features of bigger apps etc.
No, not every HN thread, but "Every Google product".
This is an entirely valid concern borne out by history. Until Google goes to extraordinary measures to prove that it will be unusually long-lived, you should assume that it will be dead in a few years.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
> we should go into every Show HN and say their project will be dead
It would be totally fair to ask an upstart DocuSign competitor about their wind-down process. The fact that I’m more confident they will have thought that through is the problem.
Show HN threads don't repeatedly come from the same guy popping in with his unlimited amounts of money that he used to make yet another side project that some people will use for a few years while he gathers your data then decides to kill because it wasn't an immediate smashing success, or he wanted to redo it cause the other one was old.
Most people aren't affected by those vaproware products. Most people are tied into Google one way or another, and changes they make can affect everybody.
"people" don't. This is largely just a hn-ism which I've pretty much never heard outside of this bubble. In any case, repeating a cliche response on any news out of Google isn't any kind of substantive contribution to the discussion and makes for a poor hn comment even if it was true.
... did you not read any news at all covering Stadia? Like... any of it? At all??? Google's propensity for killing projects is absolutely in the mainstream mindset.
Signatures aren’t a move-fast-and-break-things domain. Google’s culture is bad at maintenance and wind-down. I would react negatively to someone sending me a Google e-sign without having considered these questions.
