Printing from the Cloud – Google says “Yes We Can”

"Our goal 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."

Google announced that it’s close to devising a plan to print from the cloud. The reason Google wants to do this? Because the company is building tools to make all your devices “stateless,” that is, with all the information hosted on their servers and sent to your device as needed. One of the hurdles to this dream, “in the cloud” existence has been printer drivers. If you aren’t installing anything on your physical device, how does your device communicate with the printer? Google wants to take on the role of translator. When you want to print something, it will get sent straight from the cloud to the printer. Nothing to install, just walk to the printer and grab your double-sided, single-spaced, recycled-paper document ;).

I like where this is going — I’ve reached a point where I keep most of my personal documents online and am always jumping from computer to computer…work, home, boyfriend’s computers. In this scenario, I could hit “print” from any of these places and my world would keep on turning.

–Sharon Howell