[DanielBMarkham]

I love the decoupling the driver from the PC idea, but I can't help but wonder where this is all heading.

Isn't Google just re-inventing the mainframe, where they own the mainframe and the rest of us are customers, er dumb terminals? In other words, is this an open standard where any two web-enabled devices can communicate? Or is it a Google-managed service ("we return the status of the print job back to you") where we're yet again investing in the success of Google? Seems like the latter to me. Perhaps I misread it.

[cpr]

They're proposing standards for all the levels, so, in theory, other "cloud printer" providers could do what they do.

So, in theory, it's not lock-in to their cloud.

In practice, who else is going to do this?

I suppose if there were a common OSS solution that one could run per-company or per-workgroup, that'd be great.

[leej]

open standard is not open just because there are no loyalties. a standard is open when it's managed by a consortium or task force. OpenGL is one, for example.

[benkant]

The cloud is not an awful lot different in principle to when we used to lease managed IBM mainframes.

I find it hilarious how quickly the IT industry forgets the past. The thick/thin client rotation has been going on since before Unix epoch.

It's all just a little bit of history repeating...