I've seen about 50 "smart whiteboards" in people's offices in my life. I have never once seen such a whiteboard being actively used.

I see nothing in the jamboard that suggests it will fare any better.

Great point, I've seen this too. People want to want this kind of thing but seldom use it.

Seems nice, but the the $600/yr fee is outrageous. This is on top of what your company is already paying for Google Apps.

This is essentially a well-built Chrome OS device with strong Google Apps integration that also isn't supported by your current Google Apps plan. Oh, and don't forget the $1200 rolling stand.

There must have been a 10x developer on that stand, I can't see more than $120 in materials. Makes me think I should be selling stands to Google instead of the stuff I make now.

This is what kind of stand you get for $120: https://hecklerdesign.com/windfall-stand-for-ipad-air

A TV is much larger and there's more to this than just formed steel. $1200 is consequently exactly how much this one is as well: https://hecklerdesign.com/heckler-av-cart

Sure, you can get cheap junk like https://www.amazon.com/Mount-Factory-Rolling-Mobile-Screen/d... , but that would probably fall apart in a week and isn't meant for a screen being touched all day. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1090879-REG/middle_at... and https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1337848-REG/peerless_... are in the same category as this. The target audience is businesses who will potentially be using it every day fairly heavily for years, not how-cheap-can-we-make-it home use. In that, it seems to be very much in line with the other stuff currently on the market, potentially even a good deal for what you get and how nice it looks.

Sorry, but I've been burned too many times by side projects from Google that have then been killed off.

Memo to Google: The google brand is very strong in some areas, but your actions have rendered it toxic in some specific areas. Continuing to launch cool things and then killing them off when they don't gain traction is making this worse, not better.

The US government can't even get wifi in half their spaces and thinks 400 MB/s is plenty of bandwidth for a major hospital (hint: that doesn't even cover the contractually required reserves for all the contracted imaging systems). I'll never see this in my current job. We'll be speaking Chinese before that happens.

Totally agree. I've worked in or with hospitals since the mid 80s, and they were some of the first connected organizations; Pharmacy and Lab were first to network, with AP/Patient Accounts coming soon thereafter. And even though hospitals were early adopters, they still don't think of connectivity or throughput as a big deal - until everything comes crashing down.

Google should release the software as part of Chrome OS. This way it could be used in Chrome OS devices connected to projects and screens in meeting rooms and classrooms. Once the collaborative features become a hit, then sell them the luxury device.

Otherwise with this ridiculous price it smells like DOA to me.

Well, this is some of the more interesting ideas recently from Google. But is this worth the price here? I think take photo of whiteboard is not really a deal breaker here. It is handy and intuitive.

I looked at my calendar and double checked that it wasn't April 1st when I saw the fee structure.

I wonder if this is going to be used instead of a whiteboard in coding interviews :)

A coding interview should best be done a keyboard...my opinion.

I was able to use one of these at Google Next. It's pretty reasonable but I was still unimpressed. I have a very simple test for drawing applications that represents something I would do in reality: draw a system diagram with multiple components by drawing and labeling a couple components, copying them multiple times, drawing arrows between them as appropriate, and then rearranging it in a new way.

I very quickly found early limitations of the jamboard like (iirc) not being able to copy drawings or group text and drawings. I'm sure over time the programming will get better.

I think that's a bit of an unfair comparison, Jamboard looks like a collaboration tool, essentially a whiteboard with some added features. It's not a drawing tool for producing pretty diagrams.

I would be curious to hear from anybody who has used a Jamboard, Surface hub or other digital whiteboard in a collaborative setting. Does it get used? More than the regular whiteboard and cell camera?

We have one at work. Everyone looks at it when they come into the room, and pokes at it. I've never actually seen anyone use it though.

I personally spent maybe 2 minutes trying to get it to work, and gave up out of frustration and resorted back to the glass board.

I was part of the PBL lab at Stanford which was doing a bunch of research in that space. I think the major benefit is remote collaboration ala whiteboard and replay of course.

I can see VR/AR being the logical successor of this concept.

Why spend $5k on a new whiteboard when magic leap turns everything into a smart screen.

I actually agree. I was using my Vive / Tilt Brush to whiteboard design some systems architecture[0], and it felt very natural to want to collaborate and share with both local and remote parties.

3D is such a more robust experience when designing that it just feels magnitudes of order better.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/dpgailey/videos/10103011916576896/

[edit]

And I'd also say that having "one per viewer" would be just as easy to use the cheaper headsets/phone combos for passive or voice only participants.

Because you'd need one per viewer and no good way to handle guests without going well over the initial $5k budget.

This disadvantage will be one of the largest hurdles to overcome, dependent of course on the amount of participants and their corresponding access. Once more mainstream adoption occurs then this could be reevaluated and become a non-issue but how far away is that?.

This hurdle is not very different from people needing to have individual mobile phones to communicate with each other. Such a distributed requirement where the device is reusable across multiple contexts and not limited to a company may result in the costbeing directly borne by individuals. It might take time, but we've seen this repeatedly happen - the internet, cell phones, wifi, cameras (ever snap whiteboard pics?)

Because one of these things actually exists and the other does not?

magic leap ? didn't they burn up in a haze of fire and lies ?

So I am now confused. We use Google Hangouts, ah, sorry now Meetings, with a Chrome box. Hows does this fit in? Do I need this and my current setup or can this take the place of the current system? It was not clear at all from the product page.

Google sometimes seems like they toss stuff against a wall to see what sticks without figuring out how it all goes together.

$5000 + $600 maintenance fee ? Looks more fit for Billion$$ businesses who have run out of ideas on what to do with their money.

Have you looked at any other competing products?

Yes. Whiteboard+large supply of dry erase markers+cell phone with a camera. Much cheaper than $5000 and it just freaking works.

A whiteboard and a cell phone works, but I think the whole process could work better.

I really wanna like it, but I'm honestly really scared to invest both professionally and emotionally in new Google products. I feel like I've learned that fire is hot and that I shouldn't count on any new Google product lest I find myself in a fit of despair as I look for alternatives in a few years.

Am I just being overly cynical?

It seems like Google has created a chicken and egg problem for themselves.

I won't be willing to take on Google products until they've been around for a few years and become entrenched, but with people becoming more and more reluctant to invest into their products it's less likely to happen.

The problem is not that Google is unreliable. The problem is that the servers are not yours, and thus the services that depend on the servers are not really yours.

Therefore, if you write software to match, or foster methodologies that depend on a particular product, you risk writing software or patterning activities around a system that can trivially disappear.

You have no way of estimating the popularity of adoption (is this android?), or how essential this thing may be to internal Google teams (is this wave?), since it remains something of a trade secret, who is using what, and how much, therefore you can never know when or why Google might declare that its offering is antiquated or unprofitable to Google, or whether it will be deprecated, forcing a migration elsewhere.

I was duped and bought an overpriced GoogleTV LCD. It seemed great at first until it was pretty much completely unsupported after a year and all the apps stopped working. Never again.

No of course not. This just isn't related to Google's core business which is advertising. And as history has shown us anything that isn't core business is always first in line to be cut. This could be different but of course you should still be a little cautious.

Compare this however to Microsoft where business productivity has been an integral part the company since the very beginning. And so the Surface Hub looks like a more likely product to still be around a decade from now.

No, you're not. If people don't wisen up to it and hit Google in the numbers, we'll all keep paying the product killing uncertainty tax.

If I needed one of these, this would definitely factor into my evaluation.

I agree, google is the new microsoft, they try everything they can to lock customers in.

It also requires a $600 annual support and maintenance fee...

Google does support now?

Fair.

Does this offer any significant benefits over an online collaborative whiteboard connected to a large monitor?

Seriously?

I don't think Google's quite jumped the shark. But, seriously?

Do people really want to import pictures on to whiteboards? I've never needed to do this. It's usually easy to just draw whatever it is.

While you can import pictures as mentioned, the overall experience seems to be much more. The primary focus seems to be to encourage collaboration and thus increase productivity in a geographically dispersed team. This aspect seems the most attractive from my perspective as a remote employee. Imagine a client meeting where you'd be able to directly annotate client feedback and improve the feedback cycle by making realtime changes that can be synchronized across multiple devices. We already use Google Docs and Sheets heavily in my environment for the collaboration aspect so this just seems to take it one step further by providing another outlet.

This depends on your uses. As a programmer, I mostly just draw. But I'm a fan of the projector onto a whiteboard setup so I can pull up a spec document and draw on top of existing (and more accurate or complete) diagrams. For disciplines with lots of visual data the actual images would be nicer than loose approximations.