Google Wants to Put Printing In the Cloud

Google wants to cut the wires to printers and introduce wireless printing from mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, or notebooks running the upcoming Google Chrome operating system, the company said on Thursday.

In a blog post on the Chromium Blog, Mike Jazayeri, group product manager at Google, introduces the Google Cloud Print project, which is designed to enable any kind of Internet-connected app on any device, print on any printer.

Basically, instead of using the drivers installed on local computers to print documents, Google’s Cloud Print would be responsible for sending the print jobs to the printer through the Internet, bypassing the need to have drivers installed on the respective device.

Google Cloud Print would enable you to use any of Google’s Web-based productivity apps (from the Google Docs suite) and send it to a specific printer you have access to (such as the printer at home) from a netbook running the Google Chrome OS. This would also work from Google Android smartphones.

Google still has a few details to iron out, such as identifying the standards to make could printing ubiquitous and easy to use, but the concept itself is interesting. For now, Google made the code and documentation public, to get feedback from the developers community.

Chrome OS, expected to arrive in late 2010, is Google’s operating system for netbooks. The OS intends to make using a lightweight computer fast and simple, and is designed to replace Windows-style OSs on mobile devices such as tablets or notebooks. Chrome OS is designed to live alongside Android, the Google smartphone OS, rather than replace it.