Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Poly is shutting down

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 201 posts

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#141

Post by Hamuko »

mabbo wrote: post #111
NoOneNew wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but what about the people who did? Here's the thing, Google is a big company. When a big company offers a service or product you expect a long shelf life so you can justify the time/money investment to use it. If you stumble across an open source or just some other random project by a single dev, you have an instinctive expectation that the project could die at any time. Thus, you invest your effort accordingly…

> Google has the focus of a 12 year adhd kid who just ate a whole birthday cake, unless when it comes to data collection. A decade ago I was an intern at Google. One of my mentors said something that has stuck with me: "Google found a hose that money pours out of and it's name is online advertising. All we do now is desperately try to find another hose." Google's strategy for a long time was: Hire every clever person…

>20% time is dead. There is no second hose. They've mostly given up on the idea of a clever person finding a new money-hose. They just focus on the one they have now.

Isn't that how they've always operated? Gmail was launched in 2004 and that sure wasn't a money-hose. But it did serve as yet another platform to support their money-hose since they could scan your emails and serve you ads.

It's really only a recent change to actually monetise Gmail beyond ads. They sell it as part of G Suite and as part of Google One. Not sure if Google One brings in the dough but surely G Suite makes enough to justify its existence.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#142

Post by NoOneNew »

guyzero wrote: post #115
mabbo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has the focus of a 12 year adhd kid who just ate a whole birthday cake, unless when it comes to data collection. A decade ago I was an intern at Google. One of my mentors said something that has stuck with me: "Google found a hose that money pours out of and it's name is online advertising. All we do now is desperately try to find another hose." Google's strategy for a long time was: Hire every clever person…

Google's revenue is more diversified today than it's ever been. This is a facile take.

Being "well diversified" is subjective. But in freelance/contracting, the rule of thumb is to never have a customer account for more than 25% of your yearly income. You diversify your client base so when one walks away, it's never too big of a hit.

Ads make up 80% of their revenue. That's not diversified. That's an ad company that dabbles in other things. If Shell or BP's revenue was 80% oil and 20% solar, wouldn't you still call them oil companies that dabble in solar?

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#144

Post by NoOneNew »

mikestew wrote: post #140
hated wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the commenter with zero evidence to support their claims.

There's no posted evidence for the idea that Google only makes money on advertising, either. Can we have a discussion where we assume that everyone isn't an idiot who needs a link for every statement? Or do you seriously think advertising is the only way Google makes money? If so, sibling comment posted some nice links that one would do well to read.

They're publicly traded. Their revenue sources are open for the public to read. The other guy saying they're diversified linked to their quarterly to show 80% ad revenue. That's pretty much "they're an ad company".

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#145

Post by blevin »

DHPersonal wrote: post #87
Junk_Collector wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a funny one. I hadn't heard of it but it appears to be an Instagram alike for 3D models and VR. If Google was trying to establish themselves as a first mover platform in the VR space, it's odd that they would can such a product before VR itself has finished taking off. It signals that they actually have no interests in VR going forward but it's Google so you never know, they will probably have 4 of th…

Google has already shown that they're willing to try: they've made Tango (AR, discontinued), Google Glass (AR, enterprise-only), ARCore (AR, active), Cardboard (VR, discontinued), and Daydream (VR, discontinued).

These resemble portfolio hedging bets on potential future paths of technology playforms that could affect their ad biz. Google seems to buy a spread of small bets with several-year expiry and high convexity (i.e. big payout if equilibrium shifts in that direction). I suspect a number of these come out of discussions anticipating what could be next after mobile.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#146

Post by packetlost »

throwaway129013 wrote: post #57
bnt wrote: post #19

At this point, why is anyone relying on Google APIs (or even GCP!) for serious work? It feels like Google is contempt with Search, Ads and Android.

What's really scary is that people rely on golang ignoring that it is entirely corporate-driven. (Go ahead and downvote me a ton)

I mean, it's a language and open source. If the community really hates the direction Google takes it, they can fork it and support whatever features they want.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#147

Post by VikingCoder »

grawprog wrote: post #137
VikingCoder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act like there's zero value to having someone else host your assets FOR A WHILE. There is value. Yes, there's also cost to having to re-host your assets somewhere else.

I didn't say there was zero value, my statement also came with the assumption that upon starting this service, google never made it clear it would be temporary. I may be wrong about that. Also, not everyone can afford to re-host their assets, not everyone will be able to, some might not even realize it'll be lost. The broken trust comes from the idea that google likely promoted this as something that will be a new on…

"google never made it clear it would be temporary"

Why would you ever assume any service is permanent?

"The broken trust comes from the idea that google likely promoted this as something that will be a new ongoing community"

Anyone who "trusted" that a free service would work forever is being unrealistic.

"they try to build up communities then abandon them with no recourse"

They're hosting open source content. You can fork that. Anyone can fork it. If your content were hosted on Poly, you could use Takeout to download all of it in one go.

"that are now scattered again because they trusted google"

If there's any blame here, I would think it would be that there's not a group of people (like us at HN) who work closely with sites like Poly to back them up before they are shut down. Once we have a track record, we can ask Google to say not just, "We're shutting Poly down," but "and it's moving to Hacker News Back Things Up .com."

If someone wants to bridge that gap, moving this content to the Internet Archive or something, that sounds worthwhile.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#148

Post by pqb »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #136
neom wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, apparently, lists all it's products here: https://about.google/intl/en_us/products/#all-products - I'd never heard of Google Duo.

Duo is pretty big. It's pre-installed on every single android phone, and on Samsung phones it is the default video calling app too. Also, you cannot remove it. You can uninstall the icon, but the underlying code is so deeply integrated into the OS that people can still call you and you will get a Duo video call even after uninstalling it. Quite a menace.

That's interesting. I have a Fairphone 3 with a stock Android 10 and it does not come with the Duo pre-installed. The icon for video chats in Contacts app is greyed-out. After installing the Google Duo, it becomes active.

Is it possible to remove/deactivate it via adb or other tools?

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#149

Post by mamoswined »

ma2rten wrote: post #28

Every time Google is shutting down a product there are the same kind of reactions like “I will not trust google running anything more than a year”, “killedbygoogle.com”. I’m wondering, have you ever heard about this product? I for one have no clue what this is. How many more products does google have that you never heard about and that are not shut down?

I loved Google poly! It was a great place to find models for A-frame scenes. A-frame is VR basically built in HTML. I really liked it as a teaching tool especially for kids. Like learn HTML elements by finding a bear on Google poly and putting it in your scene.

It was a little frustrating in some places since a lot of it was oriented around their VR drawing tool (Tilt Brush) which my system didn't support.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#150

Post by kodah »

guyzero wrote: post #134
hated wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the commenter with zero evidence to support their claims.

Come on, anyone can read GOOG financial statements. https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20201030_alphabet_10Q.pd... Q3 2019, ads were 84% of revenue Q3 2020, ads were 81% of revenue It's not a massive change, but it's changing and ads are at the lowest percentage of overall revenue they've ever been.

> It's not a massive change, but it's changing and ads are at the lowest percentage of overall revenue they've ever been.

"More diversified than it's ever been" can be factually true here, but for the purposes of this discussion was highly inaccurate.

Post reply on HN