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Google Poly is shutting down

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Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#181

Post by arjonagelhout »

supermatt wrote: post #82

They are still listing it as a major feature of their $20 tiltbrush app. They are still publishing their unity asset encouraging people to use it as a runtime asset library. I’m going to see if I can get a refund on tiltbrush. I don’t want to reward this kind of behaviour.

This is the main issue for me. With the Oculus Quest and Tilt Brush having poor export options, I have no other choice than to use either Sketchfab - which has limited uploads - or Google Poly.

The ecosystem works when all services are kept alive, but when one falls, you are left with a useless piece of software.

This is a shame, because the expressiveness and ease-of-use of Tilt Brush is unmatched on the Quest.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#182

Post by guyzero »

RussianCow wrote: post #169
guyzero wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-ad revenues are a $36B business (annualized based on Q3 revenue). What's the threshold for something being a "hose"? A $36B business is a pretty big business!

That $36B doesn't come from a single source. Google Cloud is their single largest non-ad revenue stream, at $3.4B in Q3 (or 7.4% of total revenue). The rest of their non-advertising revenue ($5.5B, or 11.8% of total revenue) is lumped into the "other" category, which implies that they have a lot of smaller revenue streams that add up to a larger figure—not a single hose. So I guess you could maybe call Google Cloud a…

13 years ago ads was roughly $14B annual revenue for Google. Was it a "hose" back then?

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#183

Post by RussianCow »

guyzero wrote: post #182
RussianCow wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $36B doesn't come from a single source. Google Cloud is their single largest non-ad revenue stream, at $3.4B in Q3 (or 7.4% of total revenue). The rest of their non-advertising revenue ($5.5B, or 11.8% of total revenue) is lumped into the "other" category, which implies that they have a lot of smaller revenue streams that add up to a larger figure—not a single hose. So I guess you could maybe call Google Cloud a…

13 years ago ads was roughly $14B annual revenue for Google. Was it a "hose" back then?

Everything is relative. Back then, for Google's size, their ad business was basically printing money. Today, given their size, Google Cloud and the rest of their non-ad businesses are barely significant—over 80% of their total revenue still comes from ads, and that is only very slowly shifting. Maybe in another 13 years, Google Cloud (or another venture) will catch up to the ad business (though I'm skeptical), but today, that's nowhere near being true, and they still largely depend on that single source of revenue. So are they more diversified than they used to be? Sure. But to say that they have found a second hose that's anywhere near as profitable as advertising is misleading at best, or blatantly false at worst, at least as it stands today.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#184

Post by fuzxi »

cj wrote: post #55
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: since Google has firmly established a reputation for killing their own products, people who would otherwise find value in certain Google products (beyond search ads gmail and android) avoid them and never hear about them to begin with. I wonder if they are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: google launches a product, people avoid it assuming it’ll get killed off, google says the user metrics don’t jus…

I think HN tends to overplay google's product discontinuations. If you ask someone who doesn't read HN if they've ever been frustrated with Google shutting down a product, my guess is 95%+ of people wouldn't be able to remember a single product that was shut down that they used. One solution for Google might be to brand the products without the "Google" name prefix, until Google is absolutely sure it will be around f…

I think a lot of people remember the Reader shutdown, and the recent weird migration from Play Music to Youtube Music.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#185

Post by iainmerrick »

tomcam wrote: post #177
iainmerrick wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep them running and eat the cost. Even if they can’t do that every time, it should at least be one of the options under consideration. I feel like there’s often an argument that “keeping it running costs more than you think, because it would need updating” (or “it depends on legacy infrastructure that’s going away”), but I’m skeptical of that in the general case. Other than possibly security issues, there’s often l…

> Even if they can’t do that every time, it should at least be one of the options under consideration. Do you know whether it was considered? > Other than possibly security issues, there’s often little to get in the way of servers running happily with little or no maintenance for years. Security costs alone can be substantial. Whose department should take the budget hit for maintaining a no longer viable project? Who…

Do you know whether it was considered?

In this particular case, I don’t know, although the lack of any positive examples to point to suggests that it’s not an option that’s typically given any weight in decision-making.

Whose department should take the budget hit for maintaining a no longer viable project?

Speaking as a user, I don’t care. Isn’t Google swimming in profit?

(I realize of course that you don’t achieve the kind of success in the first place that brings those colossal profits without making hard-nosed decisions along the way -- arguably)

Whose reputation should be dinged for running a non viable product?

Again, speaking as a user, I’d put value in keeping the “non-viable” product around, if it were one I happened to use.

I’m not expecting my answer to change anything, but it’s a general answer to a general question. What could they do differently? Answer: eat the loss.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#186

Post by chaostheory »

supermatt wrote: post #84
Axsuul wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Poly looks like a fun experiment that unfortunately didn't pan out to their expectations. Google APIs/GCP have paying users that businesses depend on. It wouldn't be fair to have them in the same room.

It’s one of the main features of the $20 tiltbrush app. People ARE paying for it.

I was about to ask if TiltBrush relied on this. Thanks for confirming. It's hard to buy anything made by Google that hasn't been around for close to a decade, unless you don't care whether or not that product stays around.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#187

Post by chaostheory »

VikingCoder wrote: post #147
grawprog wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It's a service tied to a paid $20 product called Google TiltBrush.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#188

Post by chaostheory »

arjonagelhout wrote: post #181
supermatt wrote: post #82

They are still listing it as a major feature of their $20 tiltbrush app. They are still publishing their unity asset encouraging people to use it as a runtime asset library. I’m going to see if I can get a refund on tiltbrush. I don’t want to reward this kind of behaviour.

This is the main issue for me. With the Oculus Quest and Tilt Brush having poor export options, I have no other choice than to use either Sketchfab - which has limited uploads - or Google Poly. The ecosystem works when all services are kept alive, but when one falls, you are left with a useless piece of software. This is a shame, because the expressiveness and ease-of-use of Tilt Brush is unmatched on the Quest.

I haven't used Tilt Brush enough, but does this mean that Tilt Brush also dead or are there other export options?

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#189

Post by d0gbread »

NoOneNew wrote: post #96
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?

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…

Alternatively, it's time to adjust expectations and understand that if a product or service doesn't hit the growth curve Google expects, they sunset it.

A lot of businesses would be more successful if they learned how to do this across their own products and features. Instead engineers drown in KTLO, adding to cognitive load not only for employees but customers too.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#190

Post by VikingCoder »

chaostheory wrote: post #187
VikingCoder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ca…

It's a service tied to a paid $20 product called Google TiltBrush.

There's a $20 product called TiltBrush.

There was Poly.

Titlbrush could export / import to Poly. That was added after the launch of TiltBrush, yes?

Sure, if you bought TiltBrush after Poly integration was added, I could see how that's taking away a feature you used, and that's a bummer.

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