Didn't see https://poly.google.com/ before! Who are the competitors/alternatives?
Sketchfab
Google Poly is shutting down
51–60 of 201 posts
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#52Every 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?
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…
in this they behave like a short-term gain focused stock market
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#53Will there be any Google products left at the end of 2021?
If you were running Google, what would your strategy be regarding products that can’t support themselves?
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 little to get in the way of servers running happily with little or no maintenance for years.
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#54Every 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 know Google Poly since I'm in game dev (but as a hobby these days, so all the art has to come from my non-3d-artist self or places like Google Poly)
The fact that they won't just freeze uploads and leave it up is just stupid.
People always bring up "What about maintenance costs in terms of dev time!", but at the core this is literally static assets. No fancy API, no crazy isomorphic app or something needing fat servers.
Just 3D modeling files.
Literally they could generate a static page for each asset that uses the preview image instead of the 3d viewer, stick it in their cloud storage solution, and have it exist, untouched, in perpetuity.
The cost wouldn't even register on a microscopic scale for a place like Google
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#55Every 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?
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 for a decade+.
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#56Every 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?
The right thing to do by Google would be to make the product available as a stand-alone application, so users can still use it even if it doesn't run on Google's infrastructure.
More work, yes. But certainly much better than what they are doing now.
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#57At 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)
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#58Didn't really know about this platform, but to me it looks like it could perfectly be kept in some kind of read-only mode without costing all that much for Google.
Could they open source it? Or does the codebase include Google secrets? I don't know much about this, just wondering...
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#59Every 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?
The right thing to do by Google would be to make the product available as a stand-alone application, so users can still use it even if it doesn't run on Google's infrastructure. More work, yes. But certainly much better than what they are doing now.
> make the product available as a stand-alone application [...] even if it doesn't run on Google's infrastructure
How would they do that? Who would pay the server costs?
Edit: Out of curiosity, is there anyone reading this comment that would be willing to pay for the infrastructure costs to keep Poly alive?
Re: Google Poly is shutting down
#60Every 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?
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 these services at some point in the future and you'll never know when or where one starts and stops. For an advertising company, Google is remarkably bad at advertising their own products.