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Google Poly is shutting down

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Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#71

Post by onion2k »

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've not only heard of it, I use it frequently. It's by far the easiest way to access permissively licensed (Creative Commons attribution mostly) content for making things in WebGL. Given the fact that Poly is essentially a very basic CRUD app with simple files attached there's can't really be a good reason to shut it down - it's simple, mature, and can't take much more than a few hours of maintenance a month for a single developer.

Either Google has a real problem finding developers capable of maintaining things, or their decisions to keep things running are based purely on cash with no regard for either users or their own reputation as a company that can keep services running.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#72

Post by bognition »

cj wrote: post #59
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not to mention that its been built on top of the Google internal development stack and getting it working outside of that environment would require a substantial re-write.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#73

Post by ma2rten »

lima wrote: post #38
janlaureys wrote: post #18

Didn'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.

The cost is ongoing maintenance of the code base, reponding to security issues and such, not the server hosting.

Also it can’t really be read only because of things like GDPR compliance.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#74

Post by amelius »

cj wrote: post #59
amelius wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How would they do that? Who would pay the server costs?

The user would run the server, or another company, or a group of enthousiasts. It doesn't need to be expensive, especially if the user doesn't require many other users on the system.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#75

Post by virtue3 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #54
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 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 ser…

Complete second hand / third hand heresay but:

The reason google kills everything is because they do everything via monorepo. So if they don't have enough devs to literally -keep a service up to date with the currently evolving stack- they have to kill the project. This is why things get killed so easily.

Makes sense to me from a "why canyt you just leave it on" standpoint. But it still makes me very leeery of trusting any project of theirs long term (besides search/gmail).

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#77

Post by free2OSS »

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…

Google Music and Google Photos disagree.

They ended Music, and bait and switch their photo policy.

Traumatic events for me. I've left both services, won't get another pixel, and attempted to switch to Firefox.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#78

Post by jrumbut »

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…

True enough, but this is among the largest gatherings of technology decision makers (at varying levels, presumably some very high level) out there and this comes up every thread about Google.

Hosting some files to serve as a counterpoint would not be totally unjustifiable from a marketing perspective.

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#79

Post by olau »

bognition wrote: post #72
cj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not to mention that its been built on top of the Google internal development stack and getting it working outside of that environment would require a substantial re-write.

So you're saying they're getting bitten by vendor lock-in?

Re: Google Poly is shutting down

#80

Post by onion2k »

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…

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.

That is true, but it ignores the fact that at least 50% of Google's product offerings are aimed at the sort of people who read HN.

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