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 unless you're a hobbyist that enjoys the exploration (which is not most people).
Google has the focus of a 12 year adhd kid who just ate a whole birthday cake, unless when it comes to data collection. Google doesn't produce quality products anymore. They found their niche and pretend to do other things to try continuing that "do no evil" lie of a mission statement they used to have.
Here's the lesson, you can't trust google with anything. You base your personal or business infrastructure on Google you can expect one of two things:complete privacy invasion or they're going to destroy whatever you're using because they never took it seriously in the first place.
> 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 you can; give them some creative freedom; see if any of them come up with a trillion dollar idea.
Only now they've 'grown up'. 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.
>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.
I bought a Chromebook in 2014. It still works, but support was discontinued earlier this year. That sounds okay to me. I wonder if Poly was popular? I've never heard about it 'til today.
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.
> 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.
Ironically at this point, I'd place more trust on an open-source project because at the very least, if the maintainer abandons it, I could fork it and potentially self-host.
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.
They have a real problem finding developers that will want to work on it. You don't get promoted at Google for maintaining a product that isn't growing.
I've read a guess: As known, Google uses monorepo and own libraries, so they need to maintain all applications to keep up to date to work with libraries. That's why Google kills minor but worth services.
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
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).
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.
That's actually (at least recently) quite "popular" product I would say, because they included it in most Android smartphones to offer video calls. I am tempted to say Google Duo is spread on millions of devices, however it is kind of an app, which is rarely used at all by most of users. Also, there are thousands of competitors, where even Google Meet does feels better than Duo.
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.
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).
Yep, I hadn't heard of this one. Several of their shutdowns have effectively been product announcements and shutdowns rolled into one for me.
They announce a shutdown, I don't know what it is so I check it out. I get excited for a brief moment until I remember it's getting shutdown.
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.
That doesn't really make sense. poly.google.com looks to be essentially a repository/library of 3D renderings people want to share. There is no "standalone app" here, it's just a sharing site.
> 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.
Did any of your companies ever do that? How did it go?
Honestly the fact that I haven't heard of it and those comments are probably related. My trust in google to maintain things is so underwater that I really don't feel like dedicating the attention to even learn their new product offerings. For me it's all in one ear and out the other.
There's a phenomenon I've witnessed in dev teams that I always thought was a separate issue but I'm starting to question that conclusion.
Like with Covid, like with SLAs, it's not enough to think of ratios of success or failure. You have to also look at frequency and duration.
A flaky test might fail a build 1 time in 200, but as your team gets bigger, build frequency rises, your tests grow, and eventually you're getting failed builds frequently enough that people start to see them as a regular occurrence, and that negatively affects their opinions about the whole experience. I've seen people bash the system when failures happen weekly, I've seen others 'turn' after a couple of statistical clusters and then fall to confirmation bias long afterward.
Google has so many irons in the fire that I think we've reached that same threshold for a lot of people. Shutting down the worst 1% of your projects a year sounds like a completely reasonable business plan. Until you have 1000 projects, and now you're shutting one down every five weeks on average. People will talk.
And if there's no transparency in that process, how do I know that my favorite tool isn't next, or on the list for next year? Odds are low, but not zero.
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 justify the investment, and they kill it.
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+.
It's about branding and trust. Before any product is a popular one that prints money it's a small one looking for early adopters.
When those first adopters are deciding whether or not use the new product, part of that equation is what happens if this doesn't catch on? Should I trust them to jump on board now, wait, or go with someone else?
For instance if someone was choosing betwen two similar and new products from Microsoft and Google one factor weighing in Microsoft's favor is they will care about support, and an exit plan even if the product doesn't take off.
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.
Yes, I know it and browse it frequently - a great resource, if you've an interest in or need for this type of 3D asset. (I used to run a 3D animation software company.)
The problem is that if Google holds this attitude, that means I as a user must absolutely stay away from anything that isn't promoted extremely heavily by Google.
And if I and everyone else thinks this way, as Google is conditioning them to, then no one will ever adopt Google's non heavily promoted products, which will make their failure a self fulfilling prophecy.
Looking at the frequency of the art uploaded and the effort in it I bet the artists and those who used that platform would indeed care about it being killed by Google.
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 ongoing community that's now being shutdown unceremoniously.
The lack of trust towards Google's products come not just from the services they're providing they shut down, but they try to build up communities then abandon them with no recourse.
It wasn't just the assets they hosted, it was the people they were trying to bring together that are now scattered again because they trusted google.
Probably already known but people at Google get promoted because of launching new products, nobody gets promoted for maintaining an existing product. Is a mafia, Product Managers, Engineers, TPMs that want to go to next level all play the same game and the organization allows it. Ok product is released, then the team moves to the next sexy thing, and the product end up being replaced by some new team members or contractors take over and at the end, product just dies. Even worst in Cloud just playing catch-up with AWS and the same history repeats just that know you have Enterprise customers which wouldn't be happy...and what this causes is that externally and internally you have bunch of products doing the same things (messenger apps, notebooks)
Does anyone know if the Internet Archive has any plans to scrape the content? Poly is not only a critical component of several VR apps I use, it's a repository of some incredible Tilt Brush artwork and part of the history of modern VR.
I'm dreading the imminent upcoming news about Tilt Brush itself. And Google Earth VR which is a true cultural treasure.
And just finally - in case it isn't clear - fuck Google.
Yet another Google service which I only know about by reading the news that it is shutting down. This one looks pretty great. Would be nice to see announcements when those things are launching, not when they are shutting down ;)
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.
Google is an organization run by engineers. They have no concept of marketing, or product placement or community engagement. They build for an audience of engineers, and if a wider cross-section of the population embraces a product that is purely by happenstance rather than design. As an enterprise they appear to have AD/HD, these products are launched and supported for awhile and then dropped. It is baked into the corporate culture, and I don't think it will or can change.
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.
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.
I mean, that's what you get when the internal metrics are skewed towards shipping new products, paying no attention to maintaining or improving existing ones.
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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?
Google has the focus of a 12 year adhd kid who just ate a whole birthday cake, unless when it comes to data collection. Google doesn't produce quality products anymore. They found their niche and pretend to do other things to try continuing that "do no evil" lie of a mission statement they used to have.
Here's the lesson, you can't trust google with anything. You base your personal or business infrastructure on Google you can expect one of two things:complete privacy invasion or they're going to destroy whatever you're using because they never took it seriously in the first place.
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 you can; give them some creative freedom; see if any of them come up with a trillion dollar idea.
Only now they've 'grown up'. 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.
I bought a Chromebook in 2014. It still works, but support was discontinued earlier this year. That sounds okay to me. I wonder if Poly was popular? I've never heard about it 'til today.
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.
Ironically at this point, I'd place more trust on an open-source project because at the very least, if the maintainer abandons it, I could fork it and potentially self-host.
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.
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
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).
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.
More work, yes. But certainly much better than what they are doing now.
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?
Did any of your companies ever do that? How did it go?
Like with Covid, like with SLAs, it's not enough to think of ratios of success or failure. You have to also look at frequency and duration.
A flaky test might fail a build 1 time in 200, but as your team gets bigger, build frequency rises, your tests grow, and eventually you're getting failed builds frequently enough that people start to see them as a regular occurrence, and that negatively affects their opinions about the whole experience. I've seen people bash the system when failures happen weekly, I've seen others 'turn' after a couple of statistical clusters and then fall to confirmation bias long afterward.
Google has so many irons in the fire that I think we've reached that same threshold for a lot of people. Shutting down the worst 1% of your projects a year sounds like a completely reasonable business plan. Until you have 1000 projects, and now you're shutting one down every five weeks on average. People will talk.
And if there's no transparency in that process, how do I know that my favorite tool isn't next, or on the list for next year? Odds are low, but not zero.
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 justify the investment, and they kill it.
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+.
When those first adopters are deciding whether or not use the new product, part of that equation is what happens if this doesn't catch on? Should I trust them to jump on board now, wait, or go with someone else?
For instance if someone was choosing betwen two similar and new products from Microsoft and Google one factor weighing in Microsoft's favor is they will care about support, and an exit plan even if the product doesn't take off.
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.
And if I and everyone else thinks this way, as Google is conditioning them to, then no one will ever adopt Google's non heavily promoted products, which will make their failure a self fulfilling prophecy.
Well, I guess that was a mistake for whoever did.
That almost reads like a hint of self awareness for their continued killing of things they release.
There is value. Yes, there's also cost to having to re-host your assets somewhere else.
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 ongoing community that's now being shutdown unceremoniously.
The lack of trust towards Google's products come not just from the services they're providing they shut down, but they try to build up communities then abandon them with no recourse.
It wasn't just the assets they hosted, it was the people they were trying to bring together that are now scattered again because they trusted google.
I'm dreading the imminent upcoming news about Tilt Brush itself. And Google Earth VR which is a true cultural treasure.
And just finally - in case it isn't clear - fuck Google.
He's also a member of Archive Team (not affiliated with IA, but often upload scrapes there when they are done).
Yes - thanks. Fixed.
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.
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.
You can't expect them to a) Innovate, and b) Pay forever for something that's not succeeding.
You may draw the line differently, but in this specific instance, I think you're being unfair.
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(Go ahead and downvote me a ton)
PHP, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Java, Swift, Obj-C, Rust…
Welcome to capitalism, friend.
At least you're paying for GCP.