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.
(Go ahead and downvote me a ton)
PHP, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Java, Swift, Obj-C, Rust…
Welcome to capitalism, friend.
The question is whether the products started in 2021 will last until 2022...
I would try switching to spending the money on acquisitions.
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.
It would be far easier to choose Google services (and less irritating as a consumer) if services were labelled alpha, beta, production, and LTS, and if each of those labels had a specific duration (e.g. alpha services can vanish immediately without warning; beta have a limited lifecycle where they need to become profitable or at least self-sustaining, production are generally stable and can be relied on for a year, and LTS will be supported for a specific period of time, backed by enterprise support agreements).
But that's just crazy talk!
I'd advocate for the latter as a healthier way to run society with fewer tech giants of lovecraftian size slipping their tentacles into every cranny that one can stuff a million dollars into.
The cost of the experimentation is people wondering what product they'll discontinue next and whether it'll be one that _they_ rely on. If you find yourself asking this often enough, you'll probably start moving out of the Google ecosystem. How is this good for Google?
Yes, I understand that products need to pay for themselves, but Google keeps drawing people into services that they then shut down. It's frustrating for users and damaging to Google. What's the cost of the damage to their reputation?
I had heard Google is unreliable in this aspect before but after this particular experience I will unlikely use or suggest Google for anything serious.
Someday, the Google graveyard will look like this: http://www.worldwartours.be/files/img_9456_1.jpg
What I wonder is how many startups were effectively killed by these dead products, either by destroying a business model and chances of getting investors or through acqui-hiring the best talent?
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.
Their development is on maintenance mode for months now, and even the Android team is using Unity or pure C++ frameworks, instead of Java, or now Kotlin first APIs.
Just waiting for them to lose interest on Android, ChromeOS or even Chrome!
There is activity there:
Then again, Sceneform was the nicer high level API, with Studio tooling integration, here is still pretty much DYI.
Well if they need someone to wear his suit but yell in an angry Australian accent to get it done, I'm available at reasonable rates.
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.
No, really?
I see some of the content has a license that would appear to allow it. But do any of us have the time, energy, and resources to sit down and do it?
This certainly isn't the first or last time some website with interesting content is going to go down. Maybe we should all get better at forking open source content as a matter of course.
If we don't, then I think criticizing Google for not being willing to host it is pretty lame.
> Your assets will be available at poly.google.com until June 30, 2021
Does Google have any more space in their graveyard?
Perhaps the problem here is simply Google needs to more loudly tag their products with "Beta"? I remembered in the mid-aught's, every google product was "in Beta."
Facebook also stopped hosting glTF.
There is definitely a pullback from the giants with regards to their web-based 3D efforts.
I doubt they will in future.
Used to be you could download low-res OBJs and they made for some nice quick test scenes for rendering. Sadly, that seems to be gone now as well.
I guess https://openheritage3d.org/ is the better place for that now.
Usage seems super low, features models and scenes (which are all really good!) have likes in the mid double digits.
It is unfortunate that a larger community didn't really spring up, from what I can see the artwork that is there is good.
I suggest everyone spend some time going through and looking at some rather nice 3d scenes!
Why is this news now?
