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Poly will be shutting down forever on 30 June 2021
- beigeoak 6y agoUnprecedented.
- hpoe 6y ago"Another one bites the dust"
- minikites 6y agoAt this point, anyone who signs up for a new Google service is a sucker with no sense of pattern recognition.
- renewiltord 6y agoReading comments like this makes me realize why people get so angry at Kickstarter products where they fail at delivering stuff. You know what Google's experimental stuff is like. You can choose not to use it because you like stability. But there are lots of us who like the novelty and stuff. So you're not made of early adopter material. Don't early adopt.
- minikites 6y agoThere's a difference between that and what Google does. Look at how many products on https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ that were several years old, e.g. AngularJS (11 years). And I'm sure many of us remember Google Reader.
- vMPQonVtAjLWmr 6y agoTo be fair AngularJS has a successor in Angular and thus is a bad example. I think it is fine to drop it after 14 years of support (which is almost ridiculously long in JS-time)
- Google234 6y agoOmg, it also turns out that the Linux foundation killed Linux 3.0! How dare companies stop supporting old versions of their software!
- MockObject 6y agoI think if these projects were branded as Google Beta, or under Google Labs, people would be less disappointed when they get shut down.
- thisiscorrect 6y agoI agree wholly here. Google needs to be much more upfront when floating experiments. It's good that they do, but the signaling needs to be better. Or even different branding altogether. It would go a long way to help their image.
- minikites 6y agoGmail was in "beta" for years and years, I don't think this would actually solve anything.
- larinzod 6y agoIs there a "Days Since Google Killed a Product" counter that we need to reset?
- josefx 6y agoHow large is the dataset by now? Could we train a predictive AI from it?
- geitir 6y agohttps://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- autoditype 6y agoBonus points for a "Days Since Google Raised Prices on Their Customers?" counter
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- samschooler 6y agoI never knew this existed! Does anyone have alternative suggestions for a library of 3d models?
- serverholic 6y agoI really don't get how people can continue to be naive regarding google. It seems like they announce a new product and shut down an old one every month.
- lumost 6y agoIs that terribly different from early stage startups? the alternative for google is inertia where any product needs to prove it can get to a billion dollars of revenue prior to launch. The way internal politics at companies go - I'd expect that approach to yield a lot of Stadia style flops.
- minikites 6y agoGoogle is not an early stage startup and the expectations of each type of company are necessarily different.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoAnd so what if Stadia flopped? At least they proved that, yeah, you can stream games to users in a usable, viable way. I'd still like to own my equipment, but so many people want to play video games without getting into hardware specs, and Stadia was a big step forward for game streaming, which is going to be the future, whether we like it or not.
- serverholic 6y agoAnd yet other big companies like apple seem to launch products just fine. Google could do with a little more research and planning instead of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
- tinus_hn 6y agoI have (for this reason and many others) quit actively using Google products quite a long time ago. I only use Gmail out of inertia (through imap though) and YouTube in anonymous browsers. I almost never use their search or maps. Does this behavior of constantly killing products not cause other users to avoid their offerings?
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoHonestly, no. I like having access to these experiments. This site is literally a free 3d-object hosting website. I pay nothing, so why should I expect stability, lifetime access, etc. etc. all of which cost money? Google couldn't monetize this, but maybe someone else can. Google was the first to do an office suite in the cloud. Now there is Notion, Airtable, etc. all of which exist because Google was willing to put its experiments online. And yes, they mine and scrape all the data from these experiments to fuel their other paid services and ad engine, I know, but still I prefer access to these experiments. They're often ahead of the curve, and no other company is going to be able to offer all these things. I'm not a Google fanboy at all, but I don't mind if they shut down free "products" like this if the tradeoff is that we get to see and use new, innovative products earlier. We all benefit from seeing what's possible. Applies to lots of products: Stadia, Drive, Maps, etc,
- mehlmao 6y agoIt's hard for anyone to monetize (or even launch) a product when one of the largest companies in the world is providing that product for free, even if they're doing a half-assed job.
- thisiscorrect 6y agoI don't think Google mines data from their office suite to fuel ads. Do you have evidence of this?
- jakelazaroff 6y ago> Google was the first to do an office suite in the cloud. The were the first to get big, maybe, but not the first period. The Google Docs word processor was built from the ashes of Writely, which they acquired back when Ajax was a new buzzword.
- cbracketdash 6y agoIt's time to build a web scraper to save all Poly submissions. Anyone with me?
- encom 6y agohttps://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Google_Poly https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Google_Poly
- Animats 6y agoI buy and use 3D models, and I'd never heard of Poly. Free3D, TurboSquid, and CGTrader are better known. Poly isn't even on the first page of Bing search results for "3D model".
- kyrra 6y agoFYI, this was announced on Dec 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25277615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25277615
- melomal 6y agoThey need to look like they are working on something decent whilst the ad casino keeps churning money for them. Otherwise investors will inevitably realize that Google hasn't really done much. I'm certain that many investors are riding on the Moon Shot projects they keep marching out.
- enkid 6y agoThey could also just pay a bigger dividend or buy back stock. Investors would like that more than a continuous stream of projects that will never be monetized.
- autoditype 6y ago> I'm certain that many investors are riding on the Moon Shot projects they keep marching out. When they realize that Google is shutting down all the Loon Shot projects, I wonder if they'll keep investing or start pulling out their money.
- vxNsr 6y agoAre you saying that google is overvalued? Or just that it’s not doing anything expect literally printing money which might make its investors lose interest? Afaik, none of the moonshots appeared to be anywhere nearly as lucrative is search ads.
- melomal 6y agoExactly, it almost feels like Google are just funding these projects to essentially make it look like there's some tech progress going on. Even the self-driving side of their ambitions which seemed to being doing wonders for making Google look like a pioneer for a while.
- vxNsr 6y agoSo just to be explicit about it: investors don’t care about real tech innovation. They like it if it translates to producing lots of money for the company but the only thing they really care about is making money, Google has shown that it’s a very good money printer and thus investors have rewarded it with an insanely high valuation. For this reason I believe Amazon will be rolled out into two different companies now that Bezos has stepped away from day2day. One will be the money printer: AWS and the other will be the slightly less profitable store business. The MBAs will argue that this will increase shareholder value which investors see as a win.
- clircle 6y agoI read hacker news every day, and this is the first time I'm hearing about this product. Good first impression!
- darkwizard42 6y agoHow are all the initial comments just about "killed by Google again"??? This is a product that was useful in partnership with Google's Tilt Brush (which has now been spun out as open source). If that product is no longer JUST owned by Google, there isn't a reason to keep up Poly (which is just a page to share drawings made with Tilt Brush)... There is even an option to download and keep your collection (which you would have had anyway) This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to shut down
- dang 6y agoThose comments have become a mechanical reflex, which automatically makes them bad for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159467 There's a power-law dropoff in how interesting it is. It's like telling the same joke over and over. Or this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwoV7solk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwoV7solk4
- darkwizard42 6y agoIndeed. While I appreciate some of that repetitive nature (really hammers a point home) I do wish it was accompanied with more analysis or commentary...otherwise we become like Reddit or any other forum with massive inside jokes/recurrent themed comments Cue "...and my axe" LotR reference or something or the other
- Benlights 6y agoWhelp, here goes another one...