Poly will be shutting down forever on 30 June 2021

Those comments have become a mechanical reflex, which automatically makes them bad for HN: 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

It was mainly for sharing Google Tilt Brush models. With Tilt Brush being shut down this makes sense.

This is a secondary reason for me. The main reason is that I don’t want an arbitrary Google ban to ruin my life.

Some offerings like GMail, Search, and YouTube are viewed as safe. Others I think are likely avoided more. And probably end up a self fulfilling prophecy. No one uses it because it will be killed, so its killed because no one uses it.

It is certainly a hinderance to the adoption of their cloud services. They have not yet shown they are in it for the long haul.

Did you know what poly was before clicking?

Did you know Google has hundreds of branded product offerings, so say 12 closures per year is something like 2%, i.e. a 25 year median horizon (=1/.02/2)? https://developers.google.com/products

What period of support would satisfy you? For a "fast fashion/art" vignette like Poly?

Isn't it fun to have ephemeral experiences? You can choose to embrace that aspect of life rather than chastise it, it's all your choice.

Yes a person has to be pretty savvy to avoid building their business on an unstable a Google product, but all fundamental business choices need to be savvy. Let's experiment, move fast, break things, and try out the unstable Google offerings and see how it goes. Or let's do the sure choice and pick only Google Cloud products 8+ years mature. There's an appetite and big market for both which Google can fill, and the mature senior developer can well care for him- or herself.

I'd rather the megacorp allocate our capital towards experiments than not. I'd rather the megacorp keep some of its founding character than do the soulless bluechip strategy of having 50% of its operating budget be selling & marketing expenses for stale maintenance-mode products (not exaggerating, look at some public company financials like Salesforce, which actually I admire lately for their innovation by acquisition).

I like variety. I like fewer restrictions and fewer flavor-of-the-decade norms on self-expression. These are popular values, and I thank Google for materializing them for its employees and consumers.

Its pretty wild how many things get shut down. I was on a drive this weekend and went to pop on my Google music where I uploaded 10 gigs of music. I was met with a message that said Google music shutdown, but you can move your music to Youtube!

Not really. The Google products I actively use are among those most stable and lasting in the web/apps industry: search, mail, maps, video streaming. I could also count here productivity tools like docs, drive, calendar, keep and so on. I'm much more worried about account bans that seem to be happening to random people. But still not worried enough, it seems, to migrate my stuff and workflow(s) elsewhere.

The only thing I would miss is gmail. If maps went away it would only take a moment to switch to another service, the same for youtube, search, etc.

I wouldn’t put a big effort into something that relied on a niche google product, but it’s not like maps dispersing would be anything but a momentary inconvenience. I don’t seek to “punish” by not using its products.

Honestly, 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,

Is 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.

Android

GCP

Chrome eco system, e.g. chromecast + chromebook + literally the most popular browser

Google home / nest

> Hasn't really done much...

> 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.

Are 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.

They 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.

Reading 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.