It's interesting to compare Google's strategy with AWS's.
AWS SimpleDB has been a dead product for years now. Afaik, nobody is developing it, nobody is advertising it, and I believe it's not been launched in any new regions in ages. Even internally, when I worked there, it was not a product you should use for anything.
Yet it's still supported. Customers are still using it. Somewhere, there is a team in AWS keeping the lights on.
Because AWS knows that customer trust is more valuable than whatever it costs to keep that product alive.
Google’s CI/CD and internal monorepo ecosystem building against latest have a high cost to maintain legacy code. You can’t just let something rot with minimal maitenance at google.
While fine for a customer tech ecosystem facing security threats, it’s really not ideal for enterprise offerings.
As far as I know, AWS has never shut down a service. They've stopped offering some services in new accounts, but if you already had it you still do (like SimpleDB).
Microsoft and Oracle are both well known for extremely long term support and creating easy migration paths.
I would only ever use GCP as an offsite backup or use some of their AI tools as part of toolchain that either operates on a copy of the data or lands its output on another cloud.
In other words I would always make sure to design in a way where I could exit Google in 30 days or less.
They shut down ec2 classic, PV instances too. Not recent, but it’s something. Nothing compared to the thousands of products google killed that tons of people used. I personally use two Google products - gmail and maps. That’s it. I don’t trust them to do ANYTHING else.
Curious which services under GCP have been shut down? I get that Google killed Reader and that GCP users used Google Domains, but for the time-being GCP has felt safe.
From what I've heard, the biggest selling point of GCP is its simplicity and easier development experience. Other than that, it's mostly inferior to AWS or even MS Azure.
AWS is designed to be very flexible and configurable (example: look at IAM). The tradeof is the complexity and amount of work required to set up even the most frequently used services (such as ECS Fargate or Lambda).
That being said, if somebody is looking for a simple, developer-first experience, and wants to use AWS (and have all of its power/flexibility), have a look at https://stacktape.com (I'm a founder).
Actually particularly shocking that they've sold Google Domains to SquareSpace. I couldn't think of a less aligned company. They deal with novice end users who want to make web sites with minimum technical knowledge but give them premium support. Meanwhile Google Cloud's ideal customers (generally) are engineering heavy, people who want to automate everything with APIs and manage seamless automated operations, but are happy with support from a python script.
The best I can think is that maybe Google did that analysis and found that all the customers for Google Domains were high maintenance novice users so it made sense to sell it off to a business designed to support them?
I think the answer to all of this is that Google did not see Google Domains as part of the GCP umbrella. Unlike AWS Route 53, it had its on website separate from GCP. What that website did do was sell and bill Google Workspace.
SquareSpace is a reseller of Google Workspace (for people who use SquareSpace for their company homepage), and will not only be taking over the domains, but for those who bought Workspace within Domains, they will become their new reseller.
I really wish they had spun off Cloud as an alphabet company with Kurian at the head (he is CEO of Google Cloud, which isn't a CEO because Sundar is his boss), and transferred all the Cloud employees to the spinoff.
(I'm a xoogler, worked in cloud and launched actual products in it, and I strongly prefer AWS. I still don't think Cloud- specifically, GCE and GCS- will go away but I do expect them to continue trimming all the "barely profitable" services)
I'm a Cloud xoogler (2015-2023), too, and I'm not sure whether that would have made things easier or harder. There were quite a few "shiny object" solutions Cloud commercialized from other parts of Google/Alphabet over the years, and regardless of all the organizational duplication, fiefdoms and chaos that accompanied having three Cloud CEOs in six years, I think the commercial interest via Google's "innovation story" and One Google pitches created a lot of value. As a third place laggard until TK was hired, Google Cloud didn't really have much of interest to offer beyond the legacy internal data products (BigTable, BQ, Spanner) and GKE/Anthos, so having things like Google Maps, several Verily products, a few things that emerged from Brain/RMI, Google Health, etc made a real difference.
That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.
The timeline of Google’s domain registration business, according to Wikipedia:
* 2005: Google became a domain name registrar.
* 2015: Google Domains was publicly launched under a beta test mode.
* March 2022: Google announced that Google Domains was officially out of beta.
* June 2023: Squarespace concluded an agreement to purchase the Google Domains business.
Exiting beta in 2022 after seven years suggests Google planned to get serious about Google Domains. What happened between 2022 and 2023 that made them decide to kill it? I guess when a hobby becomes a business, the bar to keep it going is a lot higher.
Google really annoyed early adopters of Google Apps (now workspace) with the legacy to paid migration, then oh no you don't have to pay here's 300 free user licences nonsense.
I can totally see how CIOs and other tech savvy leaders in business really look at anything they use Google related and wonder to themselves if it might be wise to look at alternatives.
I agree with lot of comments in that Twitter thread.
More than the shutdown itself, the lack of any communications from Google has been frustrating. It gives the sense that this is a complete shitshow internally. Nobody seems to have an official answer on the fate of Cloud Domains, which is marketed as a separate product but runs on the same infrastructure (Gergely’s thread says insiders have been told that it is also going away).
Interesting in that thread that they mention that Google Cloud’s DNS service uses Google Domains NS records, and they haven’t said whether that is going away or not. I only use Google Cloud for personal stuff, but I know that I would cry if AWS suddenly said “there’s no longer a way to get public DNS names for your services through our tooling” at work.
Cloud DNS is just nameservers. Google Domains is a registrar. Two very different things. There is no reason for Cloud DNS to be affected by Domains going away.
Google is completely rudderless. Sundar has completely trashed Google's once impeccable reputation and killed all innovation. I really don't understand why they have't fired him.
This was a hell of a way for me to learn that my Google Domain account will be transitioned to SquareSpace. An email would've been nice (unless I missed it).
Gruber spotted this delightful bit of surrealism, in case you’re using Gmail.
> Turns out that even though I used an @gmail.com address to register the domain, every single email from Google Domains was being flagged as spam. So Google’s own email service considers all emails from Google’s own domain name service to be spam.
I didn't even know they sold Google Domains. How does this kind of transfer work if I'm not a Square Space customer? Do I get a free transfer out of I don't want to use them?
I imagine it will initially be migrated to SquareSpace hosted services for your interaction that you then use your Google account to oauth into, so a pretty seamless transfer from the end-user perspective.
Likely the total transition will take over a year to complete. You will probably get a notification a few months after the transfer of control that the registrar name is changing and you dont need to do anything but make sure your contact info is up to date. At some point, probably 2-3 years down the line, domains.google will cease redirecting to SquareSpace domains.
I'm a Workspace customer, hosting my family's domain for mail. Some of us use sheets or docs or drive.
Where do I flee to from here? Protonmail? Office365?
I'm willing to spend $5-$10/mo per user. Apps would be nice but mail is critical. I'll miss Google's spam filtering but so be it.
I know Workspace isn't dead yet but I'm not going to wait until it is. I'm done. My DNS has always been somewhere else which will make this a lot easier.
I can totally imagine a spinoff either to Oracle or IBM. Possibly Cisco as an outlier.
BTW I have to deal with Google Cloud as a “partner” and they’re a major pain in the ass - everything we do is mandated as custom, we have to come to them, etc - compared with their competitors who actually feel like partners. We’re always one Google reorg away from throwing away our efforts to be replaced with another goat rodeo.
I think Google is good putting ads on front of people and get money by advertisers, but awful by selling stuff directly to consumers. So in general the brand image is very damaged for people who pay for things.
The opposite of Apple who people who pays for things is his cash cow and they take care much more on that.
And what get Google's brand with only being good with ads? Love from advertisers and skepticism by consumers.
One of my life lessons: Never do business with Google.
It's served me well. I've seen so many businesses torched to the ground by doing business with Google.
That's not an indictment of Google. There are things specific companies are good for and bad for. Google is bad at any sort of B2B, partnerships, or similar.
The cloud compute market is probably 1000x? bigger than the domain market right now and will continue to widen that gap since it is on a different growth curve. It's certainly possible that Google or AWS will be forced to divest their cloud business into a separate entity or sell it by shareholders or regulators, but it's not going anywhere and it might work a lot better with more focused leadership.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. When we were deciding which cloud platform to settle on years ago, Google Cloud Platform was thrown out first because of this very concern. I would not be shocked to hear tomorrow that they are shutting it down. This is Google. I wouldn't even be surprised that Google Maps of Google Docs are being shut down. Search is the only one that would surprise me.
Google will spin out YouTube, Maps, Chrome and Gmail into a separate company.
It will shut down Google Cloud.
All that will remain is Google search/ads.
The AI opportunity has already been fumbled and will soon be completely dropped.
And Sundar Pichai, who has destroyed everything except googles advertising cash firehose, will stay there and continue to run the empty shell of googles potential.
[+] [-] mabbo|2 years ago|reply
AWS SimpleDB has been a dead product for years now. Afaik, nobody is developing it, nobody is advertising it, and I believe it's not been launched in any new regions in ages. Even internally, when I worked there, it was not a product you should use for anything.
Yet it's still supported. Customers are still using it. Somewhere, there is a team in AWS keeping the lights on.
Because AWS knows that customer trust is more valuable than whatever it costs to keep that product alive.
Google does not understand that.
[+] [-] bushbaba|2 years ago|reply
While fine for a customer tech ecosystem facing security threats, it’s really not ideal for enterprise offerings.
[+] [-] ishjoh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intermerda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] re-thc|2 years ago|reply
Both are extreme - just on different ends.
AWS should at least remove it from the product page etc so people don't fall into the trap of using it.
[+] [-] jedberg|2 years ago|reply
Microsoft and Oracle are both well known for extremely long term support and creating easy migration paths.
I would only ever use GCP as an offsite backup or use some of their AI tools as part of toolchain that either operates on a copy of the data or lands its output on another cloud.
In other words I would always make sure to design in a way where I could exit Google in 30 days or less.
[+] [-] asylteltine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarface_74|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27524549
EC2 Classic networking support
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-her...
[+] [-] ghayes|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matus_congrady|2 years ago|reply
AWS is designed to be very flexible and configurable (example: look at IAM). The tradeof is the complexity and amount of work required to set up even the most frequently used services (such as ECS Fargate or Lambda).
That being said, if somebody is looking for a simple, developer-first experience, and wants to use AWS (and have all of its power/flexibility), have a look at https://stacktape.com (I'm a founder).
[+] [-] ishjoh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cavisne|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|2 years ago|reply
The best I can think is that maybe Google did that analysis and found that all the customers for Google Domains were high maintenance novice users so it made sense to sell it off to a business designed to support them?
[+] [-] morpheuskafka|2 years ago|reply
SquareSpace is a reseller of Google Workspace (for people who use SquareSpace for their company homepage), and will not only be taking over the domains, but for those who bought Workspace within Domains, they will become their new reseller.
[+] [-] cavisne|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|2 years ago|reply
(I'm a xoogler, worked in cloud and launched actual products in it, and I strongly prefer AWS. I still don't think Cloud- specifically, GCE and GCS- will go away but I do expect them to continue trimming all the "barely profitable" services)
[+] [-] eitally|2 years ago|reply
That said, I think Cloud has matured enough that it would now be a good time to consider spinning it off, especially as the regulatory environment around Search & Ads is heating up again in multiple countries. It would be much better in the long term to have Cloud separate; not as good as if Search & Ads were separate but I don't think that's really viable without enormous costs and much difficulty.
[+] [-] lokar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlieDigital|2 years ago|reply
But some of these moves have me a bit nervous having built on top of Firebase.
[+] [-] cpeterso|2 years ago|reply
* 2005: Google became a domain name registrar.
* 2015: Google Domains was publicly launched under a beta test mode.
* March 2022: Google announced that Google Domains was officially out of beta.
* June 2023: Squarespace concluded an agreement to purchase the Google Domains business.
Exiting beta in 2022 after seven years suggests Google planned to get serious about Google Domains. What happened between 2022 and 2023 that made them decide to kill it? I guess when a hobby becomes a business, the bar to keep it going is a lot higher.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains
[+] [-] bloopernova|2 years ago|reply
Nitter link for the lazy twitter hater.
[+] [-] aussiedude|2 years ago|reply
I can totally see how CIOs and other tech savvy leaders in business really look at anything they use Google related and wonder to themselves if it might be wise to look at alternatives.
I agree with lot of comments in that Twitter thread.
[+] [-] paulgb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nexus7556|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easton|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaaarrgh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downWidOutaFite|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|2 years ago|reply
> Turns out that even though I used an @gmail.com address to register the domain, every single email from Google Domains was being flagged as spam. So Google’s own email service considers all emails from Google’s own domain name service to be spam.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/16/google-domains
[+] [-] indemnity|2 years ago|reply
Hoping Cloudflare move faster on .dev and .app so I can migrate before the inevitable fuckups happen with the transition to Squarespace.
[+] [-] brycewray|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kodah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InvaderFizz|2 years ago|reply
Likely the total transition will take over a year to complete. You will probably get a notification a few months after the transfer of control that the registrar name is changing and you dont need to do anything but make sure your contact info is up to date. At some point, probably 2-3 years down the line, domains.google will cease redirecting to SquareSpace domains.
[+] [-] joezydeco|2 years ago|reply
Where do I flee to from here? Protonmail? Office365?
I'm willing to spend $5-$10/mo per user. Apps would be nice but mail is critical. I'll miss Google's spam filtering but so be it.
I know Workspace isn't dead yet but I'm not going to wait until it is. I'm done. My DNS has always been somewhere else which will make this a lot easier.
[+] [-] pinewurst|2 years ago|reply
BTW I have to deal with Google Cloud as a “partner” and they’re a major pain in the ass - everything we do is mandated as custom, we have to come to them, etc - compared with their competitors who actually feel like partners. We’re always one Google reorg away from throwing away our efforts to be replaced with another goat rodeo.
[+] [-] kyrra|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] re-thc|2 years ago|reply
Higher chance of it being sold off to a rich SAAS wanting to get in like a Salesforce type.
IBM started by buying Softlayer and other clouds so yes no chance.
[+] [-] pentagrama|2 years ago|reply
The opposite of Apple who people who pays for things is his cash cow and they take care much more on that.
And what get Google's brand with only being good with ads? Love from advertisers and skepticism by consumers.
[+] [-] blagie|2 years ago|reply
It's served me well. I've seen so many businesses torched to the ground by doing business with Google.
That's not an indictment of Google. There are things specific companies are good for and bad for. Google is bad at any sort of B2B, partnerships, or similar.
[+] [-] gregwebs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
It will shut down Google Cloud.
All that will remain is Google search/ads.
The AI opportunity has already been fumbled and will soon be completely dropped.
And Sundar Pichai, who has destroyed everything except googles advertising cash firehose, will stay there and continue to run the empty shell of googles potential.
And like now, no-one will care.
[+] [-] shaklee3|2 years ago|reply