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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> Google did not see Google Domains as part of the GCP umbrella

That's terrible. Not every domain is on GCP Cloud domains and falls back to Google domains by default. It's quite obvious even as a user.

Google Cloud Platform has its own domains product called Cloud Domains. https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/overview

Google has had a big problem for over a decade with having multiple overlapping products, leading to wasted effort and customer confusion. It also leads to a bunch of extra work when one product is rolled into another or shut down.

It's unclear to me why they didn't migrate everyone over to GCP Cloud Domains. I'm also not sure that most customers really care if they're using Google Domains vs another registrar vs GCP Cloud Domains.

According to the author cloud domains are shutting down as well.

> It's unclear to me why they didn't migrate everyone over to GCP Cloud Domains.

Doesn't that require a GCP account? There are a lot of minimally-technical users who would be very confused going into a big cloud console, dealing with projects and IAM and all that stuff, just to renew their domain. They will have no trouble dealing with Squarespace.

What about those that bought Workspace outside of Domains?

No effect for them as far as Workspace goes. If they domain was bought from Domains, it will move to Squarespace, but they will only bill the renewals not the Workspace.

I feel like it must be a bad business in general. The fact that Azure also has a weird setup with godaddy managing the domains.

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