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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

Seriously does anyone trust Google to run a product? Even if they came out tomorrow with a teleportation service I'd be too worried they'd cancel it mid-flight to try it out.

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This decision has trashed Google’s brand and whoever made it should be fired. It’s not that Google domains is particularly important, but Google’s reputation for untrustworthiness in the consumer space has now metastasized to their cloud business. People were willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt before, that they would not treat business customers the same as consumers. Now they aren’t.

I mean I’d even argue that Google domains is important in terms of making the product a seamless experience when using GCP (and generally just carving out Google as being part fundamental internet infrastructure). I wouldn’t underestimate how much a small QoL thing like having one company as both your registrar and cloud service provider can impact the choice of which otherwise commodity service to use. Not having to do a bunch of domain verification BS for every new piece of infrastructure is (was) a pretty awesome experience.

Sure you can have an MBA look at the situation and ask “Do we really need a registrar? The other cloud providers don’t have one and look at their margins”. So what this really signals to me is that Google has lost all capacity to be forward thinking, trendy and innovative. And without that (and thus a general relevance as a tech company), what is Google?

I'm a big time proponent of Google Cloud because I believe that they've done a few things particularly well in their overall architecture that others have gotten wrong.

But this decision rubs me the wrong way because there's a deep integration with several of the services that allow connecting an external domain. The verification of domain ownership with Google purchased domains was effectively seamless and aligned with this overall architecture principle of Stuff That Just Makes Sense.

I still think that GCP is a great platform to build on, but the problem now is that they've further tarnished their image to other stakeholders who have a say in the platform decision making process.

AWS definitely has a domain registrar, although I believe they subcontract. Azure subcontracts to GoDaddy. Both still provide the service.

Are you sure? This (sourced) comment claimed the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37456916

"I wouldn't underestimate how... having one company as both your registrar and cloud service provider can impact the choice of which otherwise commodity service to use." THIS. Even if I'm just spinning up a simple blog, unless I'm buying a premium domain name, I'm gonna buy it on Bluehost instead of a cheaper registrar like Namecheap just to avoid the few minutes of work and few hours of wait time to link that domain with another hosting service.

I'm a paying Workspace customer, running a domain for my family. I reallllly don't want to migrate off but with each passing month I'm growing more and more nervous.

What are my alternatives besides Office365?

https://www.fastmail.com/

Have been a customer for years, great service run by humans.

+1 on fastmail, I've been nothing but happy with their service.

Also on fastmail. Good service.

Apple’s iCloud+ plans (starting at $1/mo) include email hosting with custom domains. I moved my family to that a couple years ago and it’s been fine. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514

Everyone in my immediate family has 1 or more email addresses in our family domain, and I have a couple of fun/project domains their too, for $0.00 above what I was already paying for iCloud.

Office 365 is decent overall, good value for money so it's still worth considering. With rough edges.

Zoho is an alternative, can do custom domains, website hosting, email, productivity suite.

I thought O365 no longer offered custom domains?

The personal and family service doesn’t, but the business service does.

Your domains should not be tied to your main Gmail and GDrive anyway. Too many horror stories of wrongful ban leading to a chicken and egg situation around account lockouts.

Oh, they're not. I knew of that trap a long time ago.

If it's just for your family, then depending on what you need, you could try OnlyOffice— Either self-hosted, or SAAS. They use MS formats as their first-class native format, IIRC, so compatibility is pretty great.

Nextcloud also advertises an office suite, though I haven't tried it. Nextcloud also apparently integrates with OnlyOffice, though I haven't tried that either— Apparently Nextcloud's own office suite is a rebranding of LibreOffice.

I'd probably go with OnlyOffice, either on its own or integrated into Nextcloud.

Fastmail is really well set up to be a family account provider. You can add multiple domains, aliases to various accounts, and you can mix and match account levels now (kids accounts can be cheaper ones than your own, but still share your domain). Their spam filter works better than Google or Microsoft's, and I set up aliases that deliver to say, my wife and I, so we can both be notified of updates for particular accounts and such.

If you have any issues, a real person will answer your support ticket.

If you only need email, then there are a bunch of providers in Europe that are cheaper (especially compared to something like Fastmail if you need one mailbox for each person in the family), have been around for several years and support custom domains. In no particular order, they are mailfence, mailbox.org, runbox.com and migadu. All of them support IMAP directly (unlike ProtonMail that needs a bridge application and Tutanota that does not support IMAP).

Been using Zoho services for my family after I got tired of fighting with spam reputation when self-hosting.

Are you just using it for email? For my family that already had a few Apple devices I switched to using custom domains with iCloud (which is included with any iCloud subscription, even the $1 one).

You can have up to 3 domains configured per family.

Mostly email, but we do take advantage of gDrive for file sharing.

And I really really don't like iCloud's file system.

> What are my alternatives besides Office365?

Protonmail ? If its email you're after you can point your MX at them.

Until Domains, I mostly trusted google to keep running a paid b2b product with lots of users. Most of the famous products they've killed have been ones that either didn't bring in revenue, or never became popular.

After the Domains announcement, I can't in good conscience bring myself to spin up any new GCP services, and have started leaning more heavily on AWS. Part of me thinks that Domains is a signal that Google is planning a larger exit from the cloud business, given the GCP / Domains integration, and the absolutely atrocious comms from Google around Domains has not reassured me at all.

> that either didn't bring in revenue

Domain registration is famously difficult to profit from unless the registrar is able to upsell

They used it to upsell Google Workspace, as well as their own TLDs (.dev, .app). And although they didn't upsell GCP through it, the integration between the two was a nice (small) incentive to use GCP.

What makes it so difficult to profit from? A yearly subscription to maintain some text entries doesn't seem that crazy to me.

The costs are known, the competition is high, the margins are low. You still have to deal with support/abuse. There is no real “high volume customer”.

There’s a lot of contractual obligations and edge cases in domain names, and a lot of potential for fraud and disputes. It’s a business with high legal fees.

Also how domains should be managed evolves with time. For example GDPR has a huge impact on WHOIS, especially since the ICANN took so much time to acknowledge that in their specs, so there was a time where it was impossible for a registrar to be compliant with GDPR and ICANN rules. It’s still not 100% clear how it’ll be handled by RDAP (future successor of WHOIS)

And last but not least, some registries for ccTLDs are real pains in the ass to work with, and won’t hesitate to slap you with big fines if you make any mistake.

They killed GCP IOT core as well. Forced us to find another vendor.

We've had multiple multi-cloud customers signal a desire to move away from GCP for years now because savvy CXOs are just fed up with the unreliability. When you're looking to resolve a ton of tech debt that you have because of the ground constantly shifting beneath your feet for 1-2 decades... well, you just get fed up and want the reliability of serious enterprise vendors.

It makes innovation much harder due to the downstream effects, but at least I'm not carrying more and more risk forward thanks to Google/Alphabet's ADHD approach to product, brand, and support.

What exactly do you mean by unreliability?

Probably the constant deprecation of API / SDK from Google, you have to keep up with their crazy deprecation policy. On the other side I still have some APPS calling AWS API since 10y without any issues.

"When will Alphabet opaquely and unilaterally depreciate this product upon which we've come to rely, as they do with many other products all the time?"

Alphabet is a hopelessly disorganized bureaucracy whose leadership appears, at best indifferent to customer needs, at worst hostile to customers that don't toe their line.

It's just a risk calculation you have to make when you're spending millions to build systems of record upon which your enterprise will depend for years to come.

I don't know if its fair or even accurate – but it's the feedback I get from client CTOs and CIOs at sizable companies.

Not having to ask "will the product I rely on today exist tomorrow?"

No, I do not. Google needs new leadership. There’s something to be said about trying things, but this continued uncertainty is killing their brand.

> but this continued uncertainty is killing their brand.

There stock price would say otherwise: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/?guccounter=1

Until people stop using their service(s) then, no, their brand is not dying.

Their stock price reflects their ad moat, and nothing more.

In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.

They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?

If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.

I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.

BlackBerry’s stock price was at its peak in 2010. 3 years after the iPhone came out and a year or so after Android started becoming popular.

I’m not saying Google is going to fail. But GCP seems like a dead man limping

> But GCP seems like a dead man limping

Sure is... https://www.statista.com/statistics/478176/google-public-clo...

Well GCPs profit was a meager $191 million last quarter

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/q1-2023-cloud-res...

And even that is only because of GSuite

We're not talking about profit (which is dictated by depreciation of capital intensive investments), we're talking about adoption the service. GCP is alive and well.

> And even that is only because of GSuite

Where do you see that?

Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.

They’ve always included GSuite

https://www.zdnet.com/article/alphabet-beats-q4-estimates-go...

> For Q4 2020, Google Cloud -- which includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite

> They’ve always included GSuite

I wasn't saying that. You have no idea what % of overall revenue is GSuite vs core GCP. Until you do, your "mostly gsuite" is purely speculation.

> Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.

I wasn't hand waving away depreciation. I was saying the depreciation (which is when capital hits the IS) is very likely going to outpace revenue for years given the growth rate of cloud adoption. We're talking at least another 10 years before they stop allocating capital towards data centers. To illustrate this further:

year 0 - $1B for data center buildings + server racks

year 5 - $200M for refresh of server racks

So, profit will come much much later. Amazon has proven this many times over.

> this continued uncertainty is their brand

FIFY.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

If it doesn't shove an ad in someone's face, Google is structurally incapable of caring about it.

I remember reading about dream workplace called Google where devs can join or leave any team for credits to count towards promotions, with a catch that helping others and/or bothering yourself with low-impact maintenance tasks could risk your employment.

If that's actually how Google works, it does sound structural.

List is missing Google Play Music

This. The Ads priiiint money, anything else looks unimportant.

Sure, if you want to fade into history as an ultimately irrelevant ad network that simply had the novel ideal of tying ads into internet search early on in the internet’s youth and became popular and rich for a decade, then take this stance.

> Sure, if you want to fade into history as an ultimately irrelevant ad network that simply had the novel ideal of tying ads into internet search early on in the internet’s youth and became popular and rich for a decade, then take this stance.

The problem with any current leader is that they do want to do this. Or, rather, they don't care if they do. Who cares what Google will look like in the long run? They'll be gone. Right now, they presided over the appearance of continued growth, and that's what matters.

(I have no internal knowledge about Google, of course, but I am at a university, whose plan is (1) attract more students, (2) more students, (3) more, (4) start thinking about what to do with all these students.)

Founder run companies care and even hand picked successors to founders who are “company men”. The Google CEO is just a suit.

If you look at all of the Big Tech companies - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, (yes I left off Netflix, it’s a nothingburger compared to those five), Google is the only one that seems to be rudderless without a long term plan or vision.

> Founder run companies care and even hand picked successors to founders who are “company men”. The Google CEO is just a suit.

Sundar has been at Google since 2004 and Larry Page hand-picked him.

So in other words. He is just incompetent. That throws that thesis out of the window.

Im not saying that is what they want, but it looks like what is happening to me. Ads was not new, it was selling internet search ads on a open auction that was novel.

Counter point, I've been using a VoIP service called GrandCentral since college. Google purchased them. Nearly 20 years later, I'm still using that same number with far more feature. In this case, Squarespace acquired Google Domains. Assuming the transition as seamless as GrandCentral was for me, what's the issue here? From what I've heard of Squarespace and their support, they will be just as good a custodian as Google.

Bandwidth.com mostly runs that service and they have proven themselves a competant business that Google built other products like GOOG-411 off of. Google Voice is just a frontend to it.

I think if it ran entirely on Google's infra and the service itself could be killed like the registrar was it would have been killed years ago (notably it stagnated from like 2012-2018 or so and there was a period of time they had a half-assed panel redesign and the product blog for it wasn't updated for years)

Can you get a number from bandwidth.com directly? Google Voice is invaluable.

You can but they don't really do B2C, their B2B has come down for small businesses but still requires a larger commitment then makes sense for a phone number or two.

Unrelated, but I've found it bizarre Google Voice doesn't do RCS but they made a big push otherwise to enable it for their Messages app.

The problem is, organizationally, it's a mesh network. If no one is kept on a single product for long, how can a product survive turnover rates when the next shiny object appears? It's a game of musical chairs.

Google is about ads and AI. Everything else is a distraction.

gmail? docs?

If google cancelled either of those I'd be very surprised and equally disappointed.

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