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 wjat this really signals to me is that Google has lost all capacity to be forward thinking, trendy and innovative. And without that, what is Google?
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.
What are my alternatives besides Office365?
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.
Have been a customer for years, great service run by humans.
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.
Zoho is an alternative, can do custom domains, website hosting, email, productivity suite.
If you have any issues, a real person will answer your support ticket.
You can have up to 3 domains configured per family.
And I really really don't like iCloud's file system.
Protonmail ? If its email you're after you can point your MX at them.
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.
Domain registration is famously difficult to profit from unless the registrar is able to upsell
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Sundar has been at Google since 2004 and Larry Page hand-picked him.
If that's actually how Google works, it does sound structural.
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.
I’m not saying Google is going to fail. But GCP seems like a dead man limping
Sure is... https://www.statista.com/statistics/478176/google-public-clo...
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/q1-2023-cloud-res...
And even that is only because of GSuite
> And even that is only because of GSuite
Where do you see that?
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
If google cancelled either of those I'd be very surprised and equally disappointed.
Take Gmail as an example: they unilaterally decided to discontinue support for admin-set signatures on their iPhone app, without any prior announcement.
Here's the relevant support thread: https://support.google.com/mail/thread/232355527?hl=en
I believe there's an underlying issue at play: Google engineering and management seems to overlook the impact that abrupt changes like this have on businesses that depend on their services.