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by tlogan 1014 days ago
I've raised this question several times, but it bears repeating: What's Google's rationale behind this decision?

Domain management appears to be a crucial component of a comprehensive cloud solution. It may serve as a loss leader, but it's undeniably an effective entry point for both Google Workspace and Google Cloud. After all, competitors like AWS and Cloudflare offer this service.
3 comments
thomasrognon 1014 days ago
GCP still has domain management via Cloud DNS. That isn't going away. This is just domain registration. I say this as someone who uses Google Domains and GCP and is upset at this decision.
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surajrmal 1014 days ago
GCP is still retaining domain registration as well. The backing registrar is changing, but the Google Cloud Domains product is unaffected otherwise.
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prepend 1014 days ago
I think it’s because GCP isn’t profitable and so they don’t want a loss leader for a product line that isn’t competitive with their other internal products.

Typically you don’t want loss leaders for things that aren’t strategic or very profitable.

Google is not a cloud company. So this is probably just reallocating resources toward more important things.

I bet if domains was a loss leader to AdWords it would stick around.

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jsnell 1014 days ago
Google Cloud reported profits in the last two quarters, and seems to be the thing they have been reallocating resources to this year, not from.

I think the reality is just that Google Domains was not (and never had been) a product of the Cloud organization and was not subject to their decision making process. But obviously that's not how anybody outside the company would have viewed it; they don't know the internal org charts nor care about them.

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tlogan 1014 days ago
I think this is the best and the most logical explanation.
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paganel 1014 days ago
> Typically you don’t want loss leaders for things that aren’t strategic or very profitable.

So does that mean that GCP itself is on the chopping block? I seem to remember a similar discussion regarding its future was in the air about 2-3 years ago.

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prepend 1014 days ago
I thought they would cut it years ago, but it’s sticking around.

It’s still a distant 3rd place, but it used to be fourth and seems to have doubled from 5-10% in the last 5 years. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/06/even-as-cloud-infrastructu...

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bananapub 1013 days ago
I would wager "focus" and symbolic headcount reduction.
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