At this point, it seems like Google just can’t help themselves. They just love killing products.

It’s hard to know what else to say that I haven’t already covered in other posts, but somehow they still surprise me. This week, Google announced that they are selling their Google Domains to Squarespace.

Google Domains is yet another useful service to get the ax in favor of “focus”“

Google sunsets Domains business and shovels it off to Squarespace

Listen, some products it makes sense for them to kill off. Honestly if you go read Google Graveyard’s website, most people wouldn’t have ever even heard of most of them. And I completely understand that you can’t be good at too many products. Apple is a company that for the most part is really good at staying focused on what they do well (though there are definitely some areas I could complain about, I’ll leave that for another time. I think overall they do an excellent job at focus, particularly for their size). But with Google, I don’t think there’s any evidence of focus going on. Look at their constantly changing absolute cluster f*** of messaging apps, just as one particularly messy example - A very brief history of every Google messaging app

To me, it seems obvious where Google should be focusing, and they even say similar things from time to time. Google Workspace and Google Cloud Platform are 2 of the biggest areas they should be razor focused on right now, I’d say even more than ever given that they essentially squandered their huge lead in AI. First and foremost, Google is an internet services company. As such, domain registration and DNS should be absolutely key. For years we used Amazon’s Route 53, which despite being more complicated than I feel like it needs to be, it was rock solid, very developer minded, and had all the dials and knobs you would ever want to use when doing public DNS routing. Google Domains was more customer focused, but it seemed for a while like Google was slowly getting their heads out of their a**es in that regard with Google Cloud Domains, which unfortunately to this day is still pretty half baked for many use cases.

To be fair, I’m not clear on whether this sale includes Google Cloud Domains, or if this is literally just the “consumer” portion of Google Domains, but regardless it reiterates the notion that Google will kill any product any time because they can’t focus, and that makes it really hard to rely on them as a business. This frustrates me so much because I really like most of the products Google makes. They truly are one of the best (I would argue THE best) at planet scale infrastructure, and web applications. Somehow translating that enormous amount of talent, engineering, technology, footprint, etc. in to products people can rely on has been a struggle.

I could go on about this, but at the end of the day, there’s yet another really great product that I recommended to people that is being killed off for reasons that make no sense to me. I’m sure it wasn’t a huge money maker for them, but I also know that they have a serious reputation problem and every one of these is making that worse. They really need to get their shit together over there or other companies are going to keep chipping away at their dominance. If they can lose the lead in AI, they can lose their lead in anything they are doing.

For the record, I have moved all of my personal domains (and the customers I work with) over to Cloudflare, both for DNS records and for domain registration. I have been and continue to be very impressed with Cloudflare as a company and their products, and they do not mark up domain costs, which is very nice as well. It’s not the most user friendly registrar for someone who doesn’t understand DNS (I’d say “consumer” in this case), but it’s pretty straight forward compared to things like Route 53, and extremely powerful.

Also, I do want to state that I quite like Squarespace. I have done several websites with them and will likely continue to do so in the future. I just don’t like this move, and I don’t particularly like having the domain name and website in the same place. I don’t know what Squarespace is planning on doing with this purchase but to date they also don’t have great DNS settings. I hope that changes, but regardless, I don’t blame Squarespace in this scenario.