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.
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.
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.
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...
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.