Our entire company runs on Google products. I really, really like Google Workspace as a platform for a small-medium non-tech company such as the one I work for, where I'm one of two developers. But them killing Domains (where all our domains are registered, of course) is the last straw for me trusting Google to follow through with anything. Domains is so...boring, I guess?...that I never expected them to pull the rug out from under it. I kinda don't really care where my domains are registered, but the fact that Google already offers a suite of everything meant that going with Google Domains was the obvious choice. As I see it, that's the value proposition: they do it all, and it's all reasonably integrated, so just go all-in on Google services. But that only works if you trust all those services to stay around. With each product that's killed, that value proposition plummets exponentially.

The pros of Google Workspace/Cloud:

- Everything (for us) can be Google: from general business stuff like email/calendar/etc to storage (Drive and/or Cloud Storage) to automating tons of it via their Cloud API (or Google Apps Script, when that's the right tool for the job).

- Everyone at my company, especially the non-technical folks (i.e. the majority of people in my company) "gets" Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Drive, etc. It's ubiquitous, and so selling administration, billing etc on "let's just go all-in on Google" is easy.

- We don't need S3 storage, but we do need a lot of (mostly hot) storage, with easy collaboration. Because user accounts pool Drive storage company-wide, we mostly use that for our cloud storage needs. So, 99% of our storage needs are effectively free, because we're paying for those user accounts anyway. This saves us thousands upon thousands of dollars per year, and that's not even accounting for the employee time needed to integrate and work with S3(-compatible) storage.

- The Cloud API is pretty solid, the documentation is generally good, and it's language-agnostic, making hiring that much easier as we expand the team and automate more processes.

- It's all good enough, and rightly or wrongly, it doesn't have the Microsoft "smell" -- a lot of my non-technical peers are in my experience quite resistant to Microsoft-anything, even though they arguably have a much better track record of not killing products.

The cons:

- I don't trust Google anymore. I expect them to kill or radically alter any of these core products at a moment's notice.

That one con completely obliterates all of the above very compelling pros.

There's honestly nothing else quite like Google Workspace. AWS is massively beyond our needs or budget. Microsoft 365 is perfectly fine for mail/calendar/Office/etc but not for the Google Cloud side of things (I sure as hell am not touching Azure, and their 365 API documentation is a mess).

The only other option is to roll our own set of modular services, which is something we've looked into quite a bit, but there's always a show-stopper somewhere, not least of which is the thought of someone else eventually inheriting this stuff if/when I move on. At the end of the day, rolling it yourself and maintaining it simply requires more chops and time on the part of the employee(s), and I shudder at the thought of essentially building a cathedral that others allow to rot once I leave, one big reason being that the middle of the venn diagram of "the skillset of people who would find themselves applying for my position" and "Linux sysadmin chops" don't really overlap at all.

Philosophically, I prefer moving the monetary cost from closed-source platforms to the salaries of developers collaborating on open-source products; but for our company's particular use-case, we're ultimately not a tech company, we're a media company, with a lot of tech-focus, yes, but not in terms of building products -- rather, we simply do as all companies in 2023 probably should do, and leverage as much automation as possible to keep things efficient, organized, scalable...generally, keep it on the up-and-up.

I'm sure that I'm not alone in feeling this way. There is a vast, vast I-dare-say "silent majority" of companies out there that are in this weird middle ground -- too small for AWS, not tech-focused-enough to build it themselves, but still need a solid suite of...everything required to run a business, and the tools to automate processes as needed. I know that Google Workspace is in the "enterprise" side of things and thus is less likely to be killed off, but...also, who knows? Google is so obviously completely aimless that I truly do not trust them anymore, and yet I don't see a truly viable alternative.