And God forbid you were an early Google for Domains adopter and have your own Google Workspace account because nothing fucking works right for those poor saps.
You think that's bad? I had my own Google Workspace account with Google Domains and then foolishly linked my Google Fi cellphone to it.
Trying to get that stuff resolved was such a pain that I eventually had to ask a friend who knew someone that worked at Google for assistance. Their support team had absolutely no public contact info available. I eventually managed to get my data and migrate the services I actually use (Google Fi and Youtube) to a non-workspace account.
The funny thing is that a few months later they tried to send a $60 bill to collections because they reopened the account for 2 days for me to migrate things off. I was originally going to pay it to just get them off my back, but Google's own collections agency wouldn't let me pay through card or check or anything. The only way I could pay was to "Log into your Google Workspace account" which NO LONGER EXISTED.
Now it's just an amusing story about incompetence to look back on, but at the time it was stressful because I almost lost my domains, cell phone number, and email addresses all at once. Now I never trust anything to a single company.
Ironically, I stopped paying for a workspace a few years ago when I shutdown a startup. The workspace got suspended and removed. I am still able to use it across any service requiring a Google account, which makes me think that if I buy a failed startup domain and sign up I could get access to their data.
This issue alone is driving me to switch to Microsoft for a particular use-case where I inherited a Google Apps for Domains account. Why anyone who knows the history of Google's behaviour with respect to supporting businesses that are not advertisers, would still choose Google over other options, continues to baffle me.
My Google Workspace account is my personal, single-user domain.
IMO, Google is still the best option. I like GMail (their spam filtering is nearly flawless), Google Drive and Docs is the right mix of working and complexity, Google Photos integrates well with what I use, etc.
It's basically Google One with the tradeoff of my rough edges in exchange for hosting my own final.
I've occasionally looked at switching away (to proton, MSFT, etc) and the most likely switch would be to a personal Google account.
I'm arguably "in too deep" because it'll soon be 20 years that I'm a google customer for that domain. At the time they were definitely the best option (I used to even self-host DNS for my domain on my home desktop).
In the corporate world, having faced a mix of options over my career, I still prefer the google stack (with the exception of google chat which I last used 3 years ago and wow was that bad at the time).
Does google know this startegy just makes people less likely to sign up for their new shiny services, as the "killed by google" meme spreads more and more
I worked at Google for ten years (as an IC). Here's my personal perspective.
Yes, of course, the individual employees know. But the decision making for these kinds of things is usually a full-time middle manager, who isn't deciding on behalf of Google as a whole, but on behalf of their organization within Google (could be 50 people, could be 2000). It's not just _not_ that manager's job to make the globally optimal decision for Google, it's actually likely often in direct conflict with their job, which is basically "set the priorities of your org such that they launch things that make your boss look good to his boss". Spending headcount on maintaining niche stuff is usually not that (and takes resources away from whatever is).
And this is exactly why they need to be broken up. If that offering was their core service, you can bet it would be the priority of the middle managers.
I'm personally unconvinced that smaller companies put out better products, and that breaking up google would raise the bar either at the new entities, or at the competition.
The integration between Google products is definitely one of the things that keeps me with them.
I've seen more than a few companies that are no better at their core service than the giants.
