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).

> It's basically Google One with the tradeoff of my rough edges in exchange for hosting my own final

I must not have been awake when I wrote this...

It should be "the tradeoff of the rough edges in exchange for hosting my own domain".

Nobody is getting a promotion for fixing that shit

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.

On average, they sure put out better customer service than the likes of Google and Meta.

I'm not sure "better customer service for an equally bad product" is what really moves the needle for me.

How smaller company will have other incentive for middle managers?

Small companies I've been working in are sometimes even worse.

Web app which takes 10+ sec to fully load? That's ok, focus on the new features!

> Web app which takes 10+ sec to fully load? That's ok, focus on the new features!

This web app wouldn't survive unless it already had backing of the Microsoft level or did offer immense unique value to its users.

It's rather lack of choice. You are going to use app of your utilities provider no matter how crappy it is.

I wish Google weren't like this, but I don't agree it should be illegal.