What can we learn from Google Domains?

Google Domains is being sold to Squarespace, per Bloomberg.

This is the latest — the 286th, in fact — in a long line of defunct Google projects.

What are we to do? What lessons can we learn from yet another product — one that was healthy, well-recommended, and perfectly functional — being sold off and abandoned?

No piece of closed-source software can promise to last forever — as Big K.R.I.T. reminds us, forever is a mighty long time, and I think it's fair to treat any promises of "forever" with a good amount of suspicion.

But you can certainly increase the average lifespan of the tools you use by asking yourself a simple question:

Could this piece of software, as it currently exists, stand with its current market and functionality in its current organization for a decade without catastrophe?

This eliminates, for instance, software that runs on a negative cash-flow basis with hopes of stumbling into advantageous unit economics or a new business model somewhere along the way.

This eliminates, for instance, software that represents a 0.0001% component of a company's top-line revenue — if the company has a mandate that all projects must purport to be sufficiently large lines of business or else they're failures.

All of this to say: Buttondown has been a happy DNSimple customer for years on end, and is even prouder to be one today. (Porkbun looks excellent, too.)