Actually there is something special about Google for that service. It's not their core business.

Unlike other registrars who would typically be happy with being profitable & having typical growth, Google may be unsatisfied with such a result and consider shutting it down. Namecheap will keep their business open even if they have a soft quarter.

Further, a service for domain registration will struggle because it's targeted at an audience with heightened awareness of Google's tendency to put their products & services onto the chopping block. They've created a chicken & egg problem for themselves; they will shutdown their products because they don't get enough traction, and they don't get enough traction because everyone expects them to shutdown.

Eh, startups 'pivot' all the time. Fun fact: Mongo, formerly 10gen, was originally a cloud/web-hosting service. They pivoted to just publish their database, which is cool, but if you were one of the early customers it kind of leaves you high and dry.

Well, not all companies are get-big-quick-fast-and-sell-or-die Silicon Valley VC-funded "startups". Many registrars have been around for years and making decent money doing that and are likely to be around for time to come.

Iron Mountain was a mushroom farm for 20 years, until the mushroom market crashed and the owner needed another use for his abandoned iron mine. Tandy Leather took a brief detour through consumer electronics, purchasing Radio Shack and selling the Tandy computer, before eventually going back to leather.

It took a mushroom market crash to ruin Iron Mountain. Was there a crash in people seeking help with stuff between Google launching & shutting down Helpouts?

The point is that Google didn't need Helpouts, Google Wallet, Google Reader, Google Checkout, etc. They have a core business. If one of those products had been their core business, they likely would have kept going. Each of the products they shutdown is typically profitable to some degree, or could be made profitable. Google shuts them down because they've have too little traction for Google to stay interested, but if they were companies in their own right, they would likely continue.

You're right, so the informed customer is likely to avoid both Google (and other large companies where the product/service isn't the core business) as well as startups.

It's unfortunate for startups, but also a reality. For large businesses, they can mitigate this effect over time by sticking by anything that they launch and seeing it through. Microsoft did that to an extent beyond what anyone expected when it came to Zune, for example. Google has developed a reputation for doing exactly the opposite. In fact, with Google Wallet they're shutting down pretty much the most compelling payments service for digital goods that the web has seen. Why? They never promoted it properly, and as a result web developers generally don't even know it exists.

I guess what I wanted to call attention to that was relevant to Google was:

1) Did users lose anything by trying Helpouts that was special? Besides time, which comes with trying anything new. 2) Google tries really hard to warn users of services shutting down. Google Reader had a bunch of notice. Wave ended up being open sourced and handed off to a different project manager. 3) Google tries hard to avoid vendor lock-in. Take a look at https://www.google.com/settings/takeout or I can use the example of Google+ photo albums that put the download or export button front and center so I can upload them to Flickr if I want.

Now don't think I'm a huge Google advocate blind to their issues. In fact, what I was trying to call out was a healthy amount of skepticism to their product launches based on previous situations and comments around Google.

Google Reader didn't allow export of all the saved blogs they had archived that were no longer live. You had to write your own scraper to get the data out of Reader.