Google Cloud this week announced the shutdown of its IoT Core service, giving customers a year to switch to a partner to manage their IoT devices.
The ad appeared at the top of the IoT Core webpage this week with little fanfare. The company also sent an email to customers announcing the change.
He believes that having partners running the process for clients is a better way to go. “Since the launch of IoT Core, it has become clear that our customers’ needs can be better served by our network of partners who specialize in IoT applications and services,” a Google spokesperson explained.
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Google is also aware of its reputation for abruptly shutting down services, and a Google Cloud spokesperson was keen to point out that they’re trying to make the move as seamless as possible for customers. “We have worked hard to provide customers with migration options and alternative solutions, and are offering a one-year path before shutting down IoT Core.”
That may be the case, but it certainly didn’t satisfy Hacker News commentators, who were highly critical of the news and questioned Google Cloud’s commitment to its customers.
Competitors AWS and Microsoft offer similar services, which allow customers to manage their IoT devices, while ingesting and understanding all data from those devices.
Holger Muller, an analyst at Constellation Research, found it interesting that Google shut down this particular service after all the hype around the Internet of Things we’ve heard in recent years. “This is important. The Internet of Things was supposed to be the big driver of cloud loads for cloud service providers.”
Mueller said the big three cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google – haven’t had much innovation in their IoT services. “All three were still somewhat in their offerings, allowing the major niche vendors to catch up. Now, these niche IoT providers are running on all three major cloud infrastructures, and they’re getting these workloads anyway without investing in and maintaining a software platform “. But so far, Google has only announced that it will abandon its core IoT service.
Ultimately, it could have something to do with the mounting losses the company has faced in the cloud division as it struggles to catch up with rivals Amazon and Microsoft. The investment appears to be working with the company, which has more than $6 billion in revenue. In its latest earnings report last month, up from $4.6 billion a year earlier. But the division also posted losses of $858 million, a much larger gap than last year’s loss of $591 million.
It’s worth noting that the broader cloud infrastructure market is growing rapidly, and Google could invest heavily to get more of that over time, taking losses in the short term. Synergy Research reported last month that the market was worth about $55 billion last quarter, with Google acquiring 10% of that amount. It was good for third place behind Amazon at 34% and Microsoft at 21%. The market, which includes infrastructure as a service, platform as a service as well as hosted private cloud services, grew 31% in the second quarter of 2022. (Google’s $6 billion cloud includes additional services beyond what matters synergy, hence the difference between The synergy account and what Alphabet has reported in relation to Google Cloud revenue.)
Google published a blog post last July that explained its basics when it comes to changing or stopping a service. To that end, the company said, “If neglect or drastic change is inevitable, it is up to us to make migration as easy as possible.”
Regardless of the written policy, clients such as the clients at Hacker News feel as if they have been left in limbo. To a large extent, commentators see this as a trust issue, and Google Cloud will have to address it, especially as it tries to increase the split.