Google announced this week that it’s shutting down its Google Cloud IoT Core in about one year – a move that’s unlikely to leave a big impact on mobile service providers.
The announcement appeared at the top of its IoT Core website, and as TechCrunch noted, it came amid little fanfare. The service is being retired on August 16, 2023.
According to Josh Taubenheim, MachNation's head IoT analyst, Google is shutting it down for two reasons.
First, “Google cancels products,” he said. It’s shown time and time again that Google discontinues support for things that aren’t going in its favor. Taubenheim said Google has axed no less than 20 major product releases over the past decade.
The second reason has to do with Google’s track record in the IoT space. Of the three hyperscale cloud providers, Google’s IoT offering “is the worst of the group,” he said. “Google has failed to adhere to current security standards, modernize their platform, and has added few to no new features since inception,” he said, pointing to MachNation’s score cards on the deficiencies that are referenced here and here.
From the perspective of a communication service provider (CSP), the Google announcement is really not a huge surprise and not much of a blow, he told Fierce. “No CSP, that MachNation is aware of at least, has built its critical IoT infrastructure on Google IoT Core,” he said.
As for enterprises that might be using Google’s IoT solutions, it’s quite unlikely that many were leveraging CSP tools to route IoT data to Google IoT Core simply because Google’s IoT offering is “lackluster and poorly maintained,” he said. For those few that were, MachNation offers some advice on routes they can take.
“The summary here is that Google IoT Core has always lagged behind the competition of other hyperscale cloud providers like [Microsoft] Azure and AWS,” he said. “It became pretty clear within the first couple of years that Google was not committed to improving or maintaining their IoT platform and we can see the result of that now.”
Google has a history of killing services that are not performant. “They throw things at the wall and see what sticks because they are Google and have the money to do so,” he said. “Clearly, their venture into IoT cloud services did not stick.”