A Coursera class on Google IoT Core for industrial control started today. 77,000 people signed up.
Hopefully they'll learn that if it's locked down to being tied to one person's cloud it's likely to become a paperweight in a few years.
I think the people that still think Stadia is gonna shut down any time soon are just the gamer blogs/communities that have been running shutdown rumor pieces every month or so for the last 3 years. (Most recently the killedbygoogle guy's "my friend heard on facebook that Stadia's shutting down..." post that went viral.)
Stadia's actively signing hardware deals with Samsung/LG and other smart TV manufacturers, and about to expand availability to even more countries. AFAICT most people that actually play on Stadia don't think it'll shut down any time soon.
Stadia isn't going anywhere soon, or the people working in the division haven't been told and have continued spending money left and right with partnership deals, which would be a weird waste of money.
LOL, that is Google 101.
Allow me to introduce you to the Google Graveyard[1]
Also not just killing but making worse like the Nvidia Shield.
How are there still googlw apologists?
Not to make more generalizations, but I think you'll find that people that like Stadia like it because they actually like the Stadia product (surprise!) -- and people that hate on Stadia often do so because they have other issues with the company behind it.
Sure, Google might shut down Stadia someday. That'd be unfortunate but not too unexpected. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure enjoying a product that's been around for years and shows no indication that it'll go away any time soon doesn't make you an apologist for the megacorp behind that product.
I'm sure one could be pro stadia/cloud gaming and still be cognizant of the garbage google pulls.
I am glad you are enjoying stadia, and I truly hope it'll be one of the services that survive, maybe it'll improve cloud gaming issues to the point I'd be on board.
But the op was in here touting google rarely closes paid offerings, ignoring they dont have many paid offerings and those are every bit at risk of being 'googled' like all their other services.
Google's own track record is every reason for me to put zero trust in them.
It's not Google apologizism to state the obvious that Stadia is getting money and time thrown at it to this very day, so it's unlikely that it will get killed soon, and pointing out the difference with the majority of the killed products which were usually on maintenance mode for prolonged periods of time before being killed (IoT Core included), not to mention in 99% of cases, free.
Stadia has the best UX by far of all cloud gaming platforms. It needs Google to show long term commitment by signing a few more big third party deals, and improving hardware and thus stream quality. Without that it will languish as a niche, with it it could get successful.
Google are still investing money and in Stadia. It's unlikely they'll shut it down soon. In most of the things they killed, there had been no investment for some time before the official announcement.
That’s actually just a Coursera marketing tactic. Most of their courses are not real-time and are self-paced content.
So, they act like they are starting the course “Today” every day, and the 77k enrolled is the # of enrolled users forever since the course has been offered. Totally misleading!
If Google Cloud (VMs, blob storage, databases) shut down, not only will large # of enterprises howl (data gravity is huge), Google will absolutely have no future in any enterprise product ever again.
I do expect them to aggressively trim small products from the cloud lineup that aren't worth the engineering investment. IoT clouds were a popular thing for several months and then people realized there wasn't a huge market or tons of profit.
This is a reflection of AWS being "customer obsessed" where Google is not.
By not doing this, they make it hard for their customers to be multi-regional.
It is easy to spin "customer obsession" any way you like.
If a customer is not multi-region already, and if Amazon hasn't promised multi-region availability, then the customer has simply chosen the wrong product. It's not in anyone's interest for Amazon to waste resources rolling out a product that they can't sell, just because maybe someone wants to expand their existing use.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/volkswagen-vid...
This was my second biggest fear after waking up to a ransomware attack.
It's hard to imagine anyone trusting Google for IoT again. I will certainly put them at the bottom of my list for any other infrastructure I develop against in the future, and ensure that we have a documented exit strategy should it come to pass.
The idea of having just one year to develop against a new IoT core, test it, update all deployed devices, and then coordinate logistics and budget to do truck rolls when things invariably go wrong is really grinding my gears.
I feel for all of the startups having to deal with this. To the folks who are invariably scrambling, I really hope you either got advanced notice, or you're getting an extension far beyond what is publicized. Edit: The more I think about this, the more I want to believe there must be contracts in place for certain customers that extend the lifetime of this product beyond what is public. There must be.
IoT is not an easy business. Designing and programming hardware is hard. Supply chains are hard. Maintaining working inventory is hard. Building logistics networks for installation and maintenance is hard. Courting and explaining to investors why you don't have the profit margins of a pure SaaS business is hard. Relying on your cloud provider to give you more than 1 year notice should be the easy part.
Isn't that exactly what contracts are for? Can you build an entire company on the premise that some random cloud service will always be available?
Changing the ingress endpoint shouldn't be a big deal via OTA or configuration change. The lack of such configuration in the first place would be concerning for any new devices.
Ransomware attack it's a real threat.
I mean, presumably they decided the IoT vertical just wasn't for them altogether.
If Google intended some new service to take this one's place, they would have 1. launched it before deprecating this one; and 2. built a backend shim to route data sent to the old API into the new backend, so that people's code wouldn't have to change. (Like they did for Firebase, and for Stackdriver, and for anything else they actually cared about keeping the business of the customers of.)
This move, meanwhile, clearly sends the message of "we don't want to be in this business; stop trying to buy this kind of service from us; just go away." It's the feel of being on the receiving end of the "fire your [bad] customers" advice — just applied to "firing" an entire (bad?) market.
The big thing I’d like is to have Google Cloud broken out as a separate business. While it’s true that shutting it down would harm them, I haven’t gotten the impression that their management are especially concerned. As an enterprise customer of both, AWS seems way more motivated not just to develop their service but also just to do things like show up. Trying to get GCP people to sell things like Anthos was surprisingly hard, like they thought it was 2005 and people would buy just because of their name.
What's funny is there was a core of engineers back in 2009 who understood everything necessary to get the technical side of Cloud to be competitive with AWS, and mostly succeeded, but by then, it was clear that Google simply didn't know how to market to enterprises. The whole thing was a squandered opportunity and I simply did not understand at the time (2009-2011) just how unprepared Google's leadership was to expand beyond ads.
That's a succinct and on-point observation.
More likely they have the same problem Intel had. Intel had a lucrative impossible to replicate business in processors. As a result they regularly abandoned one market segment after another because they couldn't get the gross margin they expected. Googles doing the same exact thing.
Other problem is googles business is backwards in that they set the requirements out for what they'll do not the supposed see above customer. All these other business ventures have customers with strict demands that they want met.
I deployed a large restaurant equipment project on Azure backends and couldn't be happier.
I've made a policy of not touching Google for anything embedded-related and it continues to pay off.
I guess, yeah, anything non-AdWords related is a hobby. For Google.
But there is nothing like BigQuery on the market elsewhere, Cloud Run and PubSub are standout services that others have tried to emulate and haven't got near it, plus everything on GCP doesn't feel like either an afterthought (AWS) or a cobbling together of mismanaged and old-version open source services (AWS & Azure).
2017 + 5 = 2022 :-P
https://www.vox.com/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-spen...
So they suckered one big company into signing a deal with them. Hell, maybe they even suckered a handful into doing so. But there are good reasons that Google is barely (if that) playing on the same level as AWS or Azure. Last I saw they had about 10% of the cloud computing market, compared to well over 50% for AWS and Azure combined. And I don't think it's any kind of stretch to suggest that Google's reputation for lacking long-term commitment to its products is one of those reasons.
And make no mistake... I take no glee or joy in saying this. I was a google fanboy (like many people my age) for quite a few years after Google first came along. And I'm still a fan on many levels. I don't want Google to fail, I just think they are going to fail (at selling to the enterprise at least) if they keep displaying the behaviors they keep displaying. Now the Search and Adwords businesses might sustain them indefinitely, so I don't expect them to go out of business. But as far as selling SaaS services, especially ones targeted at enterprise users, it's clear that Google just does not "get it." And I doubt they ever will. So unless they're going to find a way to change that state of affairs, I suggest they just exit this line of business. It would be easier for everybody, IMO.
Google has a long history of experimenting with a product and then shutting down once they've learned enough. Maybe they learn it's not as lucrative, maybe they learn how to build the tech, maybe they learn they're too late, whatever. But it's experimental and the experiment doesn't prove to be the "next billion users" so it wanes and then dies.
Not every product is like that. Cloud isn't just some product on a spreadsheet next to IoT Core. The heavy players like Cloud, YouTube, Ads, etc, have massive investment, have dedicated CEOs, and are in it for the long haul.
Google's deprecation policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to every product uniformly.