Google’s new IoT Core service helps businesses manage their IoT data and devices
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I had the pleasure to work with IoT and the Lora protocol writing and managing a Lora network server, the piece of software that takes Lora messages send through radio and decode them from radio -> udp -> MQTT (encrypted) -> MQTT (clear) [shameless plug, I packed my experience in an on-premises service: http://loranetworkserver.com/ ]
The difficult part I believe is this one, after you got the MQTT message in clear what you do with it is quite simple, straightforward and overall a solved problem (unless you are not getting millions of messages per seconds, but very few businesses have such load).
From what I understood from the google page they are solving the simpler problem of getting the data from an MQTT message and save it to disk, and maybe use later for data mining. It is weird because I wouldn't accept to have my data saved in someone else disk, at the bare minimum I would require to have the data duplicated in some standard (pg, MySQL, mongo) db (even a db managed by AWS or Google, but a standard one that I can move at will).
It doesn't seems the most valuable piece of architecture that they could develop.
But that would mean competing with partners , so it has its own issues.
Maybe by focusing on something like authentication , and offering Google branded security , they could both achieve some lock-in in and not scare partners ?
Honestly I see IoT a lot like Machine Learning, everybody is talking about it, everybody want to be part of the game, but there is not a clear solution.
Businesses have very specific use cases that require some, not trivial, understanding of the technology, to be fulfilled in full. Even more to actually use the data gathered.
For the foreseeable future I see the need to a quite senior figure to enable IoT in businesses.
Once a senior figure has such data in clear, a way to mine value out of that data I see at least unlikely that she is going to push all of that only on google only to fetch then back once you need to do your visualization or analysis. Maybe if you are completely sold to the google ecosystem, it may make sense, but still...
Works pretty well, and the Business Intelligence backend is pretty powerful. Not sure what Google's version of that is here.
It might be a useful service for B2C devices though.
I don't actually use either of these platforms currently. I put together an in house platform for the few features I need. Provisioning new device firmware and updating are probably my biggest pains. Yocto is kind of awful as well, but its the best that we have right now.