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It appears CFOs at Alphabet (Googles parent company) are responding positively to predictions of big name market forecasters (like Garner andForrester).

In this article, Edgy Labs covers how and why cloud computing continues to shape IIoT and the future of the tech industry itself.

As we discussed last week, the technologies we currently rely on are becoming more and more affiliated with data collection, storage, and exchange. With the announcements from Googles Marketing Next 2017 and Apples WWDC 2017 keynote conferences it appears tech will continue to be vitally connected to the IoT world.

The short answer is: to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft.

The current market is being driven by IIoT predictors (read: Cloud platforms). Apparently: connecting your payment services, personal documents, pictures, and music into the same service makes it extraordinarily difficult to switch cloud providers.

The result? Most customers simply stick to the brand of cloud they use first.

However, Garner reports that worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 18 percent in 2017 to a total of $246.8 billion.

In order to capture the momentum of cloud computing Google has taken part in a rigorous series of mergers as part of a larger plan to incorporate third party developments as needs of software design shifts.

The main thing that weve said is that the primary use for that [pile of cash] is organic growth and acquisition growth. We look at acquisitions all the time. Weve done some really important ones for us YouTube and DoubleClick and others came to us through acquisition. But we have a high bar. The acquisitions that weve talked about really in particular fill in holes in cloud and thats been really valuable, says Googles CFO Ruth Porat.

Watch the full Code Conference interview with Ruth Porat and Kara Swisher:

2013: Talaria Technologies, Michael Avalon2014: Stackdriver, Zync Render2015: bebop (drone technology)2016: Anvato (cloud-based video services); Orbitera; Apigee (API and predictive analysis)2017: Kaggle

Since 2016, Google has has three primary focuses when coming to mergers and acquisitions of startup research.

List of mergers and acquisitions by Alphabet

Cloud technologies that store personal data will be integral both tounderstanding big data and giving customers a highly individualized experience.

Content creation and independent contracting seem to be overtaking the digital market.

As Strategy& suggests, one reason for this is that [the internet] has democratized access to creation and distribution tools, and blurred the boundaries between professional and amateur content in the creative sector.

What does this mean for the future of jobs?

In a world without work: some fear that automatization and information sharing will lead to an undesirable social transformation. Others report that by 2050 there will be a new class of not just unemployed, but unemployable people.

However, as demonstrated in a new report by Nesta, research shows that the hardest functions for AI to perform are not physical labor or logistics but creative content creation and design (read: artists, architects, web designers, IT specialists and public relations professionals).

For now, it seems IIoT interfacing will support this growing trend and continue to provide lifelong learners with the opportunity to explore and develop their creative skills in a wide variety of mediums (VR world building, 3D app building, etc).

Link:
Alphabet CFO: Acquisition Strategy Focused on Cloud Computing - Edgy Labs (blog)