If that’s the standard of journalism in WSJ then I won’t be subscribing. There are so many errors it’s hard to know where to start.
They are/were two separate products intended for two different markets.
Jasper was bought on a whim by Rowan when he thought we could crack the connected car market and that IOT was all about software. (It’s probably more accurate to say it was sold to Rowan than he bought it.) It’s been a basket case from the day Cisco acquired it and I do not believe has ever been particularly profitable. It should always have been part of SP, never IOT. The IOT leadership team have been trying to k–l it, or get rid, for at least two years to my knowledge.
CKC has been on life support for a long time (and don’t confuse it with Kinetic or Edge Intelligence as it is now - sort of). CKC was developed for a limited number of use cases and was too inflexible/difficult/expensive to add new ones. There was another product, CAM, that should have displaced CKC but suffered from ‘not invented here’ syndrome so was dropped. CAM was much more flexible.
The reality for Cisco is that there are better solutions out there for the things that CKC did but it’s not true to say that there is not opportunity for Cisco in the smart city market.