Nest's Time At Alphabet: A 'Virtually Unlimited Budget' With No Results (arstechnica.com)

Ron Amadeo, reporting for Ars Technica (edited and condensed): Nest CEO Tony Fadell wasn't officially "fired" from Nest, but it certainly feels like it. In just the last few months, Nest has had to deal with reports of an "employee exodus," a string of public insults from Dropcam co-founder and departing Nest employee Greg Duffy, news that even Google supposedly didn't want to work with Nest on a joint project, and fallout from the company's decision to remotely disable Nest's deprecated Revolv devices. [...] It's hard to argue with the decision to "transition" Fadell away from Nest. When Google bought Nest in January 2014, the expectation was that a big infusion of Google's resources and money would supercharge Nest. Nest grew from 280 employees around the time of the Google acquisition to 1200 employees today. In Nest's first year as "a Google company," it used Google's resources to acquire webcam maker Dropcam for $555 million, and it paid an unknown amount for the smart home hub company Revolv. Duffy said Nest was given a "virtually unlimited budget" inside Alphabet. In return for all this investment, Nest delivered very little. Two-and-a-half years under Google/Alphabet, a quadrupling of the employee headcount, and half-a-billion dollars in acquisitions yielded minor yearly updates and a rebranded device. That's all.

Comments

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[The-Ixian]

Has the buying out of a smaller company EVER resulted in a better product for the consumer?

Cheaper, maybe... but almost certainly more diluted as creative control and vision is coopted/usurped.

To be expected...

[Junta]

They released an overhyped thermostat. Google then spent 3.2 billion dollars... on a thermostat company.

Sure they had vague ambitions of a connected home that jived with IoT, but all the company had really gotten into the world was a damn thermostat that could connect to the internet.

No matter how good or bad that concept sounds, it was stupid to justify a 3.2 billion dollar investment on that one concrete thing.

Nest temperature display is backwards

[paulpach]

I have a Nest thermostat. It displays in large the temperature you set it to instead of the current room temperature. What the actual fuck? A mercury thermometer is smarter than this.

There was a feature request for this opened in 2013, it has 1683 votes and its the third most popular feature request. You would think that even an entry level programmer would be able to fix that or add an option, but no, the feature has been completely ignored for years and contacting support about it only gives the reply "keep voting for it", even though that is clearly going to /dev/null. The other popular features request are equally ignored.

I am very frustrated by the complete lack of support these devices have. The entire community web site is nothing more than a pacifier for nest owners.

Fell for the hype, sold after 1 year

[trout007]

I live in Florida so I liked the idea of a learning thermostat to save some money. Instead what I figured out (and should have known ahead of time) is that it is just better to keep the setpoint constant. Sure I saved $10/mo but the house was always muggy and uncomfortable. Part of the reason is I have a high efficiency A/C so when I keep the setpoint constant it just runs the low speed compressor and fan and keeps the house cool and dry. When the nest shut everything down to save energy when we returned it had to kick on the high speed to get back to temperature. I'd gladly pay $10/mo for a comfortable house and less wear and tear on my $10k A/C unit.