Nest developers become Oompa-Loompas in Google shake-up Another month, another Alphabet attempt to restructure its Internet of Things businesses into something coherent and successful. It's probably been on the cards ever since Nest CEO Tony Fadell quit in June this year: Alphabet has assimilated the thermostat-and-smoke-detector platform team into Google. The news comes courtesy …
I can't help thinking that unless they can get those thermostats showing ads ("Please watch this ad for jumpers/ice cream before you adjust the temperature up/down") the whole lot will get dropped as Google seems to do when it gets bored with the sideline products. The idea of being able to track when people are at home and their temperature preferences is cute and all, but it's not quite as compelling a feed to the advert profiling machine as knowing all your emails and search history (either via a browser or your Android mobile).
Does anyone know the status of Waze within Google, and has it suffered a similar fate yet?
The EULA that came out a few months ago gives Nest the right to track you on the Internet with the comment that " the may not be able to honor Do not track requests". They also sell them via the utilities so that the power companies can change the temperature of you house at will during times of peak usage. I have not given the Utility the permission to change the settings as I bought it before that program came out and before Google bought the company.
They have had issues with bricking the controllers on software updates. Mine decided to set itself to away mode and set the temperature to 85 degrees. I sleep during the day and being woken up because the house was unbearably hot is not pleasant.
I am looking for a replacement. I don't want to be tracked and it is not reliable enough.
I would consider myself warned and leave things at that. Perhaps watch the episode in Mr. Robot where they hack a smart home and make the owner leave if I still wasn't sure.
Had the same types of troubles, it'd drop network connection at 2am, then fail to reconnect, with a menu in screen, requiring reentry of all SSID & PW via the terrible rotate & push UI while half asleep to turn on/off heat/AC depending what was running or not when it borked. Woken in a sweat from wasted energy from house baking from heating on that doesn't register in their efficiency calculation, or can't check via the app and pipes freezing in winter while away...
Got rid 2 years ago (returned to nest), switched to EcoBee3 (open API, and those Canadians make a really nice device that's not crashed once).
Meanwhile nest still sends monthly emails about how much energy I've saved? Go figure.
> Does anyone know the status of Waze within Google
It looks like they might be trying to pivot Waze into being an Uber/Lyft competitor. I'm sure that will go as well as we have come to expect.
The idea of being able to track when people are at home and their temperature preferences is cute and all, but it's not quite as compelling a feed to the advert profiling machine as knowing all your emails and search history (either via a browser or your Android mobile).
Well no, not as compelling. But if google already has your emails and search history, then physical information about you might be nice, too. - if you keep the temperature down on the thermostat in the summer, then maybe you're a likely customer for solar panels? If your visits home are erratic then maybe you travel a lot?
If it doesn't deliver enough personal information and profit margin, they will shutter it, like so many other Google projects.
Google at heart are an Ad company, fuelled by personal information from their search, third parties hosting Google "trojans" such as analytics, fonts, javascript libraries, users using Android with data enabled, Chrome Browser, Chrome OS, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, Uber etc.
If Nest is a success, then they will hoover up other IoT like Petchute, door systems etc, not actually have Nest widen product portfolio. It's easier for them to buy in stuff (a lot of their stuff was bought in).
Get off your fat backside, waddle the few steps from your sofa to the living room wall and use a good old fashioned cheap and reliable, unhackable, lasts for years, doesn't need power, doesn't need batteries, doesn't have some stupid display and only occupies a square inch of your wall space thermostat.
Good heavens, being able to adjust my thermostat from my phone, change the colour of my lights... what a load of tosh.
When and IF this ever turns into a technology that does something USEFUL rather than just something we can do for no good reason other than it is possible please tell me what it is that would make me want to squander 2 years worth of heating bills on an environmentally hostile piece of electronic junk powered by a pile of environmentally expensive batteries.
And yes, I know about getting home, I know about holidays, thats why the central heating boiler has a timer... and the individual rooms have thermostatic radiators and the whole damned lot has an off switch... its easy and has worked well for a long long long time.
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