Google roolz! Nest buys Revolv, KILLS new sales of home hub

Re: The same Nest that accused Honeywell of trying to bully it out of the market?

I don't believe that. Honeywell's product is utter shite and not a patch on Nest.

Re: I don't like Google buying Nest

The Nest acquisition was part of what is now emerging as a clear strategy of "owning" energy customers in their own homes. You may (or not) recall that Google have had a Federal licence to trade energy wholesale, and to supply it to residential customers in the US for several years now.

The purchase and immediate killing of the Revolv product shows that Google didn't want the brand, nor the current product, they wanted the team that developed it. And they'd only do that to develop their own home automation, control and monitoring hub. So we might expect a new version of Nest that integrates a Revolv-style home hub. All that lovely, lovely data on everything you do will be streamed back to the Googleplex to be used for their benefit (and I'd guess they'd really want to know more about media consumption, so what TV and radio is consumed if they can get that data).

And ideally for Google, you'll sign up for them to supply you energy, which gets Google a $1-2,000 revenue stream per home. Combine (potentially) real time data on energy use, by device, throw in a some load control to give Google the ability to remotely control some element of demand (demand response services are very profitable), add in some Google trading algorithms in the wholesale power market, and suddenly Google controls your home, knows where you are, what you do, what you watch and listen to. And you pay them thousands of dollars a year, whilst they subtly manage your heating, aircon and devices to make Google even more money. Throw in electric vehicle charging and there's even higher power demand and even more opportunity to manage demand.