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The article says Nest may be up for sale, which would make sense. I have to think that the buyer would probably buy Nest for the underlying technology and not t
by ericabiz 10y ago
The article says Nest may be up for sale, which would make sense. I have to think that the buyer would probably buy Nest for the underlying technology and not the brand at this point, however.
I have an original Nest thermostat but would never buy another Nest product due to the horror stories that continually pop up online. I don't follow Nest closely or have any particular interest in them, but I remember the video they reference in the article from the Google employee who couldn't stop the smoke detectors from false alarming, and I also saw the news when they decided to "brick" a $300 product they acquired.
Based on those two things alone, I don't feel like they take customer satisfaction seriously, nor do I have confidence in their ability to build a good product--even though my thermostat has never had any issues. I doubt I'm alone in this.
- aembleton 10y agoI'm very happy with my Nest thermostat. I have no desire for IoT smoke alarm but I don't think I'd like to go back to an old style thermostat.
- ericabiz 10y agoOh, me neither. But today there are plenty of companies in the smart thermostat game. A quick Amazon search shows 8 at a glance, only one of which is a Nest.
- brianwawok 10y agoHoneywell has a wifi thermostat for $80?? Which has a lot less problems than a Nest. Doesn't look as cool I guess.
- ghaff 10y agoAs someone who lives in the Northeast the horror stories make the thermostat a non-starter. Even a tiny drop in reliability that could cause an outage in the winter isn't acceptable in exchange for a cool looking device that I can, on rare occasions, use to remotely change a setting that I forgot before leaving on a trip. The current generation of Nest Protect actually seems pretty good--it's not nearly as bad with full volume false alarms as my previous one was when I open the oven door. But I basically don't care about the IoT aspect of it.
- knz 10y agoIoT is a perfect use for notifying you if the furnace fails and you are not home since IoT temperature sensors operate independently of the thermostat. I've put a Nest Thermostat in multiple houses now and been very happy with them - the remote control functionality, decent web UI for additional control/scheduling, and the app are simple enough for family members who are not in IT to use.
- ghaff 10y agoI agree that one can imagine an IoT system designed by paranoids for northern houses that does things like provide undertemperature warnings, shuts off plumbing systems, etc. I'd considered buying such a system. The Nest though strikes me as a flashy device that potentially decreases overall system reliability. ADDED: In general, I'm sure a Nest works fine. I just have a use case where the winter reliability of my heating system is really important. I can't control every aspect of that but I don't want to hurt any aspect of it for trivial gains.
- Zigurd 10y agoSelling Nest makes tons of sense. It's probably still valuable to someone who thought of buying when Google did, and Nest adds very little to Google's IoT/home-automation platform, which is more likely to be Android-based. Moreover it is unclear if, all else being equal, thermostats would be very high on Google's IoT priorities.
- robotresearcher 10y ago> buy Nest for the underlying technology What do they have that is hard to do from scratch?
- raldi 10y agoUnderstanding of the extraordinarily convoluted process it takes to get permission to sell a smoke alarm in the United States.