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Nest has customers who have paid it, it does not have paying customers. There is no ongoing fee despite every device Nest sells being connected to its servers 2
by dangrossman 13y ago
Nest has customers who have paid it, it does not have paying customers. There is no ongoing fee despite every device Nest sells being connected to its servers 24/7/365. It takes no more than ~3 seconds for any changes you make on their web/mobile apps to reach the thermostat, so it has to be at least checking in with a server constantly.
- VLM 13y agoThose servers could be paid for with some simple advertisements keyed to the information reported by the thermostat...
- DominikR 13y agoI don't think that a 24/7 network connection of a customer that just paid $249 for a thermostat is that much of an monetization issue for a company like Google. (for comparison: more than 1 billion Android devices are currently connected to their servers 24/7/365)
- JshWright 13y agoNot a lot of screen real estate for ads on a Nest...
- nacs 13y agoWell in addition to the color LCD, they do have speakers so Google could do audio ads. Also, Google+ checkins when you walk into your house and G+ status updates when you adjust your temperature would increase the G+ 'active user' count for them.
- DominikR 13y agoAlso, I could definitely see myself buying Lord of the Rings in the Google Books store and reading it on the Nest. This could provide the ideal way of monetizing this platform in the future.
- nknighthb 13y agoSurely the updates are sent via some form of push. Polling on that scale would be obscene.
- dangrossman 13y agoYet that's what I believe it does. Every few seconds, Nest sends an HTTP POST to their servers with its serial number. If there are any commands waiting for that thermostat (change temperature initiated from an app for example), they get sent in response, otherwise the connection is closed.
- nknighthb 13y agoMy opinion of Nest just plummeted. That's absurdly wasteful.
- dangrossman 13y agoThat sounds a bit hyperbolic. I think you're overreacting. The difference between this and long-polling in terms of hardware required is pretty minimal. I run a web stats service that has to deal with similar kinds of data -- millions of sites "pinging" it with a new page view to record constantly -- with one crappy server. Nest doesn't even have to record anything in response to those pings, unlike my server, just compare to some in-memory table of which devices have commands waiting for them, so most connections can be immediately disposed of. Given the setup, network and power requirements Nest operates under, this may well be the most efficient way it can be done. Or maybe it does do some kind of long-polling and the descriptions online are inaccurate. Either way, I doubt there's anything "absurdly wasteful" going on here. Poll vs push isn't melting polar ice caps.
- cbr 13y agoThat's the client pulling, not the server pushing. Pushing would be "when the owner makes a change on the website, notify the appropriate thermostat to change its settings". This would be way more efficient, but too many Nests aren't going to have suitable internet connections.
- acdha 13y agoGoogle already has massive server deployment around the world – the incremental cost of keeping some sockets open seems unlikely to noticeably increase load when they already have Android, Chrome, Google Talk, etc.
- smackfu 13y agoI do love their strategy where if you already own a Nest thermostat, buying the Nest Protect smoke detector makes your old product work better. Very clever.