Nest’s time at Alphabet
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In 2015 Nest posted job listings for its "Nest Audio Team." The team would be responsible for "developing an audio roadmap for Nest products." Industry observers suspected the audio team was building a smart Bluetooth speaker, but Google beat Nest to the punch with Google Home, an Amazon Echo-style Bluetooth speaker and voice assistant appliance. According to a report from The Information, when Nest found out about Google Home, it asked to work on the project with Google. Nest's request was turned down. We can only guess why—maybe Nest's reputation inside Google had something to do with it?
Often times Google has multiple projects doing effectively the same "thing" going at the same time. They don't work together because the idea is to have the team that can get to the "finish line" first to win, not to co-operate. This, as it was explained to me by an engineering director there, was to encourage a 'natural selection mechanism that selected for the best teams and the best products.'
While I understood the idea, that you would pit your own resources against each other like that was kind of foreign to me. My own personal learning from that, having watched them for 15 years, four of which from the inside, is that as a way of managing a company it produces few viable products and no viable businesses.
"Limited divisibility of tasks. Adding more people to a highly divisible task such as reaping a field by hand decreases the overall task duration (up to the point where additional workers get in each others way). Some tasks are less divisible; Brooks points out that while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month"."
42 weeks overall
4.33 weeks in a month
42 weeks -> just shy of 10 months
I'm not so sure if you are ahead on weeks. But you are ahead on kids! Congratulations and good luck
Not that I want to derail the well-wishing!
It really explains the sloppy state lots of Google products ship in.
OTOH, a little bit of internal competition to penalize complacency, if there's not too much wasting of resources, is probably a good thing. It's been fairly common IME for different teams to be working on very related concepts (eg, HPC platforms for different tasks), with a sort of implicit understanding that the team that does well will be able to do the logical extension of the project, and the team that doesn't will work on something else.
I don't buy the "first to win argument", but it would seem useful to take multiple approaches to solving the same or similar problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
although I think fiatmoney is conflating a centrally planned command economy with communism.
Seems like a distinction without a difference, considering that every time a nation tries to implement the latter they end up with the former as an "intermediate stage" of the revolution that somehow never goes away.
In a corporate body, there is no pretense that central planning is a transitional stage. There are a few exceptions like Valve and Zappos, but even fewer genuine success stories where a non-hierarchical structure has outperformed traditional ones in the long run.
http://www.inc.com/audacious-companies/leigh-buchanan/mornin...
One of the thorniest problems in business economics is this: we know free markets produce extraordinary results, but why is it that even in the absence of regulation, so little of the economy is structured as a free market? Very few businesses of any size operate internally as a market, instead they usually operate under hierarchical command and control. Markets generally exist only at the interfaces between organizations.
Why don't teams bid competitively within a company? How do individuals decide on the teams to form? Why are managers allowed to rise to the point of failure? Why do we pay people salaries instead of hourly wages? Why do we hire hourly wage labor as if though its was permanent?
The number of questions raised by this topic is endless.
The most general explanation is this: yes, companies adopt inefficient structures, but they more than make up for this through significantly reduced transaction costs.
At the current cost of hourly labor if you made it even more like temporary labor than it already is the quality of worker you could obtain at that price would be terrible.
If you believe current US (at least for most of the population) law theory, all employment relationships are completely at-will. They may be terminated at any time for any reason. I would argue that is all that is required for a free market. This would seem to contradict the claim that most companies to not internally operate as a market.
I know there exist serious breaches of this freedom (ie. slavery), but it is not supposed to be the norm anymore.
Nations almost all adopt an executive system because nations compete. The U.N. doesn't because Earth doesn't have to compete with anything else. Imagine a competitive interplanetary situation and you can bet the Secretary General of the U.N. would quickly gain significant decision making powers.
Collectivist market philosophies tend to be built on the assumption that there will be no competition internally and thus can be run by various committees. However, even countries trying to follow various types of collectivist ideologies ended up with single executive-types at the top, again because countries compete.
On the small scale, many indigenous tribal systems rely on a council during times of peace, and elect an executive (sometimes called a "war chief") during times of war.
The phrase "business is war" is particularly appropriate since most businesses operate like they're at war.
That's how the Roman Republic operated, too: the Senate would elect a dictator for six months to handle certainly irregular situations. Unlike any other Roman official, he had no colleague who could countermand his orders, and he was not legally liable for any act he committed in office.
Could you give an example of this? Are you talking about using contractors to get through a project, and then keeping them on indefinitely after the project is over?
Sure you do. It allows someone at the top to flip the switch between market and central command. Ideal firm size and vertical consolidation varies between industries, and plausibly varies in different environments, different times, etc.
Looks like the joke is on the winning team.
I've been reading "The Vital Question"[1] of late and it has been the first book in a while where I've had several "oh that makes so much sense!" moments. And one of the tenets is that Darwin was correct in the small, and wrong in the large understandings of evolution.
Something that jumped out to me while reading it, is that information extraction drives our technology systems like energy drives biological systems. Read the book and then sit back and analyze Twitter as a multi-cellular organism with information as energy and individuals as cells. A sort of Datasaurus. Fun stuff.
[1] "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" -- http://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Compl... based on the recommendation tweeted by Gates and comments here, I read it through cover to cover while camping, and now going through a second reading to pick up what I overlooked the first time.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pa...
More to the point, isn't this exactly what Steve Jobs advised Larry Page not to do? Steve Jobs said, famously, to put "more wood behind fewer arrows". And for a while, it seems like the advice was sticking - Google shuttered a bunch of products (for better or for worse) and seemed to be buckling down to focus on the search and YouTube division. But now it seems like Google is going right back to how it used to be - many teams, working on many products, with no guarantee of ongoing development or support. It seems to me that Google is turning into the next Cisco.
So you couldn't propose just a new antenna, you had to propose using an entirely different spectrum with entirely different rules and an entirely different platform architecture where voice service was one of many options rather than the main option. You don't get to propose re-inventing the phone, you have to re-invent telecommunications. One of those that got out of the door when I was there was the Google "wave" project. Its vision was so big it missed the fact that people just wanted Slack[1].
Bottom line is that competition within a structure is good, its something that lots of organizations have applied successfully. Google's style, when I was there, was never structured enough to head toward anything. It always went all directions at once, leaving the organization with a net zero momentum in any direction.
[1] Yes they are nearly a decade different in time frame, but as a 'dogfood' wave user and then later outside of Google it was pretty clear the "win" was the IRC replacement, none of the vision stuff was getting much traction but it was the way to go if you're group wanted to figure out which cafe to go to lunch at that day.
Sounds like this was used as a bludgeon for attacking competitors.
Bottom line is that competition within a structure is good, its something that lots of organizations have applied successfully. Google's style, when I was there, was never structured enough to head toward anything. It always went all directions at once, leaving the organization with a net zero momentum in any direction.
My experience with such competition, is that groups actually tend to undermine each other instead of pulling together with cohesive effort. Here, the lowered cost of transactions within a company can allow other groups within a company to act as gatekeepers -- otherwise "enemy" in-company groups can be penalized with higher (outside company) transaction costs for getting things done. This is especially true when project budgets are made with in-company costs in mind.
Google is famously data driven (even when it hurts) and has taken a lot of criticism (justified in my opinion) about not being able to create any new business outside of search and search advertising. I saw, and commented on, the Alphabet re-org as a way to get better visibility into the data coming from the organization. Spend vs revenue. Robots aren't carrying their weight? Toss them over. Making cell phones too hard? Sell it off.
If you work in companies like this long enough you begin to recognize that the organization can constrain what products you can even attempt to build. When the Sun "Voyager" (aka the 'portable') came out we joked that Sun could build any computer it wanted to, as long as you didn't mind it looking like a workstation. A partner Tadpole had built an actual laptop. But the Sun hardware engineering organization couldn't get there from a clean sheet of paper.
For that reason alone it is critical that Google keep re-organizing until they find a formula that works for them.
Something similar happened to one of my previous employers. We were less than 100 people and cranking out many successful projects. Once we got acquired and nearly quadrupled in size, none of the projects succeeded. Many of the early contributors left one by one due to frustrations and pressure including me. The new management style had changed everything.
It is not uncommon for a software developer to be asked to keep a seat warm in an open office seating environment. It feels very unnatural to be expected to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and be given nothing to do. Some people convince themselves that they are riding the gravy train, others go crazy and leave to find actual work.
I can't find any good citations online, but Electronic Arts was reputed to do that as well. Supposedly they'd put several developers on the same title, and whoever finished first got to ship.
The more confusing one was web vs. native - there were a dozen sessions on progressive webapps, yet they barely got a mention in the keynote, while Instant Apps got a full showcase. Internal competition is all very well, but it's frustrating as a developer to not be able to get a clear answer as to which platform we ought to be developing for.
In this case, however, given the prominence that was originally placed on the acquisition (at a time when Google had no direct presence in home automation), I suspect that the original vision was to actually merge the two worlds. The Google rank&file probably learnt very quickly how toxic Fadell was, and then proceeded to keep Nest at arms' length and do their own thing, basically writing off the acquisition and hoping it will eventually go away.
Sure there are mistakes but I don't think it's top down "team x" compete with "team y". It's more like both teams don't know about each other until the projects are far along. At which point might as well see which one does better... Or at least that seems to be the attitude at google.
(1) Top management tells everybody what to do. Result: No initiative from low-level employees.
(2) In case of conflicting projects, top management decides which team should continue. Result: Rampant internal politics.
(3) In case of conflicting projects, let all of them continue, and see which project wins the market. Result: Wasting resources; company looks disorganized to outsiders.
Some other companies (Apple?) avoid the problem by sticking to (1). However, many Google employees joined in the first place thanks to the tale of "A company where you can work on the problem you want to": it will be very tough for them to ditch the model wholesale, and it may harm the company in the long run.
I think Google does a bit of all three. While Google could certainly do better in some cases, it's not like Google's willfully ignoring an obvious solution.
It seems wasteful, but as we can see here, clearly the Nest work style couldn't compete with Google, and so no need to waste further R&D. But until you didn't the contest, how could you know?
My understand is that great product companies, like Apple, also have a kind of Darwinian development practice, but only ever reveal the "winner" once it's clear that it's the winner.
As an outsider, Apple looks like it has strategy and vision, while Google looks completely baffling, even releasing and pulling products from the market within weeks or releasing clearly incomplete, barely beta level products with no real vision and just expecting the public to sort it out.
I mean, how many chat apps is google up to now?
Interesting you say this as the first example that I can think of is Apple themselves when Steve Jobs was forced out of the Apple Lisa team and he joined the Macintosh team which then became in direct competition with the Apple Lisa team. I don't need to expunge on that but i found it to be a very famous case study on how 2 internal teams in direct competition affected the company.
So you have two teams somewhere in a company start a project at the same time.
Your challenge is, what does the corporate structure need to look like such that these two teams learn about each other's project early enough to collaborate?
If you rely on project information being passed up and down the corporate ladder, until one person learns that two subtrees of his reports are working on the same project, that's never going to work because bandwidth is reduced as you go up the tree, so less and less information is passed up, and early/experimental projects will frequently not make the cut and get filtered out. So your LCB will never hear about both projects.
If you just rely on direct communication between teams, you've got an N-squared problem as you grow, so that will never work.
If you try to give each team a carved out domain, new projects will frequently exist in the "chocolate & peanut butter" intersections, and both the "chocolate" and "peanut butter" teams will start the same project.
It's a difficult problem, and I'm not sure there's an answer between "companies should be small".
Deming said this over 40 years ago:
"The present system includes competition between people, teams, departments, divisions, students, schools and universities. Although economists have taught that competition will solve our problems, we now know that competition is destructive."
If in the end it makes the best product it's probably worth the waste of having competing solutions. But that is kind of a big if. (I would say the iPhone passed that test, personally.)
People are very hesitant to buy new appliances/home products. The last major change to the American home was the television, and that was ~50 years ago. Desktops had their day, but have been largely replaced by Laptops/Smartphones for many consumers. Adoption of new home appliances and technologies is glacially slow.
Also newer electronics have shown they need replaced/upgraded every 2-5 years. You are going to be hard pressed to sell the idea that the consumer needs to replace all their light switches and smoke detectors even every 10 years. I barely replace light bulbs at that rate now.
Cars about the only place where the IoT call home paradigm works. They are complicated machines that need semi regular maintenance. Placing sensors all over it makes sense. Trading updates for telemetry is attractive because a cars computer needs updates like any other computer. But I don't need a fridge that senses when I am low on milk, when I can just as easily look inside it and tell for myself.
EDIT: I think I should clarify that home IoT is a fad. Having machines feed back telemetry is useful, especially commercial machines with a service contract. The data is useful when its actionable. Data for the sake of data in the home is a waste.
What's not a fad is getting devices to communicate their health and status to an upstream repository for things like predictive analytics.
This is already happening in the B2B sector. It will reach the consumer sector next, but like you said it will take 2-3 consumer product cycles to make it real.
It won't be about remote control or any of the barely useful use-cases you're seeing with fridges and door locks and water bottles. It will be knowing your home's A/C has two weeks of operation before it seizes up. It will be knowing your home's plumbing has frozen and burst while you were away.
The problem with IoT is the I
Connected devices are not IoT. Marketing needs to learn that.
The major issue is the platform. Commercial products already have dedicated terminals, so the platform already exists. But I don't want to have to install the AC app on every new phone just to monitor it. Or renetwork my house when I buy a new router (imagine having your grandparent struggle through that).
The last-mine problem of standardizing the link from device to internet is going to be a hard one for a long time to come, IMO.
The thing I've realized, which may be obvious, is that first and foremost the device needs to work well in its "unconnected" form. Examples:
* Hue/LIFX/etc suck because most of the time I just want to flip a light switch, not pull out my iPhone to control it. I'm a fan of Z-Wave (or whatever) switch replacements that function just fine as regular switches, or I can turn off every light in my house through a wall controller, Alexa, or my iPhone. But if that secondary system fails I can still control my lights.
* Withings scales are great, because it works well as a simple scale, but also records my weight so I can go back and look at trends, etc.
* I like Dropcams because they're super easy, though I wish it weren't locked to a proprietary service
Pulling a new wire is better but also much more expensive. Adding a new switch for me is~200 and I can't move it around like the Hue.
However, I think no truly groundbreaking device has come out, yet. I bet money that one day, a truly useful device will eventually come out. Something, years later, we'll wonder how we ever lived without it.
Like the iPhone did for smartphones.
I really think IoT ought to be much more focused on a few high-value devices. Mostly, I think this is important because they have high value for end users but, as such, are also potentially targets for attacks, and by focusing on fewer devices they can hopefully be made much more secure.
http://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/27/smart-technology-driverless...
My favorite example is garage doors. People won't pay $50 to retrofit a half assed automation onto their existing opener. When many openers come with wifi without much of a price premium, lots of people will start using the feature.
The most obvious is: "Siri/Alexa open the garage door." (assuming some established authentication mechanism) rather than dealing with the unique garage door remote.
I can imagine others. "This is Alexa, it's 11pm and your garage door is still open. Should I close it?" and things in that vein. But those seem pretty marginal. I have very rarely left my garage door open by accident.
I have a "smart washer" largely because the smarts came with the washer I wanted. The "smart" functionality is completely unusable. First, it can only be connected to the network via WPS. (And the reviewers for the smart phone app don't seem to be able to connect it even with WPS. I haven't tried.) Second, the actual functionality of the connected app is a joke. So why do they have smart functionality at all? My guess is marketing. Is anyone going to return their otherwise awesome washer because the smart functionality is crap? Probably not, since there is no washer or dryer with true smart functionality on the market. But having it on there as a feature might sell a couple units.
On the other hand, while a refrigerator that detects when I'm out of milk is useless now, I can imagine a future in which it then orders the milk for me, so I never have to worry about it. I honestly can't stand doing inventory and ordering/shopping every week. I would love for that process to be automated.
Regular milk deliveries might be a little bit more inconvenient than automatically ordered milk, but it's vastly simpler.
What if you have milk but are out of orange juice or cheese or steak? Unless the 'milkman' is turning up with all these things on the of chance you're low on one this system is much more efficient.
That's a fad. I wouldn't be suprised if people just wanted to take a look inside their fridge while they're shopping, so a webcam at each level would be enough.
A beautiful fact about refrigerators is that they make for perfect whiteboard surfaces and they are magnetic. I take a picture of my fridge before I go shopping, on which I have written everything that needs to be purchased. A magnetic whiteboard marker with builtin eraser stays on the fridge. There is no way a "smart fridge" is going to catch up to that level of ease + utility any time soon.
Digital devices take off when they have a killer application. So far I've seen nothing along these lines.
The existing products have miniscule market penetration, for decades, precisely because their networked integration is abysmal. IoT is yet another attempt to impose some order on the market, which is still focused on incompatibility as a way to retain customers rather than grow the market.
There is ENORMOUS pent up demand for networked everything, if only a cheap universal standard arose and was accepted.
I have ~15 temperature sensors and door sensors that alert me when doors get opened. I was able to use that data to definitively measure the positive impact insulating my house had. I can tell when people enter or exit my house, and I also have ~10 cameras for security. If I get a notification that someone is around my house while I'm gone, I can call my local police department a lot faster than any alarm company.
My Nest also tells me how long my furnace is on every day. Of course their data is useless so I constantly request and store this data in violation of their terms of services, because fuck Nest and their useless TOS. But with that I can make smarter decisions on how to save money in heating and I've halved my bill by manually adjusting my heating (not relying on their stupid algos).
Do I need a fridge that tells me I'm out of eggs? No. But having metrics and data lets me as a homeowner make smarter decisions that save money.
Why could you not just turn your thermostat down 4 degrees for the same thing?
I get that there might be some marginal gains you can get with tech ("A heat wave is coming tomorrow, let's shut off the furnace 1 hour early"), but it seems really small and crude compared to existing offline tech can do (look for leaky holes in your insulation, add 6" more blown insulation in your attic, etc"). Or for example replacing a 80% efficient with a 99% efficient furnace has a pretty huge impact. Does nest magic timing have more?
I agree that insulation and upgrading the home would produce the nest results but my point is that the data is useful, not useless.
I could shut my heating completely and save 100% but that misses the point. What I did was turn on the heating in the morning to a temperature that was comfortable and then shut it off so that by the time everyone left for work/school the temperature would still be acceptable but on the lower bounds. That saved about 45 mins of heating a day.
Overnight as well I could see how my furnace behaved and tweaked based on that, etc.
The key isn't just the nest but the other temp sensors so I have a complete idea of what my houses characteristics are.
What kind of cyberpunk dystopia are you living in that you need this?
I'd seriously be interested in how you addressed that.
If you're talking about a targeted attack, there's likely nothing I can do except sit in my house with a loaded gun.
It is a fad because there is no common standard.
Just imagine you could connect to all your devices (washing machine, heating system, warm water system, garage doors, TV and hifi) from the same app om your phone. And just imagine you could just go to your parents place and do they same thing there. Just imagine you could just buy some random LED bulbs from alibaba and they would just work in your home without thinking about the right standards.
But all of this is just not possible because there is no common standard. I'd really like to buy some remote controllable LED bulbs and perhaps a remote for my heating system. But there are dozens of companies which offer the samw things but they don't work with each other... This is why home automation is not taking off.
My parents are planning to build a new house and it will be 100% traditional without any fancy home automation stuff because there is no universal system.
Why would I want to.
But if this would work flawlessly then life could be just a bit more comfortable.
For example I am laying currently on the bed and the light in the kitchen is still on. Yes, I could just get out of bed and walk over there, but if there would be an easy gui for this is my mobile it would be good because at the moment I am very lazy.
A quite real problem I have in winter is the temperature in my sleeping room. Sometimes I wake up and it is either too warm or too cold and I have to get up and change the settings. Usually I then have the problem that I can not fall asleep again. If I could just press a button, I could turn around and continue sleeping.
So yes, I don't really _need_ this, but my lazy self would love the comfort.
>If I could just press a button
The more likely model is to go "Alexa--turn off the downstairs lights."
Joking aside, there's probably some confluence between consumer IoT devices and natural language recognition that brings some things into the lazy but genuinely useful range. Unfortunately, most of my annoying home tasks fall into messy physical world interfaces (do the laundry and put it away) that don't really lend themselves to digital automation.
That said, even if you hand wave away this problem you still need to have solutions that mainstream consumers find genuinely useful/valuable. Yes, lack of interoperability adds additional friction. But I see a lot in the consumer IoT space that I'd still have zero interest even if it were completely standardized and interoperable.
As an owner of many Nest products, and thus invested into the success of the Nest ecosystem, I'm also fucking furious.
What a waste.
They make a move, they lose. They don't do anything they lose as well, it will just take longer. So they chose the second option.
Nest needs to innovate and rapidly evolve products very quickly to keep ahead of the market, which it seems includes their colleagues (madness).
Given a team of that size and complexity nothing but the best management will get products out the door.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Working on their resumes' ?
Hey Google, here is an idea, why don't you make an IoT button that can talk/control other devices like bttn or flic but costs just 5$ (I'm looking at you Amazon dash). They will sell like hotcakes!
After that you can introduce some other products, maybe under the home brand, like a device that control your AC (it just needs to work, doesn't have to be apple like the Nest) or one that monitors your water heater. What about a small device that checks for leaks in your pipes. There is so much stuff todo here.
What does the a button or a flood sensor buy them ?
Moreover chrome cast is used outside of google products like Plex, Netflix, HBO etc.
Having a low bar for entry into the home is huge for a company which is all about data and insights.
Even by Fadell's own standards, the Google acquisition doesn't seem to have led to huge wins for Nest. In an interview with Bloomberg shortly after the sale, Fadell was asked what the move would mean for Nest. "For us it was about getting out to the world faster" Fadell said. "[Our products are imported] in 96 countries where we don't even sell today. We can see these devices being connected but we can't get there fast enough. For us, going with Google, we can get access to resources to allow us to move these products around the world much more quickly." Before the Google acquisition, Nest was for sale in three countries. In two-and-a-half years under Google and Alphabet, Nest expanded to just four more countries.
I know this is probably a minority opinion here, but one plausible scenario is that 5 or 10 years from now, Google will come to the realization that full no steering wheel autonomy is still "just over the horizon" and, in the face of declining ad revenues (or whatever), the whole effort gets ramped down.
Google's basic problem: search ads are incredibly profitable when you're #1. But they've saturated that market. Nothing else they do with their excess cash can match those returns. If they do something less profitable, the stock price goes down.
Hence Alphabet's search for a "moonshot". But what management meant by "moonshot" was another high volume product with a huge return on investment. That's probably not going to happen in the home appliance space, which is price-sensitive and competitive.
"The online-video unit posted revenue of about $4 billion in 2014, up from $3 billion a year earlier, according to two people familiar with its financials, as advertiser-friendly moves enticed some big brands to spend more. But while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year, it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even,” according to a person with knowledge of the figure."
[0]http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...
In fact one can argue there is an inverse correlation there. The more efficient they are at developing new products with moonshot ideas, the less efficient they'd be at managing integrating a newly acquired company.
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.
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.
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.
What do they have that is hard to do from scratch?
Holy.. what are they all doing?
Nest the company problem as consumers (myself being one) seems to be Software...
I use the nest software and simply put it's not up to scratch
The Hardware is beautiful if only the software was...
For example the nest protect has temperature sensors yet the Nest thermostat can not use these...
Nor can the software operate without access to the "cloud" even in a reduced ability.
Google OnHub suffers from the same Software problems, Great hardware and nice low level drivers however it cant even use IPv6 which for a router is pretty basic
my advice for the incoming CEO, interoperability Simple
make use of thread & brillo (software) to unify things... (produce an alarm but have the option of ADT as the responder)
Unify the products so they can work within a LAN and expand outside of the USA.
I hope that helps
John
Nest is, in many ways, the most disappointing company. I'm not sure how much of that is just down to them lacking vision or leadership though - they have the skills to do great things.
I had thought maybe they would do a smart lawn watering system next. I know it's a smaller market, but it seemed better aligned with the thermostat as something that could be marketed as a money-saver. The smoke detector doesn't save you any money, it just seems like a solution in search of a problem. The lawn system could basically sell itself: local rebates on the up-front cost, the promise of saving you water/$$, and the name that Nest had already established from their thermostat.
There are some other companies making products like this now, but I don't know if they're good.
The underground sprinkler system my parents installed 30 years ago has a sensor to prevent that, it's certainly not unusual. It would be interesting to see rain sensors for regular sprinters although I'd be shocked if they didn't already exist.
Based on the stories, what's been happening at Nest is an extreme case of many of the same organizational antipatterns that people in the tech industry see in their own companies on a smaller scale. The things that have happened at Nest (if the stories are to be believed) are like cancer to a tech company. If left unchecked those antipatterns can grow and consume a company, and can ultimately kill it. No amount of reform will save a company if they can no longer retain talent or recruit replacements of the same or better caliber.
Given that so many HN readers are in the tech industry themselves, they probably worry about these kinds of cancers taking root at their own companies (I know I do). This stuff exists everywhere, it's just that for stable companies it's the exception and not the rule. I'm not surprised that it's been a hot topic.
Their performance versus the rest of the Google ventures? The product line that was previously leaked? And, in the eyes of Hacker News perhaps celebrating Tony stepping aside.
A lot of these stories, if they are in fact true, likely happened prior to Google acquisition and those people are now just feeling comfortable to speak out without the fear of it being spun as retaliation.
I have a lot of faith that the Google HR department wouldn't tolerate any of the behavior, which is why it smells like a marketing campaign.