Nest to join forces with Google’s hardware team

My positive perception mainly comes from this super paranoid dude, Michael Bazzell: https://inteltechniques.com/experience.html. He both hates Google for their data collection and also respects it for their security practices.

Ugh I also hate to hear they’re doing the “we’re secure but who knows about our 3rd parties” practice. State IT does this as well. As long as you sign some contract with them that promises them you do NSA-style security, they’ll buy anything from you. Of course what 5-man IT shop wouldn’t sign a $20,000,000 IT contract when worst case, they get a bad audit and have to spend 50k really quickly to get up to SOC II?

You can literally find a list of State IT contractors for most govs, and just go through them finding all the fly-by-night shops. That being said, the big vendors aren’t that much better either...

tl;dr: everyone sucks and be afraid and use mfa

It would seem you still don't understand how Android is built. Google cannot update the phones made by other OEM's. OEM's download the Android source code, add their modifications and create their own forked version of Android. This is like asking Debian to update Redhat's Linux distribution. Blaming Google for the OEM's inability to update their own phones is disingenuous, but it does support your prime directive of disparaging Google every opportunity you get.

>especially when you consider it took Google five months to patch KRACK in the Pixel 2, when third party ROM authors did it in two days.

Those patches were provided by Google incidentally. Additionally, Google patched KRACK in Dec, 2017 on the Pixel phones. So where exactly did you get this 5 months?

>Also, Google's "reputation with security" needs some serious nuance: They are very good at preventing types of exploits they care about, but they are a literal joke when it comes to security that interfaces with submitted content and user choice. Consider that the Chrome Web Store is a literal cesspool of malware, and that a lot of websites blatantly try to force you to install extensions through the Chrome Web Store which steal your browsing data. Since extensions are permitted to request such a huge security hole, Google doesn't consider it their problem that extensions do it maliciously.

Could you point me to the malware on the Chrome Web Store? Since you claim it's a "literal cesspool of malware" it shouldn't be that difficult for you to point to those extensions. I look forward to those links.

I think most home automation purists would provide a contrarian argument that points to z-wave or zigbee. :)

Thread was developed at Nest. The Thread Group was announced July 2014, far into HomeKit's R&D cycle. There wasn't much, or obvious, commercial support for for years. (Although to be fair, HomeKit has taken forever to get traction, too.)

I believe that at the time Apple was also concerned about the quality and security considerations of a Thread-like system. I can't prove or cite this, but having worked with Apple engineers who worked on MFi (ironically, I worked with them at Nest, not Apple), I'm skeptical of the narrative that it was devised as a revenue source. My sense from the culture of Apple when I was there (90s) and everything I see coming out of there more recently is that Apple tries to maintain standards of peripheral quality, security, and compatibility and that have been difficult to find in the Android ecosystem, say, although this has been detrimental in the case of HomeKit adoption and they've finally backed off.

This is in contrast to hardware support, which has tended to contract (floppy drives, CD drives, Ethernet cables, USB jacks, iPhone headphone jack).

It also makes sense to many of us who have done platform development and/or supported public APIs.

I'd want more evidence before concluding that HomePod's initial limitations are an M.O rather than an MVP.

> Apple's modus operandi is to, for example, enforce Apple Music as the only native HomePod music service.

(emphasis mine). I think you mean "natively support". You can send anything you like via their proprietary airplay service (like chromecast). "Enforce" is appropriate for, say, their requirement that iOS apps come only via their app store.

Historically Apple, like others, play nice with standards when they are the underdog (the NeXT, and thus MacOS X.<small-integer>) was all about open standards like JPG, though they also paid the danegeld for things like the RTF and GIF licenses. The iPod not only supported mp3 but they openly encouraged ripping CDs. Hell, Steve Jobs paid us actual money to make gcc & objective-C++ gret on the NeXT (though he had a really good team already in place as well). Then as they gained more power they cared about openness less.

Google was similar; they have a better committment to open source than Apple does but also try to use their market muscle to do things like their own mobile page format.

In case I sound like an apologist, I also prefer open interoperability. But I am realistic about looking at the landscape.

The thing Apple limits music-wise is Siri. You can't use voice control to tell Spotify what tracks to play.

did they? i thought nest was an alphabet subsidiary, and operated as an independent company to Google.

For instance, let's say I integrate a thermostat/camera/x device with Google Home/Assisstant. Based on # of users who connect devices and use the integration I could get some idea of user base/popularity/sales rate.

"On paper" there is separation between the two companies, and the agreement between Google and Thermostat Company A might say "data is not shared with any other entity within Alphabet".

Now that agreement is potentially null, since they might be the same thing now.

Or even things like "we're going to release a new product and want to integrate it with Google Home in advance, etc, etc".

It will be interesting to see how it plays out, but I think Amazon has a big advantage in that it has sold a massive number of Echo and Echo Dots and is fairly open in all respects except the actual voice data captured.

If I leave the house for a few hours on the weekend, there isn't a big enough energy savings for turning it off. My range of comfortable temperatures is large enough that feeling cold while sitting on the couch and needing to turn the thermostat up a few degrees higher than normal doesn't sound plausible. Like wearing a wristwatch, this just seems like more trouble than it's worth.