Hacker News Reader

Comment by tghw | Hacker News Reader

Given Google's history with acquisitions, as a Nest owner, I'm not thrilled to hear this. Hopefully they let it run as independently as possible.

View on HN

On the other hand, Android, Inc. was an acquisition with a similar purpose–to break into a new product space–and it grew into a fully-supported division. I don't think Google will treat this as an acquihire situation.

They will have them make the robots produced by the other 7 companies they just bought look pretty and operate simply. At least, that's my hope. Nest team + hardcore robotics teams = potentially awesome stuff.

I wonder what their play is. One neat thing about Nest is that they are doing what many products failed to do before, and that's to kind of become a platform for the "internet of things." It's a thermostat and smoke detector now, but it could easily soon become more stuff, sensors and actuators, and it could easily all work together toward enabling a smarter home. Yes if you are a hardware/microcontroller geek you can get the same functionality for $100 but you will spend 100 hours on it and it will look vastly inferior to the Nest designs. It is also amazing how much more successful it could be than the million crappy little X10 and zigbee gadgets with their 1960s UX.

Another amazing thing to me is how well and how fast they managed to build prominent industry relationships: you can get rebates from the electric company, they are on Home Depot and Lowes shelves, advertised on NPR, etc.

Perhaps we'll see a return of Google Power Meter. That was an ambitious project to promote a data standard, towards the goal of better efficiency through consumers' close monitoring of their own power usage. But it failed to gain traction in the industry and Google did not double down. Until now. It seems they may now think that it is better to make transparent decisions automatically rather than by providing information for the consumer to take action on themselves. Power consumption is a large opportunity and one that Google understands from its data centre operations. Certainly it is hard to justify the cost of Nest on its current portfolio and acqui-hire alone.

>>what many products failed to do before, and that's to kind of become a platform for the "internet of things."

I am not sure. They might be famous. But there is nothing like 'other products failed'. Just because 'other products' inventors don't blog and submit it on HN/Reddit every two hours, it doesn't mean they failed.

Internet of things is there since a long time, You won't hear about them in your regular internet forum discussions. But there are billions! of small embedded devices communicating over networking/internet and were communicated before Nest was even born.

Sure, but do you think the probable future lifespan of a Nest v1 has gotten better or worse after this acquisition?

Google always shuts stuff down. Which is just a big laugh when its an internet application, but not so funny when its your thermostat. Anyone know what happens when GOOG shuts off the Nest system? Hopefully the thermostat reverts to at least a simple dumb mode rather than shutting everything off?

Disconnect it from your network before they 'update' it.

>While the Nest Thermostat doesn't require a Wi-Fi connection, additional features like remote control and automatic software updates are only available when the Nest Thermostat connects to the Internet

Is that a joke? Firmware update on a Thermostat?

Um, have you seen the thermostat in question? It has a user interface on it. Why wouldn't it support software updates?

I doubt Google would shut down a $3,200,000,000.00 acquisition.

Please don't include decimals on that kind of number, it's intellectually dishonest.

That's a 12 digit acquisition!

? Only if you're incapable of telling the difference between commas and periods, I suppose.

It isn't factually dishonest, because it is an accurate number, and anyone can make sense of it.

I say it is intellectually dishonest because it reads to me as a clear attempt to make the number appear more impressive.

Borrowing from Wikipedia, "intellectual honesty":

   Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading impressions

It would still be accurate to say it was a $3,200,000,000.000,000,000,000 valuation, but I hope you will agree this is misrepresenting information.

Eh, guess we're going to agree to disagree there. Dollar figures having two decimal places at the end is pretty much a standard. If they included 3, yeah, that would reek of shiftiness. On top of that, all of the press releases I see don't even include the full amount written out, just "$3.2B".

Nobody puts commas in the decimal places.

You might as well say that he shouldn't put any zeros there at all, because all those zeros make it more impressive than saying "3.2 billion".

This is known as "rhetoric". The art of making a point. For sure the zeroes are being written out in full to make the number look more impressive. And the cents are given for exactly the same reason! What else would they be there for?! Writing out large numbers in full is a valid tactic to make a point, just as is hiding all those zeroes away behind an abbreviation.

Maybe he thinks "3.2bn" is less impressive than the actual number, and is just righting a wrong. That would be a reasonable thing to believe.

decimals doesn't have commas, if you want to add 12 digits of precision then you should have to write: $3,200,000,000.000000000000 , also when writing down a money amount, those two extra digits are for the cents(exactly 2 digits of precision), It would be ultra weird to write with 1 or 3 digits of precision, or zero for that matter.

You do know that many locales invert the meaning of the comma and period in that scenario, right?

Right?

I think it's pretty damn obvious what was meant by $3,200,000,000.00 no matter what locale you are in.

> ? Only if you're incapable of telling the difference between commas and periods, I suppose.

There's a reason people don't use Prolog...

It may be incorrect too, since the source only had 2 significant figures.

Perhaps you should step away from your PC for a bit? Christ.

Arguing that somebody shouldn't expand a large number because you personally now perceive this number differently and therefore it is intellectually dishonest is a bit of a squirrely argument, don't you think?

We're all capable thinking humans here. That isn't to say that smart people cannot be swayed with rhetoric and such, but don't you think that the same argument you're making here could be made against compressing such large numbers? Maybe expanding that number isn't so much exaggerating its value as it is simply impressing upon us its true enormity.

$3.2B ($3,200,000,000.00) is a lot of fucking money, after all. For anybody.

$3.2M would be a truckload of money too, but on a Google scale, "This number is really enormous!" is a weak argument. $3.2B is less than 1% of their market cap. Relative terms are much more important than "how many zeros"; why, just recently, Google took a $150M loss in Q3'2012 on the Motorola division. They aren't afraid of 9-figure losses. Thus (IMO) $3.2B being a large number has little bearing on whether or not Google would be willing to take a writedown on Nest, for the right reasons.

I'm not worried about a shutdown as much as I am worried about it going into maintenance mode like Google Voice.

That is a legitimate concern, however, the press release says this: "Nest will continue to operate under the leadership of Tony Fadell and with its own distinct brand identity."

For now.

I think about the Flip Video -- a reasonably-priced, small video recorder that could capture up to 2 hours of HD video. It was purchased by Cisco in 2009, and the product line was killed 23 months later. This was before a large number of consumers had quality smartphone cameras.

Google had a good reason to drop $3.2B on Nest. Providing useful products that consumers love is not it.

Should be pretty easy to keep a large amount of the functionality online, the one thing that definitely wouldn't work is remote access through nest.com. Just controlling the HVAC system doesn't _require_ any web access, easy test to see what the impact of a hard shutdown by Google is to just disconnect your wireless router from the Internet.

This is more YouTube pricing so I don't see a problem with them keeping this running.

Can't wait to need a Google+ account to change the temperature in my house.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com