Am I the only one who thought "well, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, it looked like a good product"?
I immediately thought 'google will tie this into your google phone for you. That could be pretty nice.'
You can see the list in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
I just don't want to see Google dominating the world. Competition is nice.
On consideration, I'm a big fan of Google, Apple and Amazon. The thing that makes me (and probably others) nervous about all three is that they are too big. For instance, a monopolist strategy (Microsoft style) might appear someday.
There are parallels to the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Google provided a free service to everyone, killing any good paid services/products (which didn't integrate with Google Reader), except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly they just threw it away.
Now you have companies like Reeder, with a sufficiently large user base, who have to not only scramble to provide their own backend (or integrate with someone else's), but also scale it to the appropriate number of users literally overnight, which is not necessarily an easy task for a company which has, so far, only needed to have client-side developers (which is why most client apps, like Reeder, moved to using some other company for their backend instead of writing their own).
There was certainly no malicious intent, but they basically crushed an entire market and then abandoned it.
3.5 months.
Also, you'll be hard-pressed to find much upward pressure beyond free on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators
"except instead of taking advantage of their monopoly". Woww way to telegraph the fact that you completely misunderstood the Internet Explorer/Netscape issue. Parallels with IE/Netscape are meaningless if the monopoly _gets thrown away_.
Sounds like the case.
Android would have gone nowhere without being acquired, since OEMs and carriers wouldn't talk to such a small company.
(
Oh, not Y! (although some have speculated that Mayer move was a reverse-acquisition)
I can't feel that we'd be much better off if MS had decided to lose billions on YouTube along with Bing and Google had pressed ahead with Google Video as a legitimate competitor.
But what I'm unable to accept is why the client won't let me buffer a video and erases everything just as soon as it's diplayed on the screen. It does not make downloading the content any harder - all it does is making me download the videos, whatch them and delete, because the official player sucks.
comments, ads, channels, even the way the video buffers is annoying smfh
Could they get any worse? Seriously does any normal thinking person really participate and contribute comments in that quagmire? I sometimes I thank Google and Yahoo for creating those honey pots for the internet brain-dead to vent their steam and vitriol, keeping them well away from stuff I like to constructively participate in.
Coincidence? No clue... Still, all the "OMG G+ will destroy youtube!1!" whining is looking pretty stupid...
"OMG LOL your house is burning down."
With specific regards to Foursquare: note that the founder left to do Foursquare, and they're floundering right now. Maybe the vision was never sound to begin with.
"Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to
create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that
someone won't mistake for the real thing." [1]
(edit: Poe's Law always reminds me of this SNL skit where Fred Armisen tells Jimmy Fallon that the right way to tell a joke is to use a "catch phrase": http://video.tvguide.com/Saturday+Night+Live/Weekend+Update+...)
1) http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/11/19/hell-freezes-over-th...
2) http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/13/motorola-droid-razr-...
3) https://www.abiresearch.com/press/googlemotorola-mobilitys-m...
4) http://www.anandtech.com/show/7586/motorola-moto-g-review/8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_PowerMeter
http://mobilesyrup.com/2013/12/17/google-dipping-its-toe-int...
To acquire home statistics. Can you imagine the personal data gathering? And the $ value attached to that data?
All sweetened with sugar for you to buy the product, connect, and give your data for free.
Oh how I would love to be a fly on the wall and look at who exactly is pulling these strings.
Government? - Which ones Private equity? - Which sticky hands Other Countries? - Which ones & what would the data be worth to them?
This is why I disapprove of services such as: Google glass, Home automation data gathering, Car & transport data gathering.
I'm not an 'all-or-nothing' kind of guy, but sheesh....
And that 23andMe DNA gathering product: https://www.23andme.com/ It's like a totalitarian wet dream.
I can't help but feel that this is a funded attempt to subvert power away from OPEC nations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC
If so, could be to help these guys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies)
It says in this article:http://ow.ly/syrfO "Google is a widely-known proponent of “green” energy, promoting low-power data centres and clean grid-based power whenever possible."
Excluding "It is good for mankind & the Earth", Why is it important to 'reduce' in western nations, when so many developing/upcoming/industrial/manufacturing/oil nations are laughing at this policy?
Something's up. And it isn't share price. Sorry for my conspiracy feelings -My instinct tells me there will be comments about being overly-conspiratorial (If so, this will suggest my instincts are correct), but I'm more than worried about my children's children and their future.
For some reason in these Austere times, there's a squeeze going on which is being driven by more than you and I are presently being told.
The analogy here is something like the OnStar system in recent cars. I don't think that many people who made it happen primarily did so to give the banks a way to find and repo cars, but once a large percentage of cars have this system it does enable banks to do it much more efficiently. Not to mention what the authorities can do with these same systems.
If you are so afraid of data gathering it's pretty much impossible to do a lot of technologies. I can understand being against centralization and sending that data over a network to third parties. But even that is necessary in order to improve the product. You want your self driving car to have billions of hours of experience behind it, right?
Seriously? Lifestyle information is a gold mine for advertisers. If someone is diabetic, they need drugs, so I'm sure going to serve up more pharmaceutical ads (and those pay very well). If they're running the heater, they're almost certainly in the market for a jacket, blanket, or similar. Suddenly using "auto away" for stretches at a time? I bet they're traveling for work, and could use some luggage or a vacation to throw mileage points at.
Waay more profitable than just throwing random crap out there and seeing what sticks.
>Yeah, motorola products have completely gone down the toilet after that acquisition. They were so great before with fast updates and a wonderful skin of android, and now they're either non-innovative or way too overpriced for the value. /s
it would have saved http://imgur.com/2iha7bO
He could have told us why he doesn't like this, or give us an example of another company that was acquired by Google where the result was bad for consumers, then at least we could have had a discussion about this.
But this way it's only "I don't like this" vs "I like it" and there are definitely more interesting discussions with more information in this thread that could have been upvoted.
While I am not upset by this acquisition, I can certainly understand the sentiment.
I can't speak to validity of the top comment being only that aforementioned opinion, nor am I suggesting that sarcasm was inappropriate, but I think this only highlights the upvote/downvote mechanism as an I agree/disagree button more than a add to/ doesn't add to the discussion button.
2) end your comment with '/s' [most people know this means the previous comment was meant as sarcasm. it should be the preferred method of communicating sarcasm and the sentiment that the referenced recipient is obviously wrong]
My brother works in HVAC, and I've seen some of the automation available - - the trouble is that the systems aren't intuitive to the user and do very little to think on their own outside of if statements from the sensors.
For technically-inclined individuals, understanding how water, air and gas move is the ticket to a proper disruption. This goes beyond the bandaid fix of a good, intuitive thermostat, and into the circulation of fresh air and overall design of the home.
I will say though, that smoke detector is awesome. Here's hoping that Google doesn't just shut down the good work that's been done.
"Steve is out of the house" shared publicly on google plus.
Google is a very big company. I think they are already 50,000 employees in strength. A company so big is not very good at this 'inventing' stuff. There are likely a few engineering oasis somewhere in Google, but the bulk of the company is your ordinary mid level managers, controlling people at grass roots. Their likely goal is to cripple innovation with full force to prevent engineers from looking smart. Add all kinds of pointless bureaucracy.
Spending $3.2B in such ventures in such set ups only leads to a heavily delayed project. Clueless MBA's turned project/product managers enforcing their brain dead ideas in technology areas. Other managers venturing into gold digging, lazy people being elevated as abstract thought leaders etc.
Its best to just to buy something from outside and give them autonomy.
In this case, there were only a few investment rounds, all of which were reported to be big 'up' rounds, and the (huge) deal was reported to be all cash. All of which suggests that at least the co-founders, and probably at least several others, are going to be very very rich on day one working at Google. Which in turn is not a circumstance very conducive to effective golden handcuffs.
I see why you'd see one trying to control the other and being rejected as a failure, but I actually felt relieved that nastiness hasn't be rewarded now, hoping they'll pay soon (and not so surprised by SnapChat's arrogance).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
Here you really need a good analytics engine that combines measurements of quadrillion sensors; (actually my gripe is that all these sensors and the networking that connects them also needs some electricity, so where are the savings?)
I guess google is a big public company that has to produce constant growth figures for the stock market, they see the limits that can be squeezed out of adds, so they are looking for different markets; in corporate speak you would say 'leveraging core competences into the utilities market'
You can see this diversification in other areas: once upon a time a lot of people thought that Android is about creating demand for adds, nowadays Motorola is actually supposed to sell phones.
It seems like tech (maybe all) acquisitions almost always favor the buyer and not the consumer.
Does anybody have any good examples?
The gap between expectations & execution on android is tremendous. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7053108
The comparison is between "what Android could be as an independent company" and "what Android is under Google".
I think ultimately Android is doing a lot better for a lot more people than it would have had it remained independent. I'm also having a hard time imagining anyone else that could've acquired them and achieved substantially better results (see: Microsoft's handling of the Danger acquisition).
Pixar is still making (some) good movies under Disney.
I'm sure there are more examples.
I agree w/ Pixar to some extent, but it seems they have seen a slight decline in quality recently (Cars 2, Monsters University, Brave). I think particularly, they may be looking for more opportunities to exploit previous franchises vs. making quality films. Cars 2 was the best example of this, as was evident by the mounds of merchandise on store shelves following the release.
Again, both of these are debatable, but I still don't think you can say in either case that the acquisition was favorable to the consumer.
Pixar movie quality seems to have dropped, while Disney's have gone up after the acquisition.
http://i.imgur.com/H2s4hVL.jpg
Cars 2 was clearly a release for money (they make more money of Cars merchandise than they do from films), but the other films?
Also, I'm really enjoying the increase in quality of Disney movies post-Pixar. Just saw Frozen last week and loved it.
- Keyhole (now Google Maps)
- Android Inc.
- Motorola Mobility
- GrandCentral (now Google Voice)
- NeXT
- Siri
In general, an acquired company initially became successful by bringing value to consumers. When that company is acquired, it gets more resources to bring more value to customers.
We'll see if Google tries to wholly replace it with hangouts. I wouldn't be mad unless it were missing features.
And not in a hacked "if you're with TMo/Sprint, you -might- be able to get an email with the MMS in a format that's not reply-able" (and even that, only recently).
Voice might be dead as a brand; Google's unification of communications trend might mean that the technology and functionality will eventually be merged into Hangouts.
But then again: the dozen other examples cited above are certainly better.
If, on the other hand, you're a fan of the Google ecosystem I would expect that it will be a nice tie-in and a great acquisition for them. If they could add something along the lines of Belkin's WeMo devices and maybe Dropcam they could put together a nice home automation dashboard suite.
They're going to need to honor the legacy of Nest's design, though. No one is going to spend that kind of money and settle for an ad-ridden attempt to coerce you to use Google+.
Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?
Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services. We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change. ----- is it just me or is that a non denial?
Is it ever. The new owners of Nest can just roll out updates to every Nest app that require an agreement to a new TOS. I expect to see it within 18 months.
Shame too, I was already on the fence about buying a Nest, I guess I've got a new microcontroler project to work on.
They could merge Nest Labs, Inc. into another Google company, letting the surviving company use the information. The press release does not disclose the acquisition structure but their statements suggest the company will survive as a separate entity.
And if the NSA can target a huge company like Google, I bet Nest was child's play to infiltrate.
It's another thing to feel insecure knowing that people know when your home is unoccupied. Just wait until the next big data breach happens.
It's especially interesting b/c not only is this a "when are they not home" detector, but the "they" is an indicator for "wealthy enough to afford nice things."
Those kinds of situations are the driving force of many thin a: warheads & bunkers and safes & crackers quickly come to mind.
GOOG's MSFTian sprawl may be what ends up killing them. This would have been a great fit for Apple ages ago when they could have bought it for cheap, especially given the ex-Apple guys and the Store placement. I guess at these lofty prices they can build better from scratch.
As for the product? Google's Reader product comes to mind.
But I'm human, and I was a heavy Reader user. That particular debacle -- along with the NSA revelations of last year -- have affected my perception of the company in a negative manner.
You could get the same benefit from a device for $30 of electronics. It's an overpriced gimmick to justify another selling off of your personal data forever in exchange for nothing but some minor convenience. The price doesn't justify the energy savings or by product manufacturing cost. If Google wants to know how much energy I'm using, they can buy the information from the utilities and subsidize my electric forever. I'm not paying to give it to them.
For example, this one does everything I need and costs 10% of a nest: http://amzn.com/B002RL9BIM
It actually has a backlight which is a step up from what I have today. It's just not important to me. Definitely not $250 important.
I could definitely use a smarter thermostat, but my vision of the future is a wireless dumb thermostat paired to a home PC that is connected to other sensors. While those dumb devices could be made to interoperate with a cloud service (this is probably where Google is playing), I'd rather keep that control in-house (haha).
Imagine you just, like me, bought your dream house. In the den you installed new hardware floors and custom builtin bookshelves, that you built yourself in a few hundred hours, using a gorgeous hardwood and a stain you picked after testing more than a dozen shades.
Which thermostat goes on the wall, about 15 inches from the bookselves. That POS or a Nest?
I don't care how it looks above some minimum bar, as long as it works, and works reliably.
(There's a caveat there - in a large home I assume you run into issues with uneven heating. But that's beyond the purview of a simple thermostat. Even a $250 one.)
It's not that ugly, but more important, it's white and not shiny. If I was looking for a thermostat for a completely decorated house, that's exactly the thing I'd look for (unless the walls were colored, in that case I'd get somebody to paint it). The one thing I wouldn't want people to look at in my house is the thermostat (and that's quite a thing for me to say, because my house has even decorative power outlets).
Somebody with a great sense of aestetics may be able to place a shinny thermostat in a way that it looks nice. That's not for 99% of us, and few people do hire the other 1% for helping them.
But, anyway, I'm here just for the fun, because I'm certainly not looking for a thermostat.
I must say it's actually quite nice to use. I can put it in a mode where it does precisely what I want. Hold a temperature until told otherwise, and let me choose that temperature from my desktop or iPhone from anywhere.
Such a mode so simple that the Nest refuses to allow it.
Nest can hold a set temperature like any other thermostat. It'll do so better than any other thermostat, in fact, by learning the efficiency of your heater and A/C so that it doesn't overshoot your targets, and takes into account whether the thermostat is in direct sunlight part of the day, and airflow in your house.
It can also be told to hold a temperature forever, to hold a threshold forever (cool if it gets above 75, heat if it gets below 60), you can set a detailed schedule manually, you can tell it to hold a temperature until a certain time, or you can tell it to just kick on the fan for the next X minutes without changing the temperature then turn back off.
Turning on/off auto-schedule is one click if you want that feature, like all its other learning features. I've never run into any kind of bug with mine. You can change the temperature it's holding at from your iPhone or desktop from anywhere, along with all its other settings.
There's nothing really fancy about a thermometer, humidity sensor, IR motion sensor and a bit of software anyway. Which is why Nest had no trouble identifying prior art to each of the patents Honeywell tried to assert (and made no offer to license). They carved their niche by being the only company that cared to make the most of some simple inputs and packaged them up in a way that looked different from the rest of the market. It's somewhat similar to the iPod/iPhone story.
Indeed. From this review:
http://www.amazon.com/Honeywell-RET97A5E1001-U-Wi-Fi-Thermos...
> And the Nest doesn't have a Hold Temperature option, which is a feature even a $25 thermostat has. The final Nest deal-breaker for me is the +-3 degree temperature swing. If you set it to 72, it will keep the temperature between 69 and 75, a total of 6 degree swing, which sucks compared to the +-1 degree swing of the Honeywell.
* If Nest isn't on a schedule (whether it's a manually set schedule or the "auto-schedule"), it's holding temp. Like every other thermostat.
* It is more sensitive than the Honeywell, not less; it kicks on at +1 degrees on AC mode, but -0.7 degrees on heat. If you really want, you can set fractional target temperatures too.
* He thinks Nest shows nothing on its display but the temperature, when it's actually a fully interactive computer. All the settings can be changed at the wall, not just using the app/website.
At least the number of Amazon reviews suggests Nest is outselling all the Honeywell wifi panels over 20:1 anyway.
Who knows? Maybe it was written by a Honeywell shill. Worked on me apparently.
I will note one other difference which helped sway me to Honeywell is the fact that the Nest requires a battery, while the Honeywell requires "bus" power. I actually didn't have a "C wire" set up before I installed mine, but it was trivial to climb into the attic and re-purpose the fan control wire to instead provide constant (24VAC) power.
Granted, changing thermostat batteries wasn't really at the top of my pet peeve list, but I did read that the Nest has the potential to suck batteries dry too quickly. Any opinion on battery life?
It has a permanent internal battery, charged by the power wire, which allows it to stay active in a power failure and to use more power than some systems provide when you're interacting with its screen. So there's no real difference between the Nest and the Honeywell in terms of power or installation except that the Nest has a built-in rechargeable li-ion backup battery.
Here's how mine's wired, courtesy the mobile app again: http://i.imgur.com/Rls9EZk.png
There's $10K kitchen ranges out there, $50 beer mugs. etc. Design can carry premiums in this market, and Nest is trying to be the best looking thermostat in the industry. It doesn't matter if you can hack one for $40. It's a wealthy couple who doesn't hack who just want nice stuff in their house that works. And if you think that's weird, just recognize it's your taste, not reality. Why does West Elm exist if there's Ikea.
... said someone in a forum occupied mostly by middle class people from America.
Median household income, 2008-2012 $53,046
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
If we're talking globally, software engineers are even further to the right end.
2. The relevant meaning for this particular discussion is "in a position to spend $200 on a thermostat but not willing to spend thousands". That seems like pretty much exactly the bracket a lot of US software people would be in.
(There is a phenomenon in US politics where people earning $300k/year think they are "middle class" and I agree that that's silly. But software developers on ~$100k? Middle class. No question.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/05/disr...
They have the classic business model of a better product for a higher price. If the thermostat market had consisted entirely of Nest and then Honeywell introduced cheap, crappy thermostats, that'd be disruption.
I really agree with the premise of that article, with one major exception: when the real price is your attention. Internal combustion engines, iOS, can legitimately be seen as disruption: they were more expensive than their equivalent, but thosed need so much effort… Nest might be the same for domotic.
I live in Wisconsin where I would be hard pressed to spend $300/month during the worst imaginable weather (and this is five months... the worst imaginable weather is .. January. Three months earlier or later isn't too bad, back to $100/mo or less). With the recent polar vortex event settled right over my house, maybe this will be a $400 month for me... maybe not.
I assume by "bay area" and spending $600/mo on heating you mean Prudhoe Bay on the north slope of Alaska?
a) It is a historically cold year for a prolonged period of time
b) You set your heat to 80F all the time
With gas heating, it looks almost impossible to save $250... unless you're heating an NBA arena.
Which would be a lot more than $250 lost, and not a trade I'd be willing to make considering I value my free time with the family a lot more than that.
For me this whole thing misses the point though. Saving money is a sort of minimum expectation. The thing that Nest delivers that the competitors don't is ease of use. The previous 3M and Honeywell thermostats I owned before were not cheap, but their displays were terrible and their UX was the stuff of nightmares.
It took me probably 10 minutes to setup the Nest by comparison and maintenance has been mostly hands-off. It'll tweak the schedule here and there as necessary.
THAT is the value proposition. To throw out the Indiglo monstrosities before it that were inevitably running on some awful schedule because they were too much trouble and came with 50 page instruction manuals in 5 different languages.
I don't have time for that.
So to me, that's why Nest is successful. It might also explain why their smoke detectors are meh to me. Having a nice UX for something I don't actually need to interface with beyond tapping the occasional "ignore" button just isn't very much of a motivation to spend $100.
The value proposition is that $200 and letting Google extract value from your life by way of energy prices will somehow pay for the fractional energy saved when the device realizes that you work on weekdays.
Honestly, I'm having a lot of trouble following what you're trying to say.
Now you're talking about unauthorized data use and Google manipulating energy prices? I guess?
I don't. But your circumstances may be different if you work for $1/day.
Just wondering - is there a problem with different languages?
… in theory but there's no evidence that most people actually see those benefits:
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/revis...
I was going to say that you should start a company to produce that competitive $30 thermostat but then you confirmed that you have no idea what you're talking about:
> The price doesn't justify the energy savings or by product manufacturing cost
This might be true if you live in San Diego but in much of the country people pay many hundreds of dollars every month during the winter or summer. If a smarter thermostat saves 10% of that, it pays for itself in less than a year.
Not mathematically / thermodynamically possible, sorry. I live in a cooler area but not the real cold areas up north. During the recent polar vortex, which momentarily was centered over my house (and I'm not kidding) we got down to -15. (70 - -15) = delta t of 85 degrees. Lets say the magic machine dropped the temp by 5 degrees during the entire event 24x7 to save me energy. Why I'd pay $300 to simply permanently turn a thermostat down and leave it down is a mystery, but stick with me. That would mean a theoretical delta T of a "mere" 80 degrees. That means a maximum theoretical energy savings of (1-80/85)100 = 5%. Not 10%. No, I'm not setting my thermostat back 24x7. No, I don't live in a cold area like the folks up north where it was -30, in fact right now its somewhat above freezing outside. I just don't see it mathematically.
True, the weather is not always that bad. Right now its about 35. So 70-35 = 35 degree delta T, and dropping 5 degrees temporarily when unoccupied could save as much as (1-30/35)100 = 14 % if the weather was like this all the time and my house was perma-unoccupied. However, out of 168 hours in a week, my house is unoccupied for 18 hours. The rest of the time is filled by work at home, strange overlapping shifts, etc. So my house can only set back 10% of the time, so I only get 10% of the theoretical maximum savings, or a whopping .... 1%.
Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties, but we like it, keeps the riff raff away. So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039.
Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
I would come out ahead both in comfort and financially by purchasing a kerosene heater and $300 of kerosene. Or better yet, even more insulation, or newer windows or whatever.
The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
Given that I can set my thermostat back roughly part time, and most people work 40 hrs, and someone who can blow $300 on a thermostat probably works at least 60 hours, I will triple my theoretical savings to $36/year. Given a zero interest loan that would pay for itself in a "mere" nine years. Google products don't last nine years before being shut down but I will error on the side of optimism and assume this is an outlier. The problem is the 29.99% credit card to buy the $300 thermostat means it really costs $90/yr to buy one... and now we're saving $36/yr instead of $12, but its still an order of magnitude or so too little to run a profit before it requires replacement.
Still not seeing it.
The target audience is people who can't do math. Or like greenwashing. Or like showing off to other people that they can throw away $300 on a thermostat, or at least obtain a loan to do so. There's nothing particularly wrong with that as a market, either. I read an online article from three months ago that they were selling 40K/month and assuming they get a revenue of $100/unit (rest goes to retailer, warehouse, shipping, etc) thats a revenue of about $50M/yr which isn't bad. A 10% profit on revenue on electronics would be good, so lets say $5M profit per year. Well, I wouldn't pay about $4B today for $5M next year, but aside from that little issue...
I don't claim the product, in itself, is foolish at all. As a "hey look at how much money I have, err, had" $300 product, its probably a better long term investment than a $300 cellphone or a $300 computer video card or even a $300 giant TV. Some of the mathematical / economic rationalization is hilarious but that's orthogonal to the foolishness argument.
A reasonable opportunity cost might be 3%, I'm too lazy to bother figuring the time till profit because nine years at zero is already too long.
So say an alternative is 30, the cost is 220, not 300. That takes several years off your calculation. Then having the benefit of an improved interface is non zero. Even if it takes a long time to pay back I plan on living in my house for a long time, and I liked nice things.
Now if you want to argue about overpriced absurd things, go with their $130 smoke detector or whatever it is. No thanks.
Engineers and technical people tend to analyze things like their energy bill already. They also tend to love gadgets.
A couple of parts of Nest that aren't usually factored in are the convenience factor of using your favorite device to control the thermostat remotely and the cost of your current programmable thermostat. If new home owners choose Nest instead of another thermostat they only have to save $150 to make it worth it. And they can factor in convenience.
Another words, it's not a crazy idea to pay a little extra for one these especially if you haven't already been analyzing your energy usage.
"Programming thermostats is complicated and irritating - but an un-programmed thermostat can waste 20% of your heating and cooling bill. So the Nest Thermostat programs itself."
So she works 40 hrs a week which works out to 25% of the time. So we can just turn the thermostat down 4 times as far for a quarter the time. So... She leaves for work and the thermostat drops to 70-40=30. Which is unfortunately below freezing so all her plumbing pipes burst. But at least she saved 10% on her heating. Also she owns an indoor cat and at 30F she'd turn into a frozen cat-sicle.
So she pays $300 for a thermostat that can't save her 10% on her bill unless she destroys all her plumbing flooding her house and killing her cat. I'm not seeing this as a great selling point.
So, no, cold parts of the country are precisely the locations where you can't achieve great heating savings because its mathematically impossible because its so cold outside. Maybe a 20000 sq foot mcmansion on the coast in florida, it might work there. But not where its cold.
But imagine that there are 4 or 5 months a year where the outdoor temperature is 15 or 20 degrees colder than a comfortable indoor temperature. And imagine turning down the thermostat during the night in those periods, not just during unoccupied times.
(I realize that more energy is used during cold periods, but some huge portion of the country lives in areas that rarely see 20 for the several months they are below 60).
The polar vortex scenario is where a thermostat can help the least.
For instance, imagine a home that heats from 50 most of the time. Then it is (1-15/20)/100=25%.
This mathematical model would work for a poorly insulated house in an area that never gets cold. So if in Atlanta the furnace is struggling at 50F outside, then this would mathematically work out. The problem of course is total annual heating bills in Atlanta probably aren't very impressive, so saving even 10% on them still wouldn't amount to much.
The broader point is that the average heating season temperature at the location is more interesting than the coldest temperature experienced during a given decade.
That still ends up being something like (1-8/50)/100 for a lot of people, so an easy opportunity for 15% during away times (and 70->62 isn't an absurd night setting...).
Beyond that, you're completely missing the point about a smarter thermostat: the savings don't come from the temperature outside is -15° and your heater is running almost constantly. You have to deal with that by adding insulation or living in a colder house. Where many people can save money is waste: when the heating or cooling would have run without benefit – e.g. it's 40° outside and you're paying to keep it over 65° but it'd really be perfectly fine if it drifted down to 50° for the 8+ hours in the middle of the day when everyone's at work. A serious miser will religiously turn it off before they walk out the door but most people won't. Many people even leave the thermostat set at a comfortable temperature because they dislike coming home to a very cold/hot house.
Those people are the ones who will benefit the most from something programmable but unfortunately most of the devices on the market have horrible UIs and none of the $30 ones will do things like detect when you aren't home, which is significant for people who don't have rigidly predictable schedules. Again, it doesn't have to be a game-theoretical optimum – only better than what most people are doing now.
> Unfortunately my heating bills over a very long term only average maybe $100/month, which I'm sure sounds insane to coasties
Head to New England and your new neighbors will complement you on your frugality, as most people have heating bills 4-8 times that high in the winter. Toss in, say, a spike in heating oil costs and anything which reduces inefficiency starts to look pretty cheap. Hint: none of them had McMansions, either – it's just cold during the winter in Connecticut.
> So I can save about $1/month or $12/year. At $300 retail, it'll pay for itself by 2039. Even worse, most will be purchased using a 30% interest rate credit card, making payback time infinite. The 30% interest on the credit card to pay for the $300 thermostat would be $90/year but I'm only saving at best $12/year. Whoops.
When you need to make up numbers so the math makes your argument seem less arbitrary it's time to accept that other people are allowed to make decisions in life without your approval. You're overstating the purchase price by nearly 25% and assuming the worst possible purchase method – and you're doing that for an amount which the average American household spends on cable tv / internet / smartphones every couple of months.
> The final killer problem is I intentionally don't live in a McMansion so I can have a better lifestyle, such as not shivering in the winter. I've already decided to own a 25% smaller house to save 25% on my heating bills, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in saving 10% on my bill by shivering. I'm not paying thousands of dollars a month to shiver in a house when I could be warm and toasty in a hundreds of dollars a month apartment. Nope not happening non-starter totally uninterested. Selling snow to eskimos. Nope.
You do seem to need a lot of external validation for your decisions. Hopefully the smug feelings will keep you warm.
1) doubling is the same as an order of magnitude (or more), ah math who cares.
2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)
3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.
4) average and peak are the same. Pick whichever advances an argument more.
5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.
6) I do admit you are 100% correct on the price. And given the mighty power of Google and expansion and wider availability of capital not only are you correct that the price has slightly dropped, but I suggest going further and in the long run it could drop to $100 or so, maybe lower. Fundamentally, from an electronic standpoint, the inevitable Chinese clones will probably only be $75 or so. See also #1 above, 25%, order of magnitude, who's counting.
7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.
Oddly enough you haven't convinced me you're correct and I'm wrong.
> 2) it costs the same amount to heat a house to a given temp no matter the outdoor temp (for a house built to be comfortable down to -30, heating at 40 costs almost nothing)
This is not about how much it costs to heat a house to a given temperature. It's about how often heating or cooling is used when the occupants don't need it.
> 3) The public is stupid, far too dumb to program something, so lets prey on them with something real expensive that tries to avoid that.
The only thing I said on this is that most programmable thermostats have bad UI and I'd extend that bad UI to note that they also tend to assume a rigid schedule. It came as no surprise to me when I read the government studies concluding that programmable thermostats: the Honeywell which my Nest replaced allowed you to set two temperatures per day and there was no way to adjust for changes in your schedule without clicking through the entire schedule — 3 (hour, minute, AM/PM) pairs with two high/low temperature thresholds for 7 days or almost 40 clicks on low-quality buttons which would have shamed a $2 calculator. If you knew you were going to be out late one evening, do you spend 15 minutes clicking through that UX disaster or just say “Meh, we'll heat the house for a couple extra hours”? Maybe you plan to go out for a couple hours mid-day? There's no way to express that short of turning the entire thing off, which is fine part of the year and annoying during the rest when it means you'll come home to a very hot/cold house because there's no way to say “Keep the house over 50° (or under 80°) for the next few hours”.
That's not saying that the public is stupid, it's saying that there's been a market failure in producing decent thermostats. It'd be great if there were options between the Nest and the junk $30 thermostats for people who wanted more intelligence (or just the silly auto-away sensor) but don't mind, say, cheap plastic fittings or losing some of the more processor-intensive features.
> 5) Its OK to rip people off as long as you don't rip them off for more money than other people do.
You're arguing against something which I didn't write.
> 7) Paraphrase to something like I don't like the results of your math equations, so I'll call you smug instead. Come on, you can do better than that. If we're going to go all playground here, "Your mom" me or something.
Your entire argument has been that if people lived exactly the same way as you do and made the same decisions which you've made it's wrong for them to want a Nest. That's smug because it assumes that there are no other valid positions. Using terms like “ripped off” implies a moral judgement rather than, say, people making decisions based on different circumstances. Similarly, assuming that people will finance everything on a bad credit card is implicitly stating that most people who are not you make bad personal financial decisions — that's both insulting and irrelevant to the issue at hand.