Nest Joins Google As Alphabet Doubles Down on Smart Home
- Mehedi Hassan
- Feb 07, 2018
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Nest, Alphabet’s smart home security subsidiary, is joining Google today. The merger of the two firms will likely pave the way for a wider array of smart home products from Alphabet.
Nest was already a part of Google before Alphabet was even a thing, so the merger of the two firms isn’t surprising to see. Especially with the recent smart home push from Google with its Home speakers and Assistant, this was bound to happen.
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“To build on this momentum, we’re excited to bring the Nest and Google Hardware teams together. The goal is to supercharge Nest’s mission: to create a more thoughtful home, one that takes care of the people inside it and the world around it. By working together, we’ll continue to combine hardware, software and services to create a home that’s safer, friendlier to the environment, smarter and even helps you save money—built with Google’s artificial intelligence and the Assistant at the core,” said Rick Osterloh, who currently spearheads Google’s hardware efforts, including its Pixel brand.
Nest makes excellent smart home security products, and combined with Google’s existing voice-activated smart home devices, Alphabet will be able to work on building products that not just improve your home’s security, but also give you a full-fledged smart home experience.
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<blockquote><a href="#244032"><em>In reply to JG1170:</em></a></blockquote><p>It is funny how people see things differently. I think Google will NOT be our tech overlords. Google IMHO, still only does two things very well. Search and Maps. Everything else they do is either half-arsed or beta.</p><p><br></p><p>YouTube is a great service for many things, minus the despicable comments section, but Google bought them and YouTube would be just fine if Google had not bought them.</p><p><br></p><p>Google is a distant 3rd on the cloud space. Their attempts to come of with a "Facebook" or "Twitter" have failed multiple times. G-Suite/Apps is a great product but so is MS Office and Google after all these years had not really made a dent in the corporate world. I go to a peer company retreat every year for technology. Last year of the 14 companies all used Office 365 and one used the Google products. Just got back from the retreat last week and now all use Office 365. The one that used Google told us how the users basically rejected the Google products.</p><p><br></p><p>The are doing well with schools, IMHO, because of the price. Free is very compelling to public schools. My kids go to private schools and they use Microsoft, but they do pay $10 a year per student I think. A 1000 students on Google is ZERO, 1000 on Microsoft $10,000.</p><p><br></p><p>Android is a hot mess in my experience I manage our MDM solutions for my company. It is NOT getting any better. Google just stated a few weeks ago they pulled 700,000 malware apps out of their store in 2017, up something like 70% over 2016. Where do I NOT sign up for that??? The Pixel 2 still feels like Google is not fully behind the making of a phone. 3rd party phone makers still can't pump out updates, or won't, like Apple does.</p><p><br></p><p>Lastly is privacy. We are seeing the beginning of the privacy backlash that I think will impact Google, Facebook, Twitter and others very soon. In the EU it is really taking hold in 2018 with some steep, really steep fines for companies like Google that continue to cross the privacy fine.</p><p><br></p><p>My personal use of Google products is using them for search, not logged in or giving them my location, and Youtube with a fake account.</p>