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.
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.
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.
