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Google to Acquire Nest

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Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Right?

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? $200 for a predictive thermostat, with a lame excuse to stream energy usage data and proximity data (Nest detects humans) out of your home? Id rather pay $99 to tell health insurance companies how often I exercise, live. 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 m…

The price makes me choke as well. But I think Nest's real value is as a market distruptor, the evidence being Honeywell's lawsuit and furious attempts to update their own products with comparable features.

The price that Nest charged for this as an independent company trying to make a profit may be very different from the price Google charges for it.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#303
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? $200 for a predictive thermostat, with a lame excuse to stream energy usage data and proximity data (Nest detects humans) out of your home? Id rather pay $99 to tell health insurance companies how often I exercise, live. 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 m…

Realistically Nest is a luxury product and the rest is just rationalization. But luxury gadgets is a legitimate market.

Yes, but Apple's market not Google's...

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#304

smart phone > smart car > smart house > ... ? ... > smart human I for one see great areas of improvement and possibilities inside the common house. Not that I'd wire up every appliance with a Wi-Fi sensor, but some data can be useful, if only for safety (falling asleep with the oven on: here a sensor could cut the power at a certain condition, or trigger the fire alarm, or ring up the firefighters). Or you left the h…

I know this makes me sound like a terrible luddite or hipster or both, but I've been thinking about all of these smart devices and services and how they may have a somewhat infantalizing impact on people. I recently met with some people behind a startup built entirely around generating meal plans for you. I understand that it's a useful service (for some types of people). But I worry about the implication that we are…

We can figure out what to eat. But it takes time. Imagine that you want to personalize your diet. Take certain ammounts of protein, calories, fat, etc... It would take lots of time if you would prepare a weekly plan for yourself. Thats a good Idea.

But I do feel what you'r expressing, like we need an app to do everything.

But I much rather live with these little apps and have lots of good information than to live completly oblivious to everything like my grandads (kind'of. I still have my hippie moments).

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#305

Someone at google is thinking of ways to use Google Plus to fuck up Nest.

Has google hired a lot of MBA's recently, because it look an awful lot like they are trying to cross-pollinate their main business lines, to improve vertical integration and uptake.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#306
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Besides the fact that Nest is a great product (But so are Triscuits), why would Google buy them? The Nest _does_ know when you are home. If Google starts to use Nest data to target adds at me, I'm going to rip it out, set it on fire, and mail it to Larry.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#307

The only possible way this acquisition make sense is that Nest has some truly amazing product in the pipeline. It is impossible to justify 3.2 Billion for a team or thermostats. My guess is they wanted to get acquired because some future product make sense to have Google's brand and go to market ability.

A friend is currently working for an intrusive home management solution that certain telecoms are to unleash on the unsuspecting Germans. All internet of things stuff, all remote. It will be sold with internet subscription. The root capabilities will be in telco and not the home owner.

I am willing to bet a lot that Nest have either something similar or that google wants to spearhead this market and are scrambling with whatever the cost the know how.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are just a few examples: - 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.

Google Voice is effectively a dead product, isn't it? Doesn't seem that favorable to me.

It's kept working for the last 3 years being awesome... Doesn't seem that dead to me.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#309

I don't know a lot about Nest, but I understand that requests to the thermostat are made from the phone app indirectly through a central server? What possible consumer benefit could that indirection have? edit: The reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out why an exact copy of Nest except that it didn't leak data and didn't require other people's servers to work wouldn't eat Nest's lunch.

I used that indirection to turn the heat up for my cat while on vacation, knowing that a big ice storm was coming. Couldn't do that if it only worked on the LAN.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#310
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and like Android and Youtube. Sarcasm aside, Google has actually done pretty well with acquisitions compared to other companies. (Say ones that begin with "M" or "Y"). You can see the list in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

YouTube was fine when Google wrote checks and got out of the way. Now Larry and co. have their hands all over it and YT is slowly going to shit... from the G+ spam to the annotation spam and of course you need to sign in to keep them turned off (lol maybe!), to "hey let's make you rebuffer the whole video you just watched" to just horrid performance drops in general to "hey we found a way to make YT comments even worse".

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.

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