Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google to Acquire Nest

investor.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 590 posts

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#531

Post by CoryG89 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #488
jt2190 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poe's law explains why sarcasm doesn't work on the internet: "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] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law (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://v…

Well not exactly: the one(?) form of sarcasm that works very well is when the facts being stated are clearly false. Though obviously this does rely on the audience knowing the factual background...

It relies on more than that. Not only does this rely on the audience to know the factual background, but it also relies on them coming to the conclusion that you also know the factual background and are not just uninformed, misinformed, or plain wrong. Sarcasm on the internet only works well between people who are familiar with one another.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#532

Post by rokhayakebe »

mbesto wrote: post #89
ActVen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have paying customers. It matters.

Helen of Troy which owns Kaz, which owns Honeywell (one of the largest businesses specific to Nest's thermostat space) has a market cap of $1.7bil - http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=HELE - that's why this sounds crazy. On the flip side, P&G is a $217bil business - so, not that crazy how big the market is and can be. EDIT: As larrys points out, Honeywell is a $70bil biz.

I like how this 1.7B publicly traded co has a wordpress engine running their site.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#533

Post by CoryG89 »

foobarian wrote: post #492
lstamour wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never found my Nest to be all that intelligent beyond "I wonder if he'll notice it's colder now?" "Oh wait, he turned me up, I guess he noticed." It's a game of cat and mouse with that darn auto-away enabled sometimes.

I find the learning functionality to be a nuisance. What makes it awesome is the design, the remote control, and the scheduling interface.

I figured as much. Just seems like a big fuss over a whole lot of nothing though if that's all it is. And 3.2 billion for that? Why couldn't Google just make their own that does exactly the same thing? I think its trendiness is all people really care about.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#534

Post by CoryG89 »

ariwilson wrote: post #308
eridius wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not completely. When they came out with hangout integration in gmail, I completely lost all ability to make outgoing calls for a long time.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#535

Post by lstamour »

CoryG89 wrote: post #533
foobarian wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the learning functionality to be a nuisance. What makes it awesome is the design, the remote control, and the scheduling interface.

I figured as much. Just seems like a big fuss over a whole lot of nothing though if that's all it is. And 3.2 billion for that? Why couldn't Google just make their own that does exactly the same thing? I think its trendiness is all people really care about.

If it helps, as Verge commenters reminded me, it's 3.2 Instagrams, 0.8 Snapchats or 0.4 Skypes. :D

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#536

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #379
MrZongle2 wrote: post #11

Am I the only one who thought "well, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, it looked like a good product"?

No, my first thought was "wow, good for the Nest guys" followed by "too bad, I really don't want Google Analytics hanging on my wall."

I think it is about the smart grid; the electric grid is supposed to adjust production of electricity to actual demand;

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.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#538

Post by CoryG89 »

smackfu wrote: post #324
wmf wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An interesting question is whether Google will keep it a luxury product.

This is exactly what I was thinking. They will use their resources to make it cheaper, mass manufacture them, and start selling them to next to nothing just to get the data. More power to 'em.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#539

Post by Narretz »

teh_klev wrote: post #486
Steko wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

"hey we found a way to make YT comments even worse" 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.

Well, since they are (more) tightly integrated with Google+ you get even more inane one-liners like 'interesting' that somebody posted with sharing the video, and useless banter in conversation threads following these shares.

Re: Google to Acquire Nest

#540

Post by mdda »

ceejayoz wrote: post #309
pessimizer wrote: post #182

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.

Actually puzzled : Why would the cat need it warmer indoors if there's an ice storm? Isn't keeping it at the same temperature enough? Or is the problem because the heating switches off overnight, so you feel that it needs a boost during the day to compensate? Isn't that something that a smart thermostat should cope with?
Post reply on HN