I won't buy a NEST after the Google acquisition; nice to see other players entering this space. Laughable how long it took them -- Honeywell should have completely owned this market. Next up for disruption is home security.
> Honeywell should have completely owned this market. True, with respect to "smart" thermostats. But Honeywell already owns the thermostat market, and it's much larger than the "smart" thermostat market.
Prior to this release, Honeywell seemed to be playing Blackberry to Nest's iPhone: "we own the serious market. Only kids and geeks would want a 'smart' ${device}". And then suddenly one day everybody wanted one, and the incumbents were blindsided to realize that they didn't understand their market as well as they'd thought.
There's no reason at all that Honeywell shouldn't dominate the smart thermostat market, other than that they couldn't be bothered to. In a couple of years when no homeowner is going to want to buy a new house with a "dumb" thermostat, they'll need to have something attractive in that space. I bet more is riding on the success of this release than you'd think.