So this happened today: Google just announced its buying Nest. $3.2 billion, all cash, and apparently the deal's already done, not just rumored. I found out because my brother-in-law texted me "isnt that the thermostat thing you wont shut up about" which, fair, I probably do bring it up more than a normal person should at dinner.
I've had the Nest Learning Thermostat on my wall since last spring. Cost me $249 plus an hour of fumbling with wiring I did not fully understand, and a call to my dad who also did not fully understand it but was willing to stay on the phone while I poked at wires anyway. And I'll say this plainly: it's the best home purchase I've made in years. During that brutal cold snap a couple weeks back, the one where half the country was hitting temperatures colder than Antarctica, the thing quietly learned that I leave for work around 7:40 and started ramping the heat back up around 5, right before I get home, without me touching a single setting after the first week. Walked in from single-digit weather into a warm apartment four days in a row. Genuinely felt smug about it.
So you'd think Id be thrilled that the company behind it just got a giant validation stamp from Google. Instead my first reaction, honestly, was something closer to dread.
Heres my actual problem with it, and its not really about Nest, its about what Nest becomes now. Tony Fadell built this thing to be the anti-surveillance smart-home device, or at least thats how it was marketed to me when I bought it: a company that makes money selling you a $249 box, not a company that makes money knowing everything about when youre home. Google's entire business is the second thing. Every ad dollar they make comes from knowing more about you than you'd tell a stranger. Now the company that knows my search history, my email, my location half the time through my phone, also owns the device that knows exactly when my apartment is empty. Thats not a hypothetical slippery slope thing, thats just what a thermostat that reports to the cloud already does, now sitting inside a company whose whole model is monetizing exactly that kind of data.
Google says Nest will keep operating separately, keep its own brand, its own app, Fadell staying on as the guy in charge. I believe that's true for now. Ive just watched enough acquisitions to know "stays independent" is usually true right up until it very suddenly isnt. Give it two years and Ill bet the privacy policy quietly grows a paragraph about "our family of products including Google services."
Not that I'm going to rip the thing off my wall over this. Its already learned my schedule, Im not starting over with a dumb thermostat and going back to fiddling with a dial like its 2004. Thats sort of the whole trap of these devices, isnt it. Once its useful enough you stop being able to imagine leaving.
Small tangent because Ive been sitting on this complaint for a week: can we talk about how every tech blog headline this month has just been "X BUYS Y FOR $Z BILLION, HERES WHAT IT MEANS" written within about ninety minutes of the press release, before anyone's actually used anything or talked to anyone who isnt a company spokesperson. I get it, deadlines, pageviews, whatever. But I read four separate posts today that all had basically the same three paragraphs rearranged. None of them mentioned what it actually feels like to own one of these things, which, fine, is sort of why I'm bothering to write this instead of just linking the press release like everyone else did.
Also, entirely unrelated: my coffee maker broke this morning, the cheap $30 one from Target, and I spent longer being annoyed about that than I did about the acquisition news, which probably tells you something about where my priorities actually sit before 9am on a Monday.
Anyway. Watch this space, I guess. If my thermostat starts serving me ads for space heaters Ill let you know.