I've had a Nest on my hallway wall since last spring - the round one, the second-gen Learning Thermostat, the one that cost me $249 plus an evening of swearing at a wire labeled "Rh" that didn't match anything in the manual. It's been fine. Good, even. It learned my schedule in about four days and now the house is warm when I get up and cold when I'm at work, and I basically never think about it.
Except now I'm thinking about it, because on Monday Google announced it's buying Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash. Cash. For a company that makes thermostats and smoke detectors. Tony Fadell, who ran the thing (and who apparently gets called "the father of the iPod" in every single article about this, myself now included, sorry), is going to keep running it, just under the Google umbrella instead of on its own.
My first reaction, honestly, was that number. $3.2 billion is an absurd amount of money for a device that regulates the temperature of my living room. Instagram sold for a billion and that had, what, thirty million users posting photos of their lunch. Nest has sold a few million thermostats total, and most of the coverage I've seen puts total revenue somewhere in the low hundreds of millions. So this is Google paying something like ten times revenue for a company whose entire product line fits in a shopping bag. That's not a thermostat purchase. That's Google buying a team, a brand, and a foothold in your house that has nothing to do with search ads. Or it's Google buying data. Probably both.
And that's the part that's actually bugging me a little, not the price tag. I like my thermostat. I don't love the idea that the company that already knows what I search for and reads my Gmail (their words, more or less, from years of ad-targeting disclosures) now also owns the company that knows exactly when I'm home, when I'm asleep, and when the house sits empty for a week because I'm traveling. Nest has always said its data stays separate from the parent company's ad business, and I believe that's the plan today. Plans change once the checks clear, is my only real worry, and I don't think that's a crazy thing to worry about.
None of this is going to make me rip the thing off the wall. It's a genuinely great product - the interface is the first thermostat UI I've ever used that didn't make me want to throw the remote at the wall, and the auto-away feature has probably saved me sixty or seventy bucks in heating this winter alone, if I'm being honest about how often I forget to turn the thing down before leaving. I just think it's worth sitting with the discomfort of "a search-and-ads company now owns the thing that watches my house" instead of pretending it's no big deal because the app is pretty.
Separately, and I promise this is related: this also happened the same week a federal appeals court threw out the FCC's net neutrality rules, which got buried under all the Nest coverage and deserves way more attention than it got in my feeds. Verizon sued, and won, and now the legal basis for treating all internet traffic equally is basically gone until the FCC tries again with different rules. I only mention it here because it's a good reminder that the smart-home story and the open-internet story are, underneath, the same story: a handful of very large companies deciding, quietly, how the pipes and the boxes in your house actually work, with basically zero input from the person paying the bill every month. Sorry, that got a little bleak for a post that started out being about my thermostat.
Anyway. Still keeping the Nest. Still setting it to 65 at night because my partner runs cold and won't admit the house is fine at 62. Just going to be a little more deliberate about which smart devices I let into the next place I live, and a little less impressed by a slick UI on its own.