So Google bought Nest on Monday. $3.2 billion, all cash, and I've been sitting here for two days trying to figure out how I feel about it, because I have one of these things bolted to my hallway wall.
I put the Nest Learning Thermostat in back around Thanksgiving, mostly because my old Honeywell dial thing died and the Best Buy guy talked me into the $249 one instead of a $40 replacement. Took maybe twenty minutes to install, not counting the ten minutes I spent googling whether my furnace even had a C-wire (it did, barely). And it's been fine! It learned my schedule in about a week, it dims itself at night so it's not glowing like a nightlight, and my December gas bill was noticeably lower than last December. I was smug about it. I told at least four people about my thermostat, unprompted, which is not a thing I do.
Then Monday morning I opened Twitter and everyone's thermostat company belongs to Google now.
I get why they did it. Tony Fadell ran the iPod team at Apple for years before he left to start Nest with Matt Rogers, and the whole pitch of the company was always "boring home hardware, but designed by people who actually care about design." That's basically Google's pitch for everything they touch lately too, so on paper it's not a weird fit. Fadell's staying on to run it as its own thing under Larry Page, not getting folded into the Android team, which is apparently supposed to make me feel better.
It doesn't, really. Not because I think Google's going to do anything sinister with my thermostat schedule specifically (nobody cares that I turn the heat down at 68 and up at 71, I promise), but because I've been burned by this exact company deciding a product doesn't matter anymore. I was a Google Reader person. I know how that story ends. One day it's a beloved little tool with a devoted userbase, three years later there's a blog post about "streamlining our product line" and you're migrating your data somewhere else at 11pm on a Tuesday. Nest isn't a free web app with no revenue model, obviously, it's a $250 piece of hardware bolted to actual walls in actual houses, which is a different kind of commitment. But "different kind" isn't "no kind."
Nest also said, in their announcement, that Google won't be using your Nest data to target ads and that data stays separate from other Google services for now. I believe that's true today. I have no idea if it's true in three years, and neither does anyone writing headlines about it this week, and that's kind of the whole problem with these acquisitions — nobody making the promise is still in the room by the time it gets broken.
Separately, and I'm not going to turn this into two posts stapled together, but it's worth mentioning that a federal appeals court struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules on Tuesday. Verizon sued, the D.C. Circuit sided with Verizon, and now the rules that were supposed to stop ISPs from throttling or prioritizing traffic are basically gone until the FCC figures out a new legal basis for them. I don't have anything clever to say about it yet, it's two days old and every telecom lawyer on the internet is still arguing about what it actually means in practice. I just think it's funny that this happened the same week as the Nest thing, because both stories are really about the same question: how much do you trust a small number of very large companies to behave well once nobody's forcing them to.
Anyway. My thermostat still works. It's 34 degrees out and the house is 69 and I'm typing this in a sweater I don't need, so credit where it's due. I'm just going to keep an eye on it, the way you keep an eye on a landlord who seems nice so far.