So Nest bought Dropcam today. $555 million, all cash, according to what's floating around this afternoon. If you don't know what Dropcam is, it's the little cylindrical webcam thing that sits on a shelf and streams your living room to your phone so you can check on your dog, or your kid, or make sure nobody's robbing you while you're at the beach. And if you don't know what Nest is by now I don't know what to tell you, but: thermostat company, bought by Google back in January for something like $3.2 billion, and apparently not done shopping.
I own a Nest. Bought it last winter mostly because my old Honeywell thermostat looked like it belonged in a submarine and I was tired of walking over to punch buttons on it at 11pm. It's fine. It learns your schedule, it's got a nice screen, it saved me maybe a little money on the gas bill, I genuinely can't tell if that's the thermostat or just a mild winter. What it did NOT do is make me think "you know what this company should own next, a camera that watches my house."
But here we are. And I keep going back and forth on how I feel about it, which is not usually how I write these posts, I know, I'm supposed to have a take. Here's my actual take: this is Google building a sensor network for your home one acquisition at a time, and calling it Nest instead of Google makes it feel cozier than it is. Thermostat, smoke detector (Nest bought Revolv-adjacent stuff too, forgive me if I'm getting the timeline a little tangled), and now a camera with a live feed and cloud storage. Individually these are all nice gadgets. Stacked together under one company that also happens to run the biggest ad business on the planet, it starts to feel like a different thing than "smart home."
Tony Fadell, who runs Nest, has said publicly more than once that Nest data isn't going to get folded into Google's ad targeting. I want to believe him. He built the iPod, the guy knows how to make hardware people love, and he seems to actually care about not being creepy. But saying it today doesn't bind whatever this looks like in three years, and "we promise not to use this the obvious way" is a sentence that ages badly in tech, historically speaking. Not always! But often enough that I raise an eyebrow every time I hear it.
Dropcam itself I've actually used, a buddy of mine has one pointed at his front door and it's legitimately useful, motion alerts, decent night vision, the video quality is way better than the last generation of these things. It's not a bad product. That's kind of the point though, it's good enough that a lot of people are going to buy it now specifically because Nest is behind it, and Nest is behind it because Google is behind Nest, and around we go.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: this is also the same week Amazon did their whole Fire Phone reveal out in Seattle, dynamic perspective and Firefly and all that, and I'm sure every other blog on the internet has fifteen posts about it by now so I'm not going to add a sixteenth. I'll just say the demo with the head-tracking thing looked neat on stage and I have zero idea if it'll feel neat in my actual hand for six months. Different post, different day maybe.
Anyway. If you're the type who already has a Nest thermostat, you're probably getting a Dropcam pitch in your inbox by August, mark it down. I'm not buying one yet. Not because I think Google's about to start selling footage of my kitchen to advertisers tomorrow, I don't think that, but because I'd like to see how this whole portfolio behaves for a year or two before I put a camera on my own bookshelf. Thermostats don't have a lens. That's not nothing.