If anything, Nest is a comment about how growing a company via investments doesn't work. If Nest could focus on working out the technical issues without the investors breathing down their neck, I'm sure the product would do much better.
Not only that, but I already have a thermostat. It works perfectly. I've never said to myself, "Gee, I wish I could adjust my home temperature from work, I need an exact 23.5 degrees when I get home". It doesn't do enough for me to justify messing with my HVAC system, that whole "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage comes to mind.
On the flip side I'm exactly their target market. My house has two heating zones - one for the main floor and one for the basement. In the winter the basement defaults to 60 degrees because it's not a regular living space. That being said if I go down there to watch movies or play video games on my office computer... I don't want it to be 60 degrees. Rather than freeze for an hour while that zone heats up after manually setting the thermostat, I can just adjust it from upstairs.
Is that lazy? Sure... but the convenience is worth a couple hundred bucks.
Don't you still have to wait the same amount of time for that zone to heat up? I guess I value a couple hundred bucks differently.
I guess I would just walk down the stairs, manually adjust the thermostat and walk back up, but then again my parents just told us to put sweaters on if we were cold.
The amount of time wasted doing that every couple days walking from one end of the house to the other, and interrupting what I'm doing? Well worth the price of admission. I get it's not for everyone, but the annoyance factor alone makes it worthwhile. The same reason I have a smart garage door opener, so when I get to the end of the street and can't remember if I closed it or not, I can just pull out my phone and check instead of driving all the way home.
Smart homes for me are about removing everyday annoyances. Is the price to entry higher than it probably should be? Absolutely, but that's the way it is with any new technology. I would be shocked if 10 years from now the norm for every new construction is anything other than a smart thermostat.
So much of "SmartHome" is solutions in search of a problem.
In the case of Nest, I suppose I can imagine that I took off on a trip and forgot to turn the thermostat down. But I balance that against the cost, the "it ain't broke" thing, concerns about decreasing the reliability of my heating system in a cold area of the country, and a sufficiently variable schedule that I challenge any non-omniscient device to learn my patterns.
There are some useful things like leak detectors, low temp warnings, and general piece of mind visibility into what's happening with my house when traveling that I've installed. But most of the non or minimally automated things (I do have a couple wireless X10 lights) around my house work well enough that they're pretty far down on the list of stuff that I wish I could improve to make my life easier/better.
"So much of "SmartHome" is solutions in search of a problem"
Being a bit neurotic about switching off appliances before traveling and leaving our home unoccupied for a while I would throw money at any service that could allow me to tell what devices were on or off in my home at any time.
I do sort of have a solution involving an iPhone that I use at the moment - but it's a bit silly....
On the flip side everything in my house has been automated and it makes our life better and easier, especially with a young kid around. One thing I don't have to think about. Additionally, the Echo makes a fabulous input device.
Is it a must have? Not yet, but definitely worth the initial setup time.
And I bet your VCR never flashed 12:00, either. You are not a representative user.
There are hundreds of millions of families out there that have no idea how to program their thermostat beyond changing the current temperature, so they just leave it running all night and day, whether they're home or not.
The appeal of the Nest thermostat is not so that control freaks can fine-tune the temperature at home while in an airplane. It's so that regular people can just have it installed and forget about it.
But wouldn't those people not able to program their current thermostat, for whatever reason, would have to be able to program their new fancier thermostat?
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but the whole point of the Nest thermostat is that it can still do a pretty good job without its owner having to do any programming.
They don't scream this like they used to, but it's called the "Nest Learning Thermostat". There's one control, a ring that you turn left for colder and right for hotter. Over about a week the thermostat takes your inputs combined with the weather and develops a schedule it thinks you'll find comfortable. As it misses, you override it (again, just turn the ring) and Nest learns and updates its schedule for you.
You can use the app or the website to input a specific schedule if you prefer, which is still simpler than 99% of conventional thermostats.
Anecdotally I just programmed my grandmother's thermostat for her and it took me -- a 30-something with deep technical experience -- way too long to figure it out (I even had to break out the manual). What if grandma could just turn the ring left or right and the thermostat would come up with a schedule for her, wouldn't that be better?
But isn't that just a small part of the Nest idea?
Wouldn't the same thing be accomplished by getting someone to do it for them? Much like your grandmother and you? You set it up for her, she likely has to rarely deal with it again. All Nest does is take you out of the equation but you work for free.
Except the next time I visited, her thermostat had messed up its program and it was set at 80 degrees. Whether it was a power outage and dead backup battery, or she somehow fiddled with it and messed it up herself, it was once again in a broken state.
I hate to invoke the overused phrase, but the nest thermostat Just Works™.
Not really, because it continually adjusts its schedule for you depending on your manual inputs, is powered by the HVAC wires themselves (and charges a small backup battery that you never have to worry about), and if you really wanted to you could log into her account and fix the thermostat remotely if somehow she managed to really break things. If all you do is turn the ring right or left for colder and hotter, it'll do its thing just fine.
You could hop into the menus and.. forget the wifi password or something I guess?
One thing nest handles really well is "I'm feeling a little too cold/hot tonight and I'm going to adjust the temp". You walk up and twist the ring and you're done. You don't have to disable scheduled mode or enable override mode or anything like that. Twist and done. I have a feeling that's how grandma messed up her thermostat, she was feeling cold so she turned it up to 80 (lol) and then the thermostat said, ok I guess this is my life now. 80 degrees forever.
I hate that this sounds like I'm arguing, because I'm not. I just find this discussion interesting.
If the device learns over time from grandma turning the dial up and down, does that not create strange data for the device to figure out? Take your example, grandma is cold so she turns the temp up; does this count as a manual input? Does that not eventually create a problem? Much like the original thermostat but takes longer?
Although, the account thing is interesting. Can you set the schedule and then disable the manual interface to let grandma change all she wants with no changes?
I don't know the internals of how nest deals with wild swings in manual inputs, but I haven't seen a problem. Although even if it results in a "nights are 80 degrees" situation, the rest of the day is unaffected so at worst it's still better than the other thermostat.
Yes, you can set a schedule and disable the physical interface.
I'm genuinely curious about how many of those "regular people" replaced a working thermostat with a Nest. Anecdotally, it certainly seems to me as if it's the geeky gadget types who get all excited about things like the Nest.
Maybe. Certainly almost all of the people I associate with regularly could afford a Nest if they chose to do so. My experience is that most of the ones that I know who have actually done so are the same people who are always buying and trying out various types of gadgetry. I know lots of people who are technical to various degrees but aren't especially into electronic devices.
I don't have the Nest, but I have the Ecobee, which is great, especially the wireless connectivity.
It's not "I need an exact 23.5 degrees when I get home", but rather, "I just left to go vacation. Maybe I should turn my thermostat off" and can do so from my phone, and also, "Looks like I'm getting home a day before I expected. I can turn my heating on so my home won't be freezing when I arrive."
Additionally, scheduling on the Ecobee is far, far easier than traditional thermostats.
I have an Ecobee as well (and a RadioThermostat brand one before that), and find the internet part the least compelling thing about these.
My Ecobee:
* Has remote sensors that depend on schedule
At night it is based on upstairs bedroom temperatures. During the day, it strikes a balance between the front and back of the house. The back of my house is south-facing with lots of windows, and the sun heats it up significantly compared to the front, and it skews the thermostat.
The result is that the temperature is more balanced: the south side a bit warmer on sunny days, but front rooms, like my office, are still warm enough.
* I can control it from bed
Normally the schedule keeps it warmer/cooler at night, but sometimes it needs tweaking, or it's a holiday and we're trying to sleep in (when usually we'd be gone to work), etc.
Yes, lazy, but very handy.
* Can run fan for minimum x minutes per hour
Helps with circulation and the temperature imbalance in my house.
* Looks nice
* Easier to edit schedules
* Runs my whole-house humidifier (and keeps it adjusted based on outside temperature so it's as high as possible without getting frost on the windows)
There's other stuff I don't use such as auto home/away, and "follow me", largely because software limitations with scheduling and, for example, at night the sensor is in the baby's room but the baby doesn't move enough to make it think the room is occupied.
Like most home automation, it's not about tweaking your house while you're not home: it's about automating it and doing things with software. The fact there is internet connectivity and remote access is just a side-effect. (I realize that's not how most "IoT" companies look at this, but IMHO that's one of the problems).
Many people live in houses with poor insulation or other such problems. They may be tenants with landlords who will not fix this, or live in areas where fixing it is regulated in way that increases the cost by 5-10x (think building regulations where new windows must look like old ones).
Come home to a cold house, wake up in a cold house, heating system that overshoots, forgot to turn it off once when going on holiday etc etc. Even if they have a timer system, it probably has an awkward interface or is in located in an awkward place and some of these problems are still relevant.
Not the worst problems in the world but certainly something they wish was solved. And they like sexy little gadgets too, I expect.
I see the market. I have been part of it more than once.
Nest, to me, was never about a computing revolution.
It was that someone was finally taking Apple-level industrial design and applying it to common household goods. That made me very excited, and happy to pay more for it. Finally, a common product was getting better aesthetically, rather than worse.
All the rest was noise, mainly for investors. Unfortunately, it appears that the noise may destroy what matters.
This would have happened a long time ago if Honeywell didn't have all the patents on good thermostat design. They have three lawsuits currently going on and have settled with Intellectual Ventures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nest_Labs#Litigation That's crazy expensive and it would put almost any other company out of business very quickly.
That's the problem with modern patents. What you're seeing is their implementation of their patents. Another company might make a massively better design, but tread on their overly broad patent that is vaguely written for just that reason.
Yeah, but if they've got a patent on using a knob on a thermostat, and changing it remotely, and getting power from the wall. It's pretty hard to produce a competing product that doesn't infringe.
Funny timing on this story. Just last night my Nest "froze" the heat on. Heat was set to 68, thermostat read 73 and the Nest was still running the furnace (and the screen was orange, indicating the heat is on). Had to power cycle the thing for it to stop running my furnace. Welcome to the future!
I have a Nest and if the cloud service went away and I couldn't control it from my phone anymore, I really wouldn't be sad. It's a feature I use maybe twice a year at most.
The Nest does look cool and has a much better interface for programming a schedule, but it is hardly revolutionary.
In particular, I've been disappointed that the "the Nest will know when you aren't home and automatically adjust!" feature never worked, although that's maybe not a surprise since it's basically magic.
But I got it for free, so I can't complain. It looks cooler than the old Thermostat I had and they send me an email every month telling me how I'm like the bestest person in the world for turning off the heat and opening the windows in the spring.
> I have a Nest and if the cloud service went away and I couldn't control it from my phone anymore, I really wouldn't be sad. It's a feature I use maybe twice a year at most.
I have to be honest, the number one reason I don't have a Nest is the required connection to the cloud. Even if I wanted remote control that badly, I already have a server, I don't need someone elses.
When it was released there was nothing like it. It's still the best DIY home thermostat imo. The installation is straight out of the Apple playbook, little included screwdriver and all. It looks both retro and futuristic. Turning the wheel to set the temperature is such a great interface.
Auto-away works really well for me, so being able to crank on the heat/a/c when I'm an hour away is huge. Huge. This sounds lazy, but I like being able to control the upstairs thermostat while I'm comfortably snuggled in watching a movie downstairs.
Monthly emailed energy reports help me pay attention without being too intrusive. It's also adapted to our family's usage really well (the "learning" part of the learning thermostat). I love not having to mess with it too much, although I understand that's not a Nest-specific feature.
Best of all, there's no monthly fee. I can't get behind Nest Cam because of their fee, but the Thermostat is buy-it-once (...so far).
What's so smart about it is that unlike other energy-saving improvements, you can use it in rentals too. My current nest was installed in my last rental, I just saved the old thermostat and took pics of how it was installed so I could put it back.
For me, its set-it-and-forget-it factor is massive, and that's what I prefer almost always. Since I'm the resident utility guy, the less I have to dork around with stuff other people use, the better - and Nest filled that role perfectly (incidentally: that's why my family has iphones and macbooks instead of android & windows/linux desktops, why I don't install Tomato on my routers, etc -- not because I think they're intrinsically better, but because I don't have to spend a bunch of time managing them).
Anyway, my point is I think the thermostat was revolutionary -- essentially nobody was thinking about residential thermostats before Nest came along.
Their smoke detectors on the other hand... don't even get me started.
> Turning the wheel to set the temperature is such a great interface.
It doesn't get talked about as much anymore, but the scroll wheel on the original iPods really was a fantastic interface... it turned something obnoxious (tapping arrows to move through a really long list) into something easy and comfortable. I'm very glad the idea is still being used.
Nest is product very few people want. Period. A thermostat is not difficult to operate and why would regular people introduce complication into their lives over something they think about as little as the thermostat? The IoT will only take off when someone can come up with a value proposition besides "isn't that cool?"
It took me maybe 10 minutes to set up my programmable thermostat, and I probably never need to touch it again.
It cost like $40. I just can't see spending $250 for something to save that 10 minutes. And that's assuming that the Nest actually takes zero setup. What if I have to dig into it because its internal logic is doing something weird?
There was an efficiency program that gave out programmable thermostats to average householders. When they evaluated the program they found that they actually made things worse, because no one knew how to use them properly.
It's not that most people couldn't figure out how to use those programmables right; it's that they didn't care enough (ie, see the benefit) to take the time necessary to learn it.
For people who do see the benefit (I am one of those as I programmed mine in ~ 10 minutes as well), it's much more time and money efficient to use the programmable that came with my house than it is to buy some $250 contraption, install it, sync it, then learn how to use it.
With gadgets, the world is divided into those who love them for their own sake, those who see enough utility in them to invest the added time/money (relative to lower tech alternatives) and those who do not care enough to use the alternates or the gadgets (ie, most of humanity).
The value proposition of Nest is the same as that of a basic programmable thermostat: save money on heating/cooling (enough to pay for itself several times over), make your life more comfortable (wake up in or return to a warm/cool house without wasting money), and save the planet (lower bills equals less carbon).
You say thermostats are simple, yet I know lots of people that can't use them. I regularly find my own utterly basic home thermostat set at some crazy level because someone was too hot or cold at some point earlier.
It was a pretty good market,Nest seemed to have early momentum and now seemed to have squandered it.
I replaced my existing "dumb" thermostat with a nest and it has certainly been worthwhile, both in terms of energy cost savings and in having a convenient, pleasant interface for temperature control.
I purchased the third party Skylark app and installed it on my phone and my wife's phone so that the nest goes into "away" mode only when we are both out of the house. I think the official Nest app also added similar functionality recently.
After this initial set up, and a week or so of "training" we haven't had to think about setting our thermostat. Our house is just magically at the correct temperature when we are there but our bill is lower than it was before we got it.
Nest is a cool product, but it might be just slightly ahead of its time, by a hair. Maybe the future generation of homeowners will be adamant about having a high tech touchscreen interface for their HVAC system, but for most people I know, it isn't a problem they're compelled to pay for. As the saying goes, the existing solutions are generally "good enough". I think Nest is on to something, but I'd bet it's another 5-10 years before they start seeing real breakthrough success.
It took them so long to produce a version capable of running common European systems (separate hot water), that I lost interest long back. They finally released something christmas last year.
The cock ups along the way didn't help either. Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole now.
Honeywell on the other hand seem to have smarter smart kit, and a decent reputation.
Honeywell's Evohome product is much smarter, you're right. As is Heat Genius. They are probably a slightly different market though, because have more capable systems, being able to do soft zoning. Also arguably, neither are quite as slick looking.
The trouble with Honeywell is that they should've been doing this stuff a decade ago.
Personally I think all these thermostats are just sticking plasters over the real problem: houses shouldn't leak heat nearly as much as they do. We know how to fix it, it's a technically solved problem, but regulation and government intervention just isn't keeping up.
>houses shouldn't leak heat nearly as much as they do. We know how to fix it, it's a technically solved problem, but regulation and government intervention just isn't keeping up.
The house I live in is almost 200 years old. What sort of regulation and government intervention do you have in mind? Should everyone with a house that's not up to the latest modern insulation standards be forced to undertake a major construction project to update all their walls and windows?
As with many things, the issue isn't with the technology and standards that exist today. It's with the large installed base that can't be just wished away.
The UK had, for a while, a reasonable approach to insulation. Historically, especially post-war, we had some terribly poor housing as far as thermal efficiency went.
The energy companies were required to provide free and discounted energy saving measures for their customers, to a certain value each year. This was as part of the overall carbon lowering measures.
They typcally provided loft and wall insulation, both of which could be done in a day. If you had solid walls it took a little longer and some properties weren't suitable.
For the vast majority it was quick, easy and cheap. No major construction required either for most.
When CFL bulbs were new (and pricey) there were a number of programs to sell those at discounted prices to consumers through the power companies. I've never heard of anything comparable wrt insulation although that doesn't mean there hasn't been such.
I've actually done a lot with my house when I've been having construction done anyway but there's no easy way to retrofit insulation into the existing walls. (Plaster lath etc.)
Well, they can introduce a (further) carbon tax and the people who choose to heat the area around their house can pay more than the people who only heat inside their house.
They can ensure that every house sale includes the information on how well insulated a house is, and those who like to be cosy or save money or the planet can buy a different home.
No one's forcing you to do anything, they may however object to you forcing them to pay for your extravagances via market externalities.
The main takeaway from the article (they don't make this argument directly, but I'm inferring it) is that the main opportunity is for a cloud/services company to provide a standard and backbone services for all the individual appliance manufacturers to connect to. So we wouldn't be seeing a Nest washing machine, but rather an LG washing machine that connects to your (for example) Nest account.
This still leaves an opportunity for Alphabet (who knows better than them how to offer a free service and profit off the data?), but leaves Nest in a category similar to Nexus - a line of HW that demonstrates the value / usefulness of the services, but is not really a key profit center for the company. It's not bad, but it's not somewhere I personally would want to work.
It's a fascinating topic and there are many angles to discuss, but the one I would focus on is the acquisition issue.
One of the contradictions of capitalism is that a high-P/E and high-growth company like Google will inevitably close services and squash products that it acquires because it to maintain that high-P/E ratio they will be forced from time to time to get out of any businesses that can't sustain the great numbers that their core business can put up.
At the enterprise level, if I was tasked with vendor management with a company that was acquired by Google or Facebook I would probably call my sales rep right away and be like "you better post a performance bond" or "you better sign an escrow agreement for the source code" or "I talked with a sales rep at company B and he told me this and he told me this (what do you think about that?) and he told me this (what do you think about that?) and he told me this (what do you think about that?) (oh really?) and I would go on with that until he gives me at least a 15% discount or blows up at me and hangs up the phone."
If it was Microsoft I would feel the same way based on historical experience. Not so with IBM. They buy failing or market trailing companies that have something to do with "Watson" or "Cloud" -- generally they don't get any better, but they suffer from at most benign neglect. Generally they did not make the cut or we moved to a competitor years ago, but as notorious as IBM is for discarding employees, it does try not to leave customers out in the cold.
> ...or "I talked with a sales rep at company B and he told me this and he told me this (what do you think about that?) and he told me this (what do you think about that?) and he told me this (what do you think about that?) (oh really?) and I would go on with that until he gives me at least a 15% discount or blows up at me and hangs up the phone."
"Nest" isn't a bust. "Post-Google" Nest is a bust. And the bigger issue is much, much bigger.
Google didn't acquire Nest to out of an altruistic desire to assist Nest to grow faster to fulfill their mission. Nest was acquired because Google was lazy and saw an opportunity to grow Google's revenue and data-base while at the same time getting a foothold in the nascent but exponentially growing IoT sector, instead of having to build something themselves and compete with Nest.
When I hear about the piles of cash that companies like Google and Apple are sitting on I often shudder to think of all the other "Nest" like companies out there that will be snatched up in the middle of a growth spurt like an organism infected with a virus that injects its own DNA in order to hijack the host organism's biological mechanisms in order to fulfill its own goal of self replication, often killing its host in the process.
Nest was born from Apple culture. The founders left Apple after having worked on the iPod and set out to build another beautiful product. They wanted to build something. And the culture that informed them to make this decision, to take this path, was essential in the manner in which it played out. Acquisitions such as this, that aren't merely hands-off capital injections, by definition change the culture, goals, and products of the company acquired.
So, companies, like Google and Apple, that have massive, massive stock-piles of cash have the luxury to, as a side-effect, at will, change the culture, goals, and products of just about any nascent company, and they most often do so for the purposes of furthering their bottom line, expanding their user base, and growing their data-base.
Everyone else (read: everyone that is not one of these handful of companies like Google and Apple) pays the price by losing out on all the beautiful things companies like Nest could have born into the world.
Because it's not just about products. Products are, in addition to being attempts to solve engineering problems, a piece of our culture, of our social technologies, of our shared experiences. Nest wasn't trying to "solve" thermostats. They wanted to improve the experience of being in your home, for many of us our most sacred or private space.
You can't "solve" everything, because not everything is a "problem".
People buy vases and then put them in the middle of a room with nothing to fill them, because they like the way it makes the space feel. There was no "vase" problem. And there is no "awkward silence between friends in a car ride" problem. That awkward silence is a miracle of a good relationship, when two people know, without saying anything, that something is being left unsaid, and that one of them has the chance to be brave and kind enough to, for the benefit of their friendship, make the unspoken spoken. But Spotify would like to suggest you play their "awkward silence" play-list.
Independent companies creating products they themselves want, and that they are not trying to push onto others, but that they'd love to share with the world, need to resist the urge to take that capital infusion or accept a buyout so they can have access to the network and infrastructure of some grand suitor. It's a deal with the devil almost every time.
I think this article makes some good points. No matter how you spin it, most people just won't understand the appeal internet-connected, smart devices for the home. That's why the direct-to-consumer market isn't exactly the correct route to take, right now.
It works well with tech-savvy individuals, but that's a small subset of humanity. It's basic economics.
My company (ElectrIQ Power) is actually in the IoT space, and we've carefully assessed the market before even starting. Fortunately, for us, we're in a unique group where demand is currently small, but increasing at a very high rate. Our revenues are also far greater than would be possible if we were operating in a direct-to-consumer strategy.
If, in an article of a former IoT enthusiast who now starts to understand the other side, most of the quotes and sub-headings sound like trivial common-sense, maybe that sheds some light on how solid the assumptions behind today's IoT actually are...
Honestly, the only stroke of genius at Nest wasn't the self-learning aspect of the thermostat, or the fact you could set pre-programmed times, or control it from your phone. There had been other products on the market that did this, albeit somewhat poorly.
I'm convinced it was the industrial design, of making something that normally is a beige box sexy and nice to look at. Something you put on your wall, that is a necessity is now a piece of high-tech artwork that you can admire.
This is evidenced by the fact their smoke alarms, if their "connected home" story were to hold true, haven't done nearly as well. People could care less if their smoke alarms are smart, because you rarely look at your ceiling. You often see your thermostat every day, with most being located on the wall when you walk into your house or apartment.
Evidence: I have many non-tech friends and family who own a nest. They do not use any of the advanced features, maybe rarely. They all say the same thing: they bought it because it looked cool and wanted a "finishing touch" on their house. Maybe did so after a kitchen remodel or something else they did to their house, indicating it was more an emotional purchase fueled by aesthetics and ego.
Based upon this, it is now unsurprising the hype hasn't scaled. The business was kind of a one hit wonder and it's not shocking the company is floundering.
I'm really disappointed about what they did with Dropcam. The dropcam was such a great product that Nest basically destroyed by pushing out the core team, making the product worse (but hey, it's slimmer), and stagnating development. I believe we are missing out on great things that would've happened if Dropcam had stayed independent.
When this thing started out, I remember reading Fadell saying that he would go around and have coffee with his colleagues in the valley, and tell them he was working on a thermostat. And as the story went, they were all incredulous that it could be a good idea. Maybe they were right after all.
Nest is a pillar of the future. The future of ubiquitous surveillance. We track your online activities, we track your work and personal communications, we track whom your friends are, we track your whereabouts, we track your financial transactions.
The last battlefield is your home. You must have an always on device in your house that listens to your activity and conversations. Since you can turn off mobile phones and smart tvs [1], we need something better. Amazon has Alexa. Google has Nexus Player. Nest is the best, because shutting it down has unpleasant consequences.
[1] Your smart tv is probably smart enough to not really shut down and keep listening [wink wink].
70 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadNot only that, but I already have a thermostat. It works perfectly. I've never said to myself, "Gee, I wish I could adjust my home temperature from work, I need an exact 23.5 degrees when I get home". It doesn't do enough for me to justify messing with my HVAC system, that whole "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage comes to mind.
Is that lazy? Sure... but the convenience is worth a couple hundred bucks.
I guess I would just walk down the stairs, manually adjust the thermostat and walk back up, but then again my parents just told us to put sweaters on if we were cold.
Smart homes for me are about removing everyday annoyances. Is the price to entry higher than it probably should be? Absolutely, but that's the way it is with any new technology. I would be shocked if 10 years from now the norm for every new construction is anything other than a smart thermostat.
In the case of Nest, I suppose I can imagine that I took off on a trip and forgot to turn the thermostat down. But I balance that against the cost, the "it ain't broke" thing, concerns about decreasing the reliability of my heating system in a cold area of the country, and a sufficiently variable schedule that I challenge any non-omniscient device to learn my patterns.
There are some useful things like leak detectors, low temp warnings, and general piece of mind visibility into what's happening with my house when traveling that I've installed. But most of the non or minimally automated things (I do have a couple wireless X10 lights) around my house work well enough that they're pretty far down on the list of stuff that I wish I could improve to make my life easier/better.
Being a bit neurotic about switching off appliances before traveling and leaving our home unoccupied for a while I would throw money at any service that could allow me to tell what devices were on or off in my home at any time.
I do sort of have a solution involving an iPhone that I use at the moment - but it's a bit silly....
Is it a must have? Not yet, but definitely worth the initial setup time.
I also think it's fair that some of the automation devices start to make more sense with a family than they do for mostly one person as in my case.
There are hundreds of millions of families out there that have no idea how to program their thermostat beyond changing the current temperature, so they just leave it running all night and day, whether they're home or not.
The appeal of the Nest thermostat is not so that control freaks can fine-tune the temperature at home while in an airplane. It's so that regular people can just have it installed and forget about it.
You can use the app or the website to input a specific schedule if you prefer, which is still simpler than 99% of conventional thermostats.
Anecdotally I just programmed my grandmother's thermostat for her and it took me -- a 30-something with deep technical experience -- way too long to figure it out (I even had to break out the manual). What if grandma could just turn the ring left or right and the thermostat would come up with a schedule for her, wouldn't that be better?
Wouldn't the same thing be accomplished by getting someone to do it for them? Much like your grandmother and you? You set it up for her, she likely has to rarely deal with it again. All Nest does is take you out of the equation but you work for free.
I hate to invoke the overused phrase, but the nest thermostat Just Works™.
You could hop into the menus and.. forget the wifi password or something I guess?
One thing nest handles really well is "I'm feeling a little too cold/hot tonight and I'm going to adjust the temp". You walk up and twist the ring and you're done. You don't have to disable scheduled mode or enable override mode or anything like that. Twist and done. I have a feeling that's how grandma messed up her thermostat, she was feeling cold so she turned it up to 80 (lol) and then the thermostat said, ok I guess this is my life now. 80 degrees forever.
If the device learns over time from grandma turning the dial up and down, does that not create strange data for the device to figure out? Take your example, grandma is cold so she turns the temp up; does this count as a manual input? Does that not eventually create a problem? Much like the original thermostat but takes longer?
Although, the account thing is interesting. Can you set the schedule and then disable the manual interface to let grandma change all she wants with no changes?
I don't know the internals of how nest deals with wild swings in manual inputs, but I haven't seen a problem. Although even if it results in a "nights are 80 degrees" situation, the rest of the day is unaffected so at worst it's still better than the other thermostat.
Yes, you can set a schedule and disable the physical interface.
It's not "I need an exact 23.5 degrees when I get home", but rather, "I just left to go vacation. Maybe I should turn my thermostat off" and can do so from my phone, and also, "Looks like I'm getting home a day before I expected. I can turn my heating on so my home won't be freezing when I arrive."
Additionally, scheduling on the Ecobee is far, far easier than traditional thermostats.
My Ecobee:
* Has remote sensors that depend on schedule
At night it is based on upstairs bedroom temperatures. During the day, it strikes a balance between the front and back of the house. The back of my house is south-facing with lots of windows, and the sun heats it up significantly compared to the front, and it skews the thermostat.
The result is that the temperature is more balanced: the south side a bit warmer on sunny days, but front rooms, like my office, are still warm enough.
* I can control it from bed
Normally the schedule keeps it warmer/cooler at night, but sometimes it needs tweaking, or it's a holiday and we're trying to sleep in (when usually we'd be gone to work), etc.
Yes, lazy, but very handy.
* Can run fan for minimum x minutes per hour
Helps with circulation and the temperature imbalance in my house.
* Looks nice * Easier to edit schedules * Runs my whole-house humidifier (and keeps it adjusted based on outside temperature so it's as high as possible without getting frost on the windows)
There's other stuff I don't use such as auto home/away, and "follow me", largely because software limitations with scheduling and, for example, at night the sensor is in the baby's room but the baby doesn't move enough to make it think the room is occupied.
Like most home automation, it's not about tweaking your house while you're not home: it's about automating it and doing things with software. The fact there is internet connectivity and remote access is just a side-effect. (I realize that's not how most "IoT" companies look at this, but IMHO that's one of the problems).
Come home to a cold house, wake up in a cold house, heating system that overshoots, forgot to turn it off once when going on holiday etc etc. Even if they have a timer system, it probably has an awkward interface or is in located in an awkward place and some of these problems are still relevant.
Not the worst problems in the world but certainly something they wish was solved. And they like sexy little gadgets too, I expect.
I see the market. I have been part of it more than once.
It was that someone was finally taking Apple-level industrial design and applying it to common household goods. That made me very excited, and happy to pay more for it. Finally, a common product was getting better aesthetically, rather than worse.
All the rest was noise, mainly for investors. Unfortunately, it appears that the noise may destroy what matters.
1) I guess the possibility of being sued by a large number of contractors and building owners tends to focus the mind.
The Nest does look cool and has a much better interface for programming a schedule, but it is hardly revolutionary.
In particular, I've been disappointed that the "the Nest will know when you aren't home and automatically adjust!" feature never worked, although that's maybe not a surprise since it's basically magic.
But I got it for free, so I can't complain. It looks cooler than the old Thermostat I had and they send me an email every month telling me how I'm like the bestest person in the world for turning off the heat and opening the windows in the spring.
I have to be honest, the number one reason I don't have a Nest is the required connection to the cloud. Even if I wanted remote control that badly, I already have a server, I don't need someone elses.
When it was released there was nothing like it. It's still the best DIY home thermostat imo. The installation is straight out of the Apple playbook, little included screwdriver and all. It looks both retro and futuristic. Turning the wheel to set the temperature is such a great interface.
Auto-away works really well for me, so being able to crank on the heat/a/c when I'm an hour away is huge. Huge. This sounds lazy, but I like being able to control the upstairs thermostat while I'm comfortably snuggled in watching a movie downstairs.
Monthly emailed energy reports help me pay attention without being too intrusive. It's also adapted to our family's usage really well (the "learning" part of the learning thermostat). I love not having to mess with it too much, although I understand that's not a Nest-specific feature.
Best of all, there's no monthly fee. I can't get behind Nest Cam because of their fee, but the Thermostat is buy-it-once (...so far).
What's so smart about it is that unlike other energy-saving improvements, you can use it in rentals too. My current nest was installed in my last rental, I just saved the old thermostat and took pics of how it was installed so I could put it back.
For me, its set-it-and-forget-it factor is massive, and that's what I prefer almost always. Since I'm the resident utility guy, the less I have to dork around with stuff other people use, the better - and Nest filled that role perfectly (incidentally: that's why my family has iphones and macbooks instead of android & windows/linux desktops, why I don't install Tomato on my routers, etc -- not because I think they're intrinsically better, but because I don't have to spend a bunch of time managing them).
Anyway, my point is I think the thermostat was revolutionary -- essentially nobody was thinking about residential thermostats before Nest came along.
Their smoke detectors on the other hand... don't even get me started.
It doesn't get talked about as much anymore, but the scroll wheel on the original iPods really was a fantastic interface... it turned something obnoxious (tapping arrows to move through a really long list) into something easy and comfortable. I'm very glad the idea is still being used.
It took me maybe 10 minutes to set up my programmable thermostat, and I probably never need to touch it again.
It cost like $40. I just can't see spending $250 for something to save that 10 minutes. And that's assuming that the Nest actually takes zero setup. What if I have to dig into it because its internal logic is doing something weird?
For people who do see the benefit (I am one of those as I programmed mine in ~ 10 minutes as well), it's much more time and money efficient to use the programmable that came with my house than it is to buy some $250 contraption, install it, sync it, then learn how to use it.
With gadgets, the world is divided into those who love them for their own sake, those who see enough utility in them to invest the added time/money (relative to lower tech alternatives) and those who do not care enough to use the alternates or the gadgets (ie, most of humanity).
You say thermostats are simple, yet I know lots of people that can't use them. I regularly find my own utterly basic home thermostat set at some crazy level because someone was too hot or cold at some point earlier.
It was a pretty good market,Nest seemed to have early momentum and now seemed to have squandered it.
I purchased the third party Skylark app and installed it on my phone and my wife's phone so that the nest goes into "away" mode only when we are both out of the house. I think the official Nest app also added similar functionality recently.
After this initial set up, and a week or so of "training" we haven't had to think about setting our thermostat. Our house is just magically at the correct temperature when we are there but our bill is lower than it was before we got it.
The cock ups along the way didn't help either. Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole now.
Honeywell on the other hand seem to have smarter smart kit, and a decent reputation.
The trouble with Honeywell is that they should've been doing this stuff a decade ago.
Personally I think all these thermostats are just sticking plasters over the real problem: houses shouldn't leak heat nearly as much as they do. We know how to fix it, it's a technically solved problem, but regulation and government intervention just isn't keeping up.
The house I live in is almost 200 years old. What sort of regulation and government intervention do you have in mind? Should everyone with a house that's not up to the latest modern insulation standards be forced to undertake a major construction project to update all their walls and windows?
As with many things, the issue isn't with the technology and standards that exist today. It's with the large installed base that can't be just wished away.
The energy companies were required to provide free and discounted energy saving measures for their customers, to a certain value each year. This was as part of the overall carbon lowering measures.
They typcally provided loft and wall insulation, both of which could be done in a day. If you had solid walls it took a little longer and some properties weren't suitable.
For the vast majority it was quick, easy and cheap. No major construction required either for most.
I've actually done a lot with my house when I've been having construction done anyway but there's no easy way to retrofit insulation into the existing walls. (Plaster lath etc.)
They can ensure that every house sale includes the information on how well insulated a house is, and those who like to be cosy or save money or the planet can buy a different home.
No one's forcing you to do anything, they may however object to you forcing them to pay for your extravagances via market externalities.
Especially about the need for better insulation - comparing our standard of buildings to Scandinavia is just embarrasing, and expensive.
This still leaves an opportunity for Alphabet (who knows better than them how to offer a free service and profit off the data?), but leaves Nest in a category similar to Nexus - a line of HW that demonstrates the value / usefulness of the services, but is not really a key profit center for the company. It's not bad, but it's not somewhere I personally would want to work.
One of the contradictions of capitalism is that a high-P/E and high-growth company like Google will inevitably close services and squash products that it acquires because it to maintain that high-P/E ratio they will be forced from time to time to get out of any businesses that can't sustain the great numbers that their core business can put up.
At the enterprise level, if I was tasked with vendor management with a company that was acquired by Google or Facebook I would probably call my sales rep right away and be like "you better post a performance bond" or "you better sign an escrow agreement for the source code" or "I talked with a sales rep at company B and he told me this and he told me this (what do you think about that?) and he told me this (what do you think about that?) and he told me this (what do you think about that?) (oh really?) and I would go on with that until he gives me at least a 15% discount or blows up at me and hangs up the phone."
If it was Microsoft I would feel the same way based on historical experience. Not so with IBM. They buy failing or market trailing companies that have something to do with "Watson" or "Cloud" -- generally they don't get any better, but they suffer from at most benign neglect. Generally they did not make the cut or we moved to a competitor years ago, but as notorious as IBM is for discarding employees, it does try not to leave customers out in the cold.
What?
Google didn't acquire Nest to out of an altruistic desire to assist Nest to grow faster to fulfill their mission. Nest was acquired because Google was lazy and saw an opportunity to grow Google's revenue and data-base while at the same time getting a foothold in the nascent but exponentially growing IoT sector, instead of having to build something themselves and compete with Nest.
When I hear about the piles of cash that companies like Google and Apple are sitting on I often shudder to think of all the other "Nest" like companies out there that will be snatched up in the middle of a growth spurt like an organism infected with a virus that injects its own DNA in order to hijack the host organism's biological mechanisms in order to fulfill its own goal of self replication, often killing its host in the process.
Nest was born from Apple culture. The founders left Apple after having worked on the iPod and set out to build another beautiful product. They wanted to build something. And the culture that informed them to make this decision, to take this path, was essential in the manner in which it played out. Acquisitions such as this, that aren't merely hands-off capital injections, by definition change the culture, goals, and products of the company acquired.
So, companies, like Google and Apple, that have massive, massive stock-piles of cash have the luxury to, as a side-effect, at will, change the culture, goals, and products of just about any nascent company, and they most often do so for the purposes of furthering their bottom line, expanding their user base, and growing their data-base.
Everyone else (read: everyone that is not one of these handful of companies like Google and Apple) pays the price by losing out on all the beautiful things companies like Nest could have born into the world.
Because it's not just about products. Products are, in addition to being attempts to solve engineering problems, a piece of our culture, of our social technologies, of our shared experiences. Nest wasn't trying to "solve" thermostats. They wanted to improve the experience of being in your home, for many of us our most sacred or private space.
You can't "solve" everything, because not everything is a "problem".
People buy vases and then put them in the middle of a room with nothing to fill them, because they like the way it makes the space feel. There was no "vase" problem. And there is no "awkward silence between friends in a car ride" problem. That awkward silence is a miracle of a good relationship, when two people know, without saying anything, that something is being left unsaid, and that one of them has the chance to be brave and kind enough to, for the benefit of their friendship, make the unspoken spoken. But Spotify would like to suggest you play their "awkward silence" play-list.
Independent companies creating products they themselves want, and that they are not trying to push onto others, but that they'd love to share with the world, need to resist the urge to take that capital infusion or accept a buyout so they can have access to the network and infrastructure of some grand suitor. It's a deal with the devil almost every time.
It works well with tech-savvy individuals, but that's a small subset of humanity. It's basic economics.
My company (ElectrIQ Power) is actually in the IoT space, and we've carefully assessed the market before even starting. Fortunately, for us, we're in a unique group where demand is currently small, but increasing at a very high rate. Our revenues are also far greater than would be possible if we were operating in a direct-to-consumer strategy.
I'm convinced it was the industrial design, of making something that normally is a beige box sexy and nice to look at. Something you put on your wall, that is a necessity is now a piece of high-tech artwork that you can admire.
This is evidenced by the fact their smoke alarms, if their "connected home" story were to hold true, haven't done nearly as well. People could care less if their smoke alarms are smart, because you rarely look at your ceiling. You often see your thermostat every day, with most being located on the wall when you walk into your house or apartment.
Evidence: I have many non-tech friends and family who own a nest. They do not use any of the advanced features, maybe rarely. They all say the same thing: they bought it because it looked cool and wanted a "finishing touch" on their house. Maybe did so after a kitchen remodel or something else they did to their house, indicating it was more an emotional purchase fueled by aesthetics and ego.
Based upon this, it is now unsurprising the hype hasn't scaled. The business was kind of a one hit wonder and it's not shocking the company is floundering.
The last battlefield is your home. You must have an always on device in your house that listens to your activity and conversations. Since you can turn off mobile phones and smart tvs [1], we need something better. Amazon has Alexa. Google has Nexus Player. Nest is the best, because shutting it down has unpleasant consequences.
[1] Your smart tv is probably smart enough to not really shut down and keep listening [wink wink].