Google Nest: Google announced that it would buy Nest Labs,(the home gadget maker founded by iPod inventor Tony Fadell ) on January 13, 2014. The Nest is a home automation company that used to design and manufacture programmable thermostats and smoke detectors]and introduced its first product, the Nest Learning Thermostat, in 2011, followed by the Nest Protect Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector in 2013.
Both of these products were aimed to enter into the growing trend for home automation that is the use of computer and information technology to control home appliances and all of its features. The home automation market is predicted to be worth $79.57 billion by 2022 with a growing CAGR of 11.3%, according to market research.
Google’s Recent Decision
Recently, Google was done holding smart home appliance maker Nest at arm’s length. It was folded into the Google Home division last year in 2018, but now, the entire subdivision has a new name: Google Nest. The new name is more than just re-branding rather it also includes a new product philosophy and a new set of data privacy policies for Nest customers.
Google is slowly unifying all of its smart home efforts together. As Google just launched a smart speaker called the Google Nest Hub Max, which, and future smart speakers will be branded by the name of “Nest.” Head of Google services and hardware Rick Osterloh said that the Nest brand is now a direct parallel to the Pixel brand and it’s just another line of hardware Google makes that’s focused on the home instead of on mobile.
The Journey of Google Nest
If we talk about the past Nest has had a bumpy road. The company was initially a part of Google, but it spun out as a separate entity during its restructuring as “Alphabet” in the summer of 2015. In the subsequent years, Nest lost its CEO Tony Fadell and its other co-founder Matt Rogers, and it acquired the Dropcam team to build its Nest Cam line up, only to have the CEO of the startup depart shortly thereafter, later it publicly disavowed the decision to sell to Google.
In early 2018, Nest was folded back into Google to align it with Google’s growing smart home business, anchored by the Google Assistant and its Google Home smart speaker range, with Nest’s existing product family, all together.
The mission of Google was clear: the only way to thrive in the current market was to be as competitive with Amazon as possible. And the only way to do that was to bring everything under one roof. In July of last year, Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz left, and Google had to put Rishi Chandra, who reports to Osterloh, in charge, for finalizing the years-long transition of Nest as its own unique identity to a proper subdivision of Google.
Challenges To Overcome
However, Nest has a few challenges to overcome before achieving success and that are, designing devices that exist restricted within a system instead of trying to do everything on their own.
The second challenge that Google Nest should be focused on the fact that users don’t live alone. A person’s phone can be a very personal device with all of their information on it behind a passcode, and the most difficult part is to do with a smart speaker is to prevent anybody in the room to access all the information. Smart home devices need to be able to operate both communally and personally. Google thinks it can overcome this problem by having its devices recognize our faces and voices to tailor experiences specific to each user, which is one of the big reasons the new Google Nest Hub Max has a camera.
The last thing Google needs to do is to provide a better job for communicating its principles around privacy. And in the context of privacy in the home, now it needs to be more restrictive than it was before and therefore they are planning to provide a new set of privacy regulations very soon.
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