When Google’s parent company Alphabet spring into existence a couple years ago, it separated the Nest smart home division from Google. At the time, it may have made sense because a hardware company like Nest was pretty far outside Google’s traditional core business. However, with the accelerating smart home and machine learning sectors, as well as increasing competition form Amazon, Apple, and others, Alphabet has reversed this strategy. In an interview, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh said, “All of Google’s investments in machine learning and AI, they can very clearly benefit Nest products. It just makes sense to be developing them together. It’s the natural thing to evolve to.” While this is an interesting business move that could potentially lead to a smarter Nest suite of products, it remains to be seen if it will further enhance the energy saving potential of the company’s products.
Read more here.