Monday, June 2, 2014

Nest, Google, and the Rise of the Internet of Things

As a lot of my loyal readers know, the renewable giant often tests out new products and gives reviews on them. My readers also know that I don't always have the time to write as often as I would like. I'm not into self aggrandizement and sometimes I just can't articulate things in a way that's interesting or enjoyable. And frankly there are a lot of things that I just don't feel are worth the trouble. 

I was remiss in writing one particular review that should have been done last year. For my birthday The Wife purchased for me a Nest Thermostat, and it promptly changed my life. Gone was my venerable yet dated programmable thermostat that came with the house. To be fair it was a good thermostat, easy to program, told the time, kept the climate controlled. But it was old, developed a short circuit, yellowed, not sexy at all, and was, well dumb. 

Not dumb in the sense that it could not speak, but rather that it did nothing else but sit on the wall like a beige, tilted on its side version of The Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

Then came the Nest, unabashedly styled like the HAL-9000 of the aforementioned movie (BTW the greatest movie ever made.) It was cool, sleek, minimalist, unobtrusive, and knew when I was home, almost as if it were sentient. (I know though, its just a motion detector like a automatic door). 

Its strange in the Brave New World of "The Internet of Things" I loved that I could hit the thermostat from anywhere on using my iPhone. I could change the settings, turn it on and off, have it turn on the fan etc. I can even check on my family when I am away simply by knowing if the thermostat has turned on recently.  I don't want to run though all of the specs here, but if you want to see all the cool features it has you can check out their website.  

As you can probably tell, it was designed by a couple of guys who worked at Apple, and left to make one of  the myriad Silicon Valley Start-ups that we hear so much about. I loved that it was a start up, I loved they were ex-Apple, I loved that it didn't have a clock (just to be an awesome thermostat and nothing else), and it would light up when I walked past it. 

What I didn't love was that it was bought by Google. 

Yes, the mega giant that I once swore my loyalty too in its attempts to stick it to Microsoft. Which has now gotten so fracking big and pervasive that it just knows everything. Hell, even this blog is written on a wholly-owned Google site. As soon as that happened (just before the sale of the Nest Protect) I cut my thermostat off from the cloud. It became dumb. It would still glow blue when the AC was on and orange when the heat came on, and I could do everything if I was standing in front of it, but I couldn't collect any data that was crucial to saving money and analyzing my patterns of use.

I had mixed emotions. I took back control of my device, but then I couldn't do all of the cool things that were a 'convenience' for me. It made me think, what then, is the price for the convenience? And is that what I paid for apart from a cool design? Does the whiz-bang factor really trump the fact that Google (intentional or not) now knows when I am home? Or at least when I haven't walked past it to go to the bathroom? 

In the end I hooked it back up to the cloud and it rejoined "The Internet of Things". I bought it for the convenience, and if I want that I have to suck up that I will be giving away some data on my habits. Google already knows everything though my email, and my maps... but this far and no farther. I probably will not buy the Nest Protect simply because it is designed to talk to the Nest. Who knows when insurance companies will get hold of that data and see "Hmmm, the Giant household had 2 alarms go off last month. We are raising their rates."

So now when I walk past it on the way to the bathroom, I still think it looks cool and was worth the purchase, but somewhere, in the back of my head, I warily wait for the day when the cool blue light turns to red.