Nest, Dropcam... And the difficulty of managing an acquired smart home company

Fadell’s days are numbered…Who wants to predict the number of days until he gets fired?

I say max 3 months…

AND, and, as I expected, Fadell is stepping down! It took Page less time than I thoughtto ‘convince’ him…

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You have a good crystal ball :crystal_ball:

Now name which SmartThings founders are going to exit around the anniversary of Samsung’s acquisition (i.e., expiration of 2 year retention agreements in August). CTO Jeff Hagins is a free throw.

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From WSJ:

Also last year, Google hired former Morgan Stanley executive Ruth Porat as its finance chief. She has suggested that she plans to rein in spending at the other bets.

In the March article, Mr. Fadell was quoted as saying, “The fiscal discipline era has now descended upon everything.” He said Alphabet executives were saying, “Hey, show us your business plan for the year. We’re going to hold you to those numbers.”

Jan Dawson, founder of Jackdaw Research, said Mr. Fadell’s departure indicated Alphabet’s other bets “won’t be given a super long leash, but they’ll be expected to hit financial milestones sooner rather than later.”

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Yup… Gotta wonder when SmartThings’s lack of net revenue is going to become a serious concern. I definitely worry about it.

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Yep, the party can’t last forever. Two years is an acceptable incubation period. After that it’s “show me the money”. :smile:

In other news: TCP have just announced discontinuation of their cloud service at the end of June. Can’t blame them - running cloud service ain’t cheap.

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I have a thought about all of these issues put together, but I need to wait until after WWDC to see if I’m right. :wink:

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This is good, though. He and his team did not get along.

You can throw a bunch of people together, but if the cultures differ, havoc.

I’m expecting problems with OnHub if they can’t get their act together. They have major smart home problems.

If it’s going to be the basis of their Amazon Echo killer, people should avoid it like the plague.

My own personal experience with Nest Protect, DropCam and Nest Cam has been extremely disappointing. Taking a perfectly good DropCam, removing features, breaking existing, promising fixes and over a year still no progress is unacceptable. Things should get better not worse (oops who else has had that issue :wink:).

Thus I am not the bit surprised at heads rolling.

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I have to agree with the onhub. I tried to give it a go but it has to go from my house.

The way it handles the 2.4 and 5ghz switching bothers me since we can not have seperate networks. My plex server cannot be accessed locally with out putting in the full address. This means that if you want to chromecast a plex video to your tv you can forget about it.

It doesn’t allow allow nat loop back. It does not do dynamic dns. You can’t specify what band you want a device to connect to by force. No managing from the Web. Ect…ect…

I tried to like it but it’s just not ready for prime time.

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Looks like the new-generation entrepreneurs are all Zuckerberg wannabes, they want to “move fast and break things”. Is it surprising that all their product are permanently broken? :wink:

It’s called common sense. Fadell may have good ideas, but he wasn’t able to manage. Ha, that sounds very familiar to a different company. I wonder which one?

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Yeah ideas are nothing if you can’t implement them. Or in classic marketing parlance, identifying needs and providing means is nothing if you can’t really provide the means.

So far it seems like Amazon may be the dark horse in this race. They seem to be hitting on all cylinders though it is not clear they are going into Home Automation head on.

It takes a crystal ball to figure out which companies are actually going to do something about it…

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But look back… Nest made misstep after misstep. Seems they even got the simple decisions wrong in my opinion. The only thing they succeeded for some time was to copy the Apple persona. However, that image can’t last forever if you don’t have product to back it up.

It’s always about survival of the fittest. Either you make it, or you get eaten…and then spit out, if you are really dumb.

Agree with you across the board.

What’s funny is Nest Protects don’t work with it. After a day or two, they go offline. The only way to get them back online is to reboot the OnHub, and then reboot each Protect. I just wait until most go offline before I go through the hassle (the smoke/CO detection works without them being online).

The Netatmo weather station won’t stay connected or reconnect to it. I had to hook up my old hub just to connect my Netatmo.

And then I had to use the old modem to connect a Ring.com chime. I had problems connecting the Ring doorbell, too.

Evidently, they have problems with DHCP. And they seem to have problems when the number of devices exceeds a certain number. When you have smart home devices, these are all killers.

Frustrating.

From 280 to 1200 employees. Nest needs to learn from history:

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