The move does make some sense. Google is increasingly making waves in the smart home with products like OnHub and Google Home, a new smart speaker aimed at taking on the Amazon Echo.
The engineers heading to Google are mainly responsible for developing the Nest platform, and will now be working with Android chief Hiroshi Lockheimer to help build on Google’s smart home products.
Of course, this certainly doesn’t mean that Nest is dead, though it has undergone a number of organizational changes over the years. The company has still rose to prominence thanks in part to its partnerships with the likes of Belkin, Philips, and August, a smart lock manufacturer, and Nest will continue to build its own platform and develop software around its services.
As mentioned, this restructure is just the latest Nest has undergone. Just a few months ago, in June, it was announced that CEO Tony Fadell would be stepping down. Nest was purchased by Google back in 2014, however last year it was separated from Google when the creation of Alphabet, a new parent company for Google and other Google companies, was announced. With that change, Nest became its own subsidiary of Alphabet, like Google, putting pressure on the company to achieve profitability, which it struggled to do under Fadell’s leadership. Now, once again, some Nest employees will be considered Google employees.
It will certainly be interesting to see what comes from Google’s smart home division. In April it was announced that Rick Osterloh, ex-Motorola president, would head up a new “living room hardware” division, including products like the Chromecast, Nexus devices, the OnHub router, and so on. When that announcement was made, it was said that Osterloh would work closely with Android head Lockheimer.
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