It’s been suggested that connected things may be overrated, with Google sibling Nest struggling and its founder, Tony Fadell, departing. The smart home market faces two problems: smart appliances and gadgets may not work well together, and perhaps many consumers are happy to manually set their $20 thermostat rather than purchase a $250 intelligent one.
Om Malik in The New Yorker offers a different take on the struggles at Nest in particular, if not the smart-home market in general. Fadell, who worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, acted as “…a benevolent but exacting dictator…” who “…put together an organization focused on his singular vision,” Malik writes.
In contrast, Malik adds, Google “…has an engineer-driven, bottom-up culture.” The result was a clash of cultures. “Trying to make the two cultures work was eventually gong to lead to a rejection of the transplanted organ,” Malik explains.
Malik does hint at a lack of practicality of some smart-home concepts. “Today’s Internet of Things has a very long way to go. I am reminded of an episode from the television show ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ where the nerdy stars rig up a system to turn on their living-room lamp over the Internet, while sitting right next to it. Such innovation, unfortunately, isn’t enough. You need a charismatic leader and a product visionary to make a life packed with the Internet of Things a reality.”
Malik concludes, “Too bad that the guy who started telling that story isn’t going to give us the ending.”
But I think we will be hearing more from Fadell.
As for what happens next at Nest, Malik notes that Fadell is being “…replaced by a former cable-company executive, which, at least symbolically, suggests that Google’s grand ambitions to build a hardware-products company to rival Apple may be turning in a more drab, utilitarian direction.” But Cees Links, GM of Qorvo Low Power Wireless, is promoting smart home functionality delivered in the form of SHaaS: smart home as a service. A cable guy might just be the person to pull that off.
