News
News Categories

Nest Labs: Once a rising star, now a question mark

By Alvin Soon - on 7 Jun 2016, 11:55am

Nest Labs: Once a rising star, now a question mark

Tony Fadell, co-founder of Nest Labs. Image source: By Official Leweb Photos.

Just five years ago, Nest Labs was the company that could do no wrong. It was founded in 2010 by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers — the Tony Fadell who served as the Senior VP of the iPod Division at Apple, and was known as “one of the fathers of the iPod.”

In 2014, Google bought Nest Labs for US$3.2 billion, leading many to speculate that with their powers combined, the two companies could bring Google into the hardware business in a big way.

That didn’t happen.

Just last week, Google announced that Nest CEO Tony Fadell was “transitioning” to an advisory role at Alphabet (Google and Nest’s parent company). To be sure, he wasn’t ‘fired,’ but it was telling that the news came late on a Friday, a common time for companies to release bad news they hope people won’t notice, and the market won’t react negatively to over the weekend.

In the two years that Google has owned Nest, Nest Labs has produced no new products — just updates on its existing products, and a release of the Nest Cam, which Nest had acquired from buying the company Dropcam for US$555 million.

A third-generation Nest Thermostat.

Before leaving Nest, Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy had an ugly public falling out with Fadell, and Duffy charged that Nest was given a “virtually unlimited budget” inside the Alphabet group, with not much to show for it.

While Nest was expected to have led the hardware charge for Google, the opposite seems to have occurred. Google released the Google Home Bluetooth speaker and AI appliance, and the Google OnHub router, by itself.

It’s been a messy two years for Nest, the company that many expected to be the next rising star in tech, and a fizzling end for its once-illustrious co-founder. Ars Technica has a summary of how it went down, including behind the scenes insinuations - fairly or not - that Fadell was to blame for Nest’s lackluster results, and where Nest could go from here.

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.