Back in 2014, Google purchased Nest Labs for roughly $3 Billion. Now, that purchase might start to be seen as an unwise purchase by Google. The smart home brand hasn’t released anything new since June 2015, and the firm is apparently suffering from poor sales and an inability to keep customers hooked into the Nest way of doing things. Now, a Reddit user claiming to be an engineer from Nest itself has come forward on Reddit to share their experience at a company that they say is “on deathwatch”.
The Reddit user, u/throwawaynest, may or may not actually be from Nest and there’s sadly no way of knowing as someone in their position would be pretty foolish to divulge their full name and credentials. Either way, the user speaks from – what seems like – experience and says that there people “cry in the bathrooms” and that “skilled engineers can tell the environment is toxic”. The user goes on to say that poor management is to blame for this toxic environment and poor sales figures, levelling the finger at Tony Fadell by saying that “we know about that time-bomb flaw you ignored so people will have to upgrade” and that Fadell simply can’t hide anything from his engineers.
Nest is currently facing the prospect of losing funding from Google, which currently sits at $500 Million, and once these “golden handcuffs” fall away “all the good engineers…have discreetly indicated they are going to flee”. A loss of talent as well as funding could all but spell the end for Nest, a firm that constantly misses sales targets and doesn’t seem to have anything new in the pipeline to take the industry by storm. One of their earlier products, the Revolv smart home hub is getting shut down soon as well, which can only do more damage to the brand’s image, no matter how old the product might be. The Internet of Things sector is heating up with the likes of LG and Samsung taking the sector very seriously, leaving Nest as no longer the only company making something smart and connected. What becomes of Nest is unclear, but without some sort of magical product or eureka moment it seems unlikely that Nest will bounce back in quite the way that Google is hoping them to.