Four years after being acquired by Google, Nest has now become merged into the Google hardware team. The announcement came today from Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz and it made it clear that the goal of merging the teams was to accelerate smart home technologies with Google AI at the heart of that innovation.
By working together, we’ll continue to combine hardware, software and services to create a home that’s safer, friendlier to the environment, smarter and even helps you save money—built with Google’s artificial intelligence and the Assistant at the core.
While details on when the full merging of teams would be complete, the announcement highlighted that the teams already work very closely together, indicating it would be in short order.
Under the Alphabet umbrella, Nest has enjoyed outstanding growth, especially in the last two years with the expansion of their smart home products beyond the thermostat they are probably most famously known for still. In 2017, Nest sold more devices than the previous two years combined.
With the integration of these hardware teams, it should make the integration of Google Assistant that much easier to accomplish. It also points to the fact that Google is aligning and deepening their efforts around hardware. Keep in mind this comes just a week after the talent acquisition from HTC was completed by Google for hardware devices, mostly phones.
Frankly, this merging of teams just makes sense and consumers will ultimately be the one who benefit from Nest smart home products coming from the same team as Google Assistant and Home devices.
