In 2014, Google purchased Nest. After many years of product and brand strategy changes, it seems that Nest is finally within Alphabet the brand for all home tech (home assistants, thermostat, security cameras and even wireless home networking).

Yesterday, Google made an important next step for the Nest brand by investing 450 million USD in ADT, an alarm system company. This should give ADT access to smarter cameras and Google to a new sales channel. It’ll be interesting to see how far the integration between Nest cameras and ADT’s alarm system will go (pretty sure that is a subtantial technical challenge).

Personally, I have my doubts about whether Google should have done this. It seems like quite a lot of money for just accessing a new sales channel. ADT is a human resource intensive business, whereas Google with its Nest cameras focuses more on high tech cameras, good software and good solutions, but all very scaleable.

I realise that without a monitored alarm system, some would argue that Nest cameras give a false sense of security, but I wonder whether an emphasis on convenience and control could be enough to strongly position Nest. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out and whether Google starts coming to similar agreements with other alarm companies in other countries.

Source (TechCruch): [Google to invest $450M in smart home security solutions provider ADT] (https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/03/google-to-invest-450m-in-smart-home-security-solutions-provider-adt/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly90ZWNobWVtZS5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIMJGwnOnYdyKWdtwhvychwfXnfzVgSVPcKDrpuS-v9qmJzvN2RPda98OJy9YFiLNI2F_r-1JlugDB3Cj5X7iD58PeMyH3_I-3lMvBPMvlzUn-cwe6WzugAn6tEdRSzZGjiS0sJPtYwOU5fIzZ9IyNyjEfKaE_wDTNumj2pJqnse)