“Apple Inc. should have bought mobile-mapping application developer Waze Ltd. at any cost, investor and Benchmark partner Bill Gurley tells Bloomberg Television,” Emily Chang reports for Bloomberg News. “‘If you’re going to pay $3 billion for a headphone company, $2 billion for a maps company is a no-brainer,’ Gurley said in an interview in October.”
“He also said Apple should have bought Nest Labs Inc. if only to bring the company’s CEO and co-founder, Tony Fadell, back to Apple,” Chang reports. “Instead, Google Inc. paid $969 million for Waze and $3.2 billion for Nest.”
“Gurley was one of Uber’s earliest investors and is on the board of the car-booking startup,” Chang reports. “The interview was conducted before Uber’s recent controversies, including talk of targeting of journalists and the arrest of a driver in India on charges of sexually assaulting a passenger.”
Chang’s full interview with Gurley can be seen on Studio 1.0 or via www.bloomberg.com/TV on December 11th at 8:30 p.m. ET and PT.
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Dead to me: Apple’s Schiller ‘unfollows’ Tony Fadell and Nest after Google acquisition – January 18, 2014
Why Apple didn’t buy Tony Fadell’s Nest Labs – January 14, 2014
Feuds, funding and a fed up Fadell: Why Apple didn’t buy Nest – January 14, 2014
Did Tim Cook blow it by not snapping up Nest before Google? – January 13, 2014
Apple did offer to buy Israeli startup Waze, but Waze politely declined, sources say – January 4, 2013
What the author fails to mention is that the main impetus for the Beats acquisition was securing the services of future Apple CEO Dr. Dre.
And the Golden Globe Award for joke of the year goes to, drumroll please … R2!!!
Whatever it is you are smoking has got to be illegal. In no way is Dre Apple CEO material. If anything I would bet on Craig Federighi and 10 years from now.
Maybe Jimmy Iovine, but not Dr. Dre.
Beats was the most ignorant expenditure of almost $3 Billion ever. Shitty headphones, me too subscription music model MDN used to make fun of when done by Real Networks and Microsoft run by two guys who started the company by ripping off the people who designed their first models.
Maybe Cook has a thing for Dre on the down-low.
No knowledge, just speculation to explain a total waste of money.
Yeah, just as I was about to get a Nest, knuckahaided goog bought it! No way now! I don’t do anything goog!
Had a Nest from early on. Sold it when Google bought them out.
Waze yes. Nest no.
If & when Apple wanted to make a connected thermostat, they can replicate Nest pretty easily. I hope they do one day.
Agreed Nest has nothing special to offer other than hi profile at present. Other companies have and will produce competing products that Apple has rightly decided can offer as much to their Home strategy as Nest can so why get into that tech itself. Seems a short sighted action it would have been criticised for by the analysts.
I think the home automation craze will fade fairly quickly. I see very little reason to have remote control of my lights or HVAC when I can just use a timer. It’s a toy.
The need for good maps and traffic feedback is much more important. I find Waze to be both fun and useful.
One really smart thing that Nest does if you have both a Nest Protect and a thermostat—it turns off the furnace if Carbon Monoxide is detected.
I really like having my Nest thermostats. I can control them from my iPhone, which means that if I want to turn all 3 down, I can. It is also FAR easier to set schedules, have filter change alerts, etc. than using any programmable thermostat I have ever tried, and I tried many different ones. When the instruction book for a Honeywell programmable thermostat is thicker than the thermostat, you know you’re going to need an engineering degree to program it.
No need for Apple to replicate Nest. With Homekit Many will be able to copy with even more features.
Google must have put a lot of value on the data that could be mined from Nest users why else pay 2B. To get Tony Fadell???
I wonder whether these pundits who are generous with free advice could run a company themselves.
Nest? That’s a joke. Look at their sales figures. They wouldn’t amount to a trickle in Apple’s revenue stream. I bet that HomeKit software will do a lot more to bring devices into the Apple sphere of influence that Nest ever could. It’s just a thermostat, and now also a smoke detector that looked pretty cool but had some major design problems. Doesn’t seem to me like Tony Fadell was worth $2B. Get a Honeywell Lyric. Invest in a reliable smoke detector. Being able to wave at your detector seems cool, but it wasn’t well thought out and was very dangerous. Very poor interface design. I think they got too cocky because of the critical reception of their thermostat.
Waze? That’s a different story. I don’t know about that. The social nature which Waze is emphasizing more and more is just not Apple’s strength, and something I am totally not interested in. But their real time traffic and user reports still far outshine anything Apple has come up with. Even their display is better when you want to see where on the road you are. You can’t zoom or pan Maps at all. Updates for Waze can occur within a day, while it’s months, many months for Map.. The parking lot roads on Waze help me find my way back out of a big lot back to the main route. Apple’s “roadmap” for Maps is opaque at best. We know their working on ways to improve their accuracy. But beyond that, it’s “trust us, it’s going to be great!” Maps will get you there, but it’s not a great driver assistant. I hope things well get better. I try Maps out every time there’s a update, but so far, I keep going back to Waze.
You say Apple could replicate the Nest thermostat easily………When I go to Home Depot I don’t see the Nest thermostat anymore , I see Honeywell’s copy of the Nest.
Leo LaPort even commented on how does’t like how the Nest worked for him. He uses it as a standard thermostat now. He was always changing it, it did not follow his lifestyle algorithms.
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With the Nest, my wife would leave the house to walk the dog and come back to a cold house. Now we use a cheaper wifi thermostat from Honeywell. Control it from its own touch screen, smartphone, tablet, or computer.
Advice is free and is often worth exactly that much. I think it’s great this guy gets writeups for telling other companies what they should and shouldn’t do. It must have been an easy article to write and I’m sure it saved the reporter from actually taking any risks or writing anything important. Fluff in, feces out.
As Apple investor I disagree with buying Waze and Nest.
But as a consumer I wish they had. I would like to buy a Nest thermostat, but will never give Google access to my activities!
See Poll at:
http://jmmxtech.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/dear-nest/