“Imagine you wake up in your bed to a freezing cold house. You know you set the thermostat to the right temperature the night before, so something must be wrong. You stumble out of bed and into the hallway to look at the thermostat. It’s off — and it won’t turn back on,” Chris Neiger writes for The Motley Fool.That was the scenario for some Nest thermostat owners (the company owned by Alphabet’s Google) after a software updated inadvertently added a bug to thermostat’s system, causing the batteries to drain and the device to turn off.”
“The Nest thermostat snafu points a potentially larger problem of bringing formerly unconnected things online,” Neiger writes. “Companies have to earn the trust of users in order for them to buy their products, but in the Internet of Things (where nearly everything is connected all of the time), they’ll have to keep that trust by successfully ensuring those devices run properly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Google and trust are two things that simply do not go together.
Do not settle for inferior wares, especially from personal data sponges.
A Nest is the last smoke alarm you want. You want a quality HomeKit-compatible smoke alarm. — MacDailyNews, July 23, 2015
SEE ALSO:
Google’s Nest thermostat bug leaves users cold, angry – January 14, 2016
Honeywell announces ‘Lyric Round’ smart thermostat with Apple HomeKit integration – January 5, 2016
Apple HomeKit-compatible thermostat Ecobee closes in on Google’s Nest – September 28, 2015
Apple pulls Google’s Nest thermostat from stores with launch of HomeKit-compatible Ecobee 3 – July 23, 2015
First Apple-certified HomeKit-compliant devices launch – June 2, 2015
Google engineer trashes Tony Fadell’s precious Nest smoke alarm – February 19, 2015
With HomeKit and Honeywell’s Lyric, a Nest acquisition by Apple would have been foolish – June 18, 2014
Will Apple’s Internet of Things vision hurt a beautiful idea? With HomeKit, Apple promises easy home automation – June 6, 2014
Smart thermostat war heats up as Apple-partner Honeywell takes aim at Google’s Nest – June 13, 2014
Honeywell takes dead aim at Google’s Nest with new iPhone-compatible Lyric smart thermostat – June 10, 2014
Google to SEC: We could serve ads on thermostats, refrigerators, car dashboards, and more – May 21, 2014
Dead to me: Apple’s Schiller ‘unfollows’ Tony Fadell and Nest after Google acquisition – January 18, 2014
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “wirehead” for the heads up.]
Like I said back when they bought them, Honeywell will come in and take the market away. My Honeywell products work just fine.
our lady of perpetual beta wants to make self driving cars, too. Alphabet/Google was able to buy a company and destroy its engineering standards, brand and track record within 2 years.
Nest secretly turns down the heat and then takes photos of owners with shrunk penises to sell on as blackmail material to the neighbors.
Hahahaha, brilliant!
Well, here’s Apple’s opportunity come knocking.
And why would anyone trust Apple with IoT when they can’t even get the cloud right?
I had purchased a Nest unit and two days later it was announced they were bought by “Do all sorts of evil” so back it went to the store. I went to HD and bought a WiFi Honeywell unit that gets its power from the HVAC unit transformer. This model does not try to guess my lifestyle — it is just incredibly easy to program at station or with their great app. Call me a happy camper who likes having a product made by a company that has made m millions of thermostats and got this one spot on.
Totally agree. My system is 4 zones all controlled from my Honeywell app on my iPhone or iPad. It just works.
I have two Nest thermostats. I called because one was acting up, got a new one in the mail in less than two day’s. Installed it and they have been working fine for almost 2 years.
So busy collecting data that they do not even care if it does its primary function. Google is an embarrassment to US innovation. Something you might expect from China, Korea, et al.
Installed a couple ecobee 3′ last year. Working just fine. Does everything a Nest does, maybe more, but no data to the Do Know Evil Google masters.
Shouldn’t that article have said “flaky Google’s Nest Thermostat” instead?
Using a basic thermostat is so haaaaaaard. I really need to spend an hour figuring out an Internet-connected thermostat to save me the three seconds setting an ordinary one.
But seriously, in a world where inability to program a VCR used to be a cliché, we need every little device connected to the Internet!? No thanks.
Easy two part answer…
1)Being able to turn the furnace on from the comfort of my nice warm bed at 4am to prepare for an early day.
2)Tracking how long each stage of my furnace has been on during the day. Useful for being energy efficient.
I don’t need everything connected to the internet. My water heater has an ‘internet’ add-on that I didn’t purchase. But furnace thermostats and fire alarms… yeah, there is value added. An email when the fire alarm goes off. A reminder to replace a furnace filter. Recording energy usage. Not everybody’s cup of tea. But I find these things useful.
I remember when the Google I/O happened with a big Nest presentation and whomever was presenting said, “We want to know when you’re at home with your kids.”
Why anyone would buy from them after that, I don’t know.
Two big thumbs up for EcoBee3… easy install a couple weeks ago and very happy with the results.
The problem here was not the Nest itself, but the fact that a faulty software update was automatically uploaded to it.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from this. The most important on ebbing that in the event of any strange behaviour, the unit must fail to a safe condition. It should be possible to monitor whether it’s working in a fully functional manner and with enough battery left for a couple of days operation. If not, it should send out an error report to the users, disconnect from the internet and simply keep the house at a sensible temperature. The system should normally send routine ‘everything is OK’ messages to the control app and the user should be alerted if those messages haven’t been arriving for a while.
Another hugely important lesson is that automatic software updates should be considered as a potential risk. Obviously pre-testing must be rigorous, but owners should be able to specify that updates are not immediately installed, but can be done maybe a week or two later and never when the house is unattended such as when the owners are away for a few days.
There are many types of things that can be internet enabled, some are more critical than others. I would want to know pretty urgently if my freezer, house heating or security systems ceased to function, but I wouldn’t need immediate notification if the automatic curtains or my desk lamps wasn’t working as expected.
The Internet of Things needs to be smart in the true sense. It needs to be able to work out what the owner needs to do and what they need to know. It needs to be able to work out when the owner needs to be told something and otherwise to remain silent, but if anything does go wrong, it needs to let the owner know and must also maintain basic functionality for critical items.
The problem with this Nest fiasco is that it reduces people’s confidence in such systems and it will negatively impact on better engineered systems. Apple needs to ensure that HomeKit not only works as described, but also works in the way that users expect it to. Google/Nest are getting a certain amount of flack over this issue, but if it had been Apple, it would have been shouted from the rooftops and everybody would hear about it.
on ebbing = the most important one being
So far, the IoT (‘Internet or Things, or IdioT) is a catastrophic MESS of bad software. It’s no surprise at all to see that IoT security is NOT the only software issue.
IoT at your peril.
‘Internet OF Things’.
…Waiting for the caffeine to kick in…
Delicious dahling! Thank you.