Back when Google bought Nest in 2014, many people expected great things to come from the partnership. More than two years later, however, the Nest acquisition is looking like an abject disaster for Google, as a new report from The Information makes clear. The short of it is that Nest’s product portfolio has grown very slowly since its acquisition by Google and its revenues are way below expectations. But that doesn’t tell the whole story — there are a lot of juicy details in the piece that really paint a picture of total dysfunction between Nest and Google.
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You want tidbits? Here are some good ones:
- Google building a rival to Amazon’s Echo and Nest asked to be part of the team designing it. Given the talent at Nest, you’d think that Google would want its engineers involved… and yet Google refused.
- Nest CEO Tony Fadell comes across as a nightmare of a boss. After Nest acquired Dropcam in 2014, for instance, Fadell told Dropcam cofounder Greg Duffy that he was not even allowed to directly report to Fadell because “you haven’t earned it.”
- When the situation with Dropcam went south, Fadell absolutely ripped into its employees. “A lot of the employees were not as good as we’d hoped… [it was] a very small team and unfortunately it wasn’t a very experienced team,” Fadell is quoted as saying. Roughly half of the employees that came over from Dropcam have now left the company.
If you want to get the full story, check it out at this link, although you should be forewarned that most of it is locked behind a paywall.
