Case in point, Google’s takeover of Nest.

It turns out that they are destroying the products because they just want to spy more intrusively on their users:

Google’s “Nest” smart home division has seen major upheaval this year, and according to a report from Bloomberg, the changes aren’t sitting well with residential builders that formerly integrated Nest projects into their construction projects.

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In addition to the death of Nest the company, we’re also seeing the death of the Nest ecosystem. The “Works with Nest” smart home program is being shut down in favor of Google Assistant compatibility, and that means devices that used to communicate with Nest now work differently or not at all. Nest’s account system is also being shut down, and in the future, users will need a Google account.

Bloomberg’s report says that residential builders, who “collectively purchase tens of thousands of Nest devices each year” have started avoiding Nest products due to Google’s changes. The report quotes Mark Zikra, vice president of technology at CA Ventures, as saying, “We’ve stopped. In an apartment complex we’re talking about 200, 300 devices that would be installed in one swoop and then all of a sudden everyone moves in.”

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Any time a tech giant takes a walled-garden approach to a device, it makes it harder for customers outside that ecosystem to adopt that product. This is particularly a tough approach for smart home gadgets due to the breath of smart home devices out there. No company can build every smart home gadget that you might want to connect together, and Google’s decision to wall off Nest (which was never that open to begin with) into the Google ecosystem was apparently the last straw for these residential developers. A more consumer-friendly approach would be to make your device as open and compatible as possible, by plugging into the open protocols like Zigbee and Z-wave and building app support for the big tech ecosystems like Apple HomeKit, Samsung’s SmartThings, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.

I knew that Google has eschewed its, “Don’t be evil” motto, but I did not know that their new motto was, “We’re evil and stupid.”