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Amazon will stop selling Nest products once its current stock of them runs out:
The impending disappearance of Nest from Amazon marks just the latest development in the acrimonious, anti-consumer feud between Amazon and Google. Nest was absorbed back into Google last month after spending three years as a standalone Alphabet subsidiary. (Google tipped off Nest that Amazon had decided against selling its latest hardware while the companies were still separate.) Amazon has steadfastly refused to sell some Google-branded products like the Google Home voice assistant speaker and the company's Pixel smartphones. In December, the online retailer said it would restart sales of the Chromecast streaming device, but it's been three months and you still can't buy it. Last summer, Amazon launched a Prime Video app for Android, but has yet to add support for streaming its content with a Chromecast.
For its part in this ugly falling out, Google has removed YouTube from Amazon's Fire TV streaming products and the Echo Show / Spot, claiming that Amazon has violated its terms of service with those implementations of the YouTube app. There were once signs that the companies were mending the scorched bridge between them, but that doesn't seem to be the case any longer.
Related:
Amazon Declares War on YouTube by Launching Amazon Video Direct
Google Pulls YouTube off of the Amazon Echo Show
Google's "Manhattan" to Compete With Amazon's Echo Show
Amazon Wants to Deliver Purchases into Your Home
Google Pulls YouTube Off of More Amazon Devices
Google Absorbs Nest, Nest Co-Founder Quits
Amazon Acquires Ring, Maker of Internet-Connected Doorbells and Cameras, for Over $1 Billion
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday March 05 2018, @08:26AM (1 child)
The consumers have to choose which of the two shits they want more and, perhaps, in the process they'll realise TMB was right all along: the ultimate pleasure of this life is to consume whatever you've caught with your own fishing pole!
(no, I'm not grinning this time)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by metarox on Monday March 05 2018, @07:34PM
At least for now we can choose none. Maybe some day we won’t have a choice and sabotaging your stuff (ahem licensed stuff) will be illegal.
(Score: 3, Informative) by anubi on Monday March 05 2018, @08:36AM (3 children)
Did any of NEST's devices require a "cloud" server?
Stuff like I just read is exactly why I am so leery of buying *anything* that requires someone else's server.
I never know who is going to wink out at the stroke of a pen. Other people may make money, but now I have more hoops to jump through, that is if it would do any good.
Its too easy for someone to simply switch off a server once the cash flow of new enrollees tapers off - leaving me with a dead box.
I remember seeing NEST products at Home Depot, but was so overwhelmed with the geekiness of the thing that I did not know if I had the tech skills to turn it on. I figure if my old school thermostat wasn't good enough, I would use an Arduino. I have had a bad feeling about "high tech" ever since I bought those Circuit City DIVX disks.
( Mini-rant: A later experience spending right at $100 for a "digital cross referenced IC Master" did not help much. I thought I was buying a bunch of interlinked HTML files burned onto the CDROM... the HTML equivalent of the IC Master catalog, which was a staple of electronic designers of the day. It was my first taste of embedded DRM, which I never did get that disk to work, and ended up tossing it. I considered the $100 I spent for that disk as tuition teaching me to be wary of anything DRM, as it was a live demonstration to me of how powerless I was after purchasing the thing. I wasn't getting my money back, nor was I to get any use out of the thing. "Rights"? I did not have any. Marketers have played hell trying to get me to bite on anything DRM'd ever since. They might as well spray their good with Liquid Ass before presentation to their customer. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @01:13PM (2 children)
Pretty sure that _all_ of the Nest products require a cloud service. Certainly their "smart" thermostat does.
A friend worked there before it was part of Google/Alphabet and he tried to convince me to buy one. I passed because we have a non-standard usage pattern -- the thermostat is in the living/dining area where we rarely go in the day time...but we work from home using other rooms. It would almost certainly have turned down the heat for the whole house, since it appears that the house is vacant during the day.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday March 05 2018, @05:27PM (1 child)
Your non-standard usage pattern isn't something that couldn't be solved by throwing money at it. Specifically, you could add another Nest to the network, mounted in a room that you frequent. That second thermostat would then communicate wirelessly with the one connected to the furnace, providing temperature control as expected.
Of course, that's not a reasonable solution. A more reasonable solution would be to manually program it to keep temperature where you want it. That solution, though, could be performed by a much cheaper thermostat, so it's not appropriate, either.
The last option would be to manually reset the heat via the mobile app on occasions when the thermostat allows the house to cool down because it is erroneously seen as vacant. But nobody buys an expensive thermostat to fight with it on a regular basis...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday March 06 2018, @02:41AM
At this point, I would have used the Arduino.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by MyOpinion on Monday March 05 2018, @02:06PM
An often disregarded function of Amazon and Google is that they amplify the illusion that there is an open competing world market, that said market works as advertized, and that Amazon and Google are some sort of fruits that emerged out of this "fair competition".
Truth is like a Lion: you need not defend it; let it loose, and it defends itself. https://discord.gg/3FScNwc
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @08:08PM (4 children)
This is why companies should be broken up. Online stores shouldn't be allowed to create their own items if they also sell other people's items. Similar to how ISP shouldn't be content creators. With this bullshit Google is going to have to create its own stores to prevent being locked out of the market from Amazon. Then a bunch of other companies will be making their own stores and soon you'll have to pay membership fees to all of them just to be able to pick what you want to buy. It's looking like in the future one company will rule your life and wars will be company vs company rather than nation vs nation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @08:24PM (1 child)
> Online stores shouldn't be allowed to create their own items if they also sell other people's items.
Does your supermarket have "house brand" items for sale? Many companies purchase from manufacturers and have the goods private labeled. Why should this be any different because it's "online"? Your proposal sounds like a regulation that would be impossible to enforce.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Monday March 05 2018, @09:26PM
To be fair, what you are talking about ("store brands") is really just a retailer offering a generic version of a commodity alongside a national or regional brand name of the same commodity.
Those Google and Amazon products are something entirely different. They are each offering a platform or ecosystem consumers can use to access their services and content as well as services and content of different companies. You can't ignore Amazon as a retailer or Google as an Internet services company the same way you can drive a couple of miles to a different grocery store. Well, not easily anyway.
You're right that there's no way the kind of regulation the GP suggested would fly. But these tech behemoths are really getting out of control.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
WTH is a monolopy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @03:25AM
jsut a sinple typo...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @02:00PM
Stop it.
Seek help.