Alphabet is moving Nest Labs engineers into Google in a bid to bolster the development of the Amazon Echo competitor Google Home speaker.
Nest Labs, the stand-alone smart home company that manufactures internet-connected smoke detectors and thermostats, was acquired by Google in 2014 for $3.2 billion. Two and a half years later, Google's parent Alphabet is restructuring Nest Labs to transfer its entire platform team into Google for the creation of a unified internet of things platform.
Nest Labs will still continue as an Alphabet subsidiary, working on developing Nest-branded devices and the software that powers them. Dozens of its programmers, however, will be moving to Google to bolster the company's efforts in the smart home market, including the development of Google Home, which is being geared as a competitor to the voice-activated and Alexa-powered Amazon Echo.
The Nest Labs engineers moving to Google will work under Hiroshi Lockheimer, a longtime executive at Google who is currently the senior VP of Android and has recently taken more responsibility in Google's products for the living room. With the programmers to report to Lockheimer, the transfer shows that at Google, Android is slowly but surely becoming the center of everything.
The acquisition of Nest Labs raised eyebrows, as Google is generally not interested in hardware, with the production of the Nexus smartphones, for example, being done in partnership with established device manufacturers. Google's plan for Nest Labs is now in motion, with Android being set up to be the common platform for all of Google's products.
Currently, Google provides Android as the operating system to be built into smartphones. In the future, home appliances could soon also be coming with Android built in, further expanding Google's reach across consumer industries.
Google Home, which was announced by Google at the annual I/O developers conference in May, will be available to consumers within the year, though no price has yet been announced for the smart speaker. The device shares a lot of similarities with the Amazon Echo, but one of the advantages that the Google Home may have over its future rival is Google's years of investment in search capabilities.
There is no information on exactly how many Nest Labs engineers will be heading to Google to work under Lockheimer, but no matter the number, the expertise that they would provide would certainly be a big boost in the development of Google Home. The speaker might even serve as the foundation of a Nexus-like line of smart home devices powered by Android.
