Jeff Seewald touched on the progress of home thermostats — and in particular, the Nest products that have done so well the last couple of years — when he sent me his latest installment on using tablets and new tech in engineering (look for it in March). Within a week, some eye-catching news came across the wire: Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion.
Right away, I saw a couple of friends online having second thoughts about the Nest thermostats they had bought or had been considering for their homes. After all, one of the neat characteristics of the later units is the ability to stand beneath a unit and literally “wave off” the alarm, with the help of some motion sensor to recognize you’re there and you want it to know that there’s no real emergency, you just burned the pancakes.