Impact and value of Nest Essays

Impact and value of Nest Essays Impact and value of Nest Essay Impact and value of Nest Essay Consequence of Nests successes and failures Matt Rogers, the co-founder and UP at engineering once said, Before Nest, people didnt care about their thermostat. l He was probably right in the sense that unlike a lot of other technology or devices, the design and functions of thermostats havent really changed much during the last few decades. By coming up with its own thermostat featuring a unique and cool design, a user-friendly interface, a motion sensor, smart learning ability and long-term energy saving function, Nest manages to create a surprisingly huge impact on its customers and users, the society as a whole ND raise moral, ethical and legal issues that cannot be ignored as its business continue to expand. Influence on customers life According to online feedbacks from Nests customers, benefit brought by Nests thermostat when its working normally is obvious and superior to any of its competitors. Nests technology of auto-learning, auto-schedule and auto-sense give the device the ability to collect data from real world and combine it with virtual world algorithm so that the customers can always enjoy personalized and accurate in-door temperature control without bothering themselves to adjust thermostats manually. The air-wave technology calculates the precise time that the air-conditioner compressor can be turned off before reaching the desired temperature while still being able to maintain the target temperature afterwards with the cold air generated a short period after turning off. This not only provides customers with a room temperature much closer to the desired one, but also increases energy efficiency and reduces energy bill for customers together with the three technologies mentioned previously. 2 By partnering with energy companies and creating projects such as Rushing hour awards and seasonal savings,3 Nest is giving its customers a much lealer idea about their own energy consumption pattern, raising their awareness of energy saving, and provide them with the incentive to be consume energy more efficiently. In conclusion, with its disruptive innovation, Nest turned the zero-sum game between customers and companies into a win-win situation. Also Nests design-thinking process and its emphasis on user experience in its thermostat really changes consumers perception of home appliance and might even lead the future trend of home appliance designing. From now on, customers will have a much high demand when purchasing home appliances. Artistic appearance, smart self-control and even human-like personality might all be required, which are all product characteristics displayed by Nest. The reason for that is because even without the customers themselves noticing, Nests thermostat is actually introducing them into the world of Internet of everything. By using or Just knowing the existence of Nest thermostat, customers are enabled to expand their vision and understanding of connectivity from Just cell- phones, laptops to a much were range AT applications Ana turn Trot resistance to accepting and embracing the idea of appliance self-evolving. However with companies like Honeywell already introducing programmable thermostats long ago, why is Nest the one that attracts mass public attention and wins popularity among customers? The reason might be their focus on the user friendliness of their products. No matter how promising or important the idea of Internet of things is, its mostly Just an idea familiar to people working in hi-tech industry, in other words, geeks. For normal customers, they care much more about getting a functional, cool and easy to use product than getting a sophisticatedly designed one and spent a Eng time admiring its amazing technology or the exciting technology future it represents. Nests design of its thermostat manages to cross the huge gap between geeks and ordinary users by providing the end customers with only the benefits of Internet of things, eliminating most of the complicated technology training or explanation. The simplicity of nests design also shows in its installation, according to Nest three people out of four install nest in less then 30 minutes. 4 All these features educated the customers that people should not adapt to technology, instead, technology should adapt to people. However in terms of dealing with customer relationships, Nest is not doing a satisfying Job. From both Amazon and Nests own community, there are a lot of angry posts regarding the unsuitability of the thermostat,5 and most of them didnt seems to receive up-to-expectation customer service. No matter its a product sold in regions outside North America where the product cannot currently be supported or sold from Amazon but later turned out incompatible with the customers HAVE system, Nest all regard it as not the problem of the thermostat therefore refuses a return to the company directly. This strategy brings a lot of unnecessary trouble to customers and might not be really suitable for a startup still trying to expand its market share. Impact on society and ecosystem Nest is not only influencing customers, but also having an impact on the whole ecosystem it is in. Its partnership with several large energy companies benefits its customers by getting them rebates and access to new exclusive services such as Rushing hour awards and Seasonal Saving, 6 while in the meantime also helping energy companies to build a more environmental friendly image and attract more seers by giving Nest thermostat as a free gift to those who sign certain energy contracts. This breaks the conventional pattern of the industry supply chain existing for decades, in which most of the time energy companies have the biggest authority and apply one-way communication to companies at lower end of the supply chain. Nests thermostat and some of the technology it used is also influencing its competitors including Honeywell and Coble greatly. Just like Apples phone first released to the market, in terms of design Nests thermostat is quite a few generations more superior to its competitors products, therefore sets the future velveteen trend of this industry. When gradually eating up its competitors market snares, Nest Is also encouraging Its competitors to devote more Into Innovation Ana come up with more creative and competitive products like Honeywell WIFE smart thermostat,7 thus accelerating the developing speed of the industry. However resistance still exists, especially from its competitors. Honeywell patent lawsuit against Nest regarding seven patents infringement that is estimated to last for years is an obvious example. No matter whether Nest really used Honeywell patents or tot according to the law, it is clearly a competing strategy of Honeywell intending to distract the companys focus and scare the startup out of the market. From the point of view of both companies, there is really nothing more can be done previously to change the current situation. Once Nest step into the thermostat market with a new and competitive product, it is going to be sued. If Honeywell doesnt do it, other companies would. And for Honeywell, if it cannot release a more competitive product in a short period, then taking advantage of its large pool of patents is the best way to pep its current market leader position. However this is not necessarily a bad thing for the society. The lawsuit between these two companies grabs a lot of media attention and provides the opportunity for governments and society to reconsider the fairness of the patent law. If the current law good enough to encourage new innovations and protect the benefits of its owners while not being taken advantage of by patent trolls with abundant resources as business war tools and discourage valuable start-ups and their disruptive innovation? If it is not, what kind of amendments should be done to improve it? Nests relationship with HAVE manufacturing companies somehow needs improvement. Without really engaging in much cooperation with those HAVE manufacturing companies, Nests thermostat is not compatible with quite a few kinds of HVACs, thus excluding certain segments of customers out of its target market. It seems that Nest is trying to imitate what Apple managed to do, that is adopt close systems and in the end became the industry standard setter. However Nest is not Apple. Unlike Pod, Nest still have substitute products to compete with to win a large enough customer base, and with only one product in the whole industry ecosystem at and, the benefit it can provide its customers who are willing to switch to its standard is simply not enough. The impact Nest can have on the HAVE manufacturing industry might now be as big as it thought it could, and in the long term it might still have to provide more integration options. Nest also runs a very different business model compared to other home appliance companies. In terms of distribution channels, Nest is trying very hard to sell its products directly to its customers, building a more intimate customer relationship and ads-intermediating middle- man to some extent. Even now Nest is selling its Hermosa at Best Buy and Apple, these two official retailers are cleverly picked to maintain its brand image. So far the business model is quite successful in promoting the idea that Nest is something cool and unique and helped the company retain great media attention, therefore might also be adopted by a lot of following companies in the home-tech industry or even a wider range. However, though customers can pay more attention to tenet new cool demonstrates Ana SST nappy about it, it remains unknown whether it would be too much when all the home appliances adopt this business model and require customers energy to interact with very single company. Ethical, Moral and Legal issues Looking into the future of Nests technology and the emergence of Internet of things it represents, certain moral, ethical and legal issues have already been raised. One of them is the information privacy. With a sensor and WIFE connectivity, Nest can gather a lot of personal information about its users. For example, it knows its users energy consumption patterns, daily schedules, whether they are at home or not, or the number of people within the family. As the product and its technology continue to evolve, it might gather even more critical and personal data. These data has to be uploaded for cloud computing in order to provide better service, question is, who will be granted the authority to access these data? Wicked government agencies be allowed to use these data to find crime or determine criminals? On CONTROL TRENDS one of the floggers pictures an unrealistic but somehow representative future. In the year 2021, thermostats have been replaced by the Nest Domestic Constable, a smart device, affectionately known as AY, sold at the Apple store and Best Buy, that reports who is home, when they got there and what they ate. It includes energy paving features like: reporting that the mother left the water running while she brushed her teeth and that father fell asleep with the TV on. This family was sentenced to six months in green prison. 8 Though this is very unlikely to happen, it does show the possible future need of more developed law to regulate private information sharing. Though smart systems like Nest using auto-tune technology is bringing benefits to its users when functioning normally, it does sometimes make bad decisions that are undesirable. In the case of Nest the damage might Just be a too high temperature or running on cooling AC in the summer, which is not severe enough to raise serious attention. However as the technology continuing to develop, when the automatic systems are smart enough to be called artificial intelligence and more previously manual work is given to machines, what could be the consequence of bad automatically generated decisions then? Those might be much more serious than just the wrong temperature within the room. And when those accidents happen, who is going to be responsible for those consequences, the users, the system, or the company? A legal liability framework set by the government would also be in urgent deed when that future comes. To sum up, as a high-tech start-up, Nest has already been bringing positive impact to its customers, the echo-system it is in, and whole society with its superiorly design thermostat. However nothing is perfect, and Nest has also encountered several failures that can be improved in the coming years. But looking into the far distant future, what the company, its products and the idea of Internet of things are going to evolve into is really a question unknown yet really exciting , and their impact on the world will WA Itt De ever nee Day tile o