This is neither the first time Google's done something like this to customers, nor the first time Tony Fadell has been directly involved. When they pulled Google Glass from the market, it was concurrent with moving the Glass team to Fadell's leadership. They didn't go quite so far as to push an update to brick devices, but they left the software in a broken state, and refused to open source their fork of Android so users could fix it themselves. Nest has also burned a lot of Google's goodwill with badly designed smoke detectors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY) and thermostats (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl...).
> "I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there."
> "Tony literally stood up at an all-hands after the Alphabet thing and said "Fuck being Googley" (direct quote)."
I think Google/Alphabet need to take a serious look at what Nest has been doing to their brand. A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there add up to a serious liability for a company like Google.
And then there's this, on a recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105510
> "I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there."
> "Tony literally stood up at an all-hands after the Alphabet thing and said "Fuck being Googley" (direct quote)."
I think Google/Alphabet need to take a serious look at what Nest has been doing to their brand. A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there add up to a serious liability for a company like Google.