Yeah so the nest protect is, when you look at it objectively, a ceiling mounted general purpose remote sensing package. It’s basically only lacking a wide angle camera and I suspect that’s because they figured it would cross too far into “creepy” for it to be saleable.
It seems to me like a team sat for a while, looked at all the possible ways they could get people to mount a package like this in every room and settled on calling it a smoke alarm.
At the most optimistic they started with a smoke alarm and gradually realised they could build a general purpose platform based on the hardware being deployed in lots of rooms and many types of sensors being dirt cheap now.
Decided they could enable new capabilities (and data goldmines!) in software later.
It’s a pity there’s not an actually customer controlled version of it.
It seems to me like a team sat for a while, looked at all the possible ways they could get people to mount a package like this in every room and settled on calling it a smoke alarm.
At the most optimistic they started with a smoke alarm and gradually realised they could build a general purpose platform based on the hardware being deployed in lots of rooms and many types of sensors being dirt cheap now.
Decided they could enable new capabilities (and data goldmines!) in software later.
It’s a pity there’s not an actually customer controlled version of it.