Nobody understands Nest, including Google. They can succeed with it if they leave it alone. Google's presence will probably help in that case.

Here's Nest's business model, in a nutshell: pluck low-hanging fruit.

Here's Nest's weakness, in a nutshell: most of the low-hanging fruit left has adamantium stems.

Take thermostats. They're the fucking stupidest thing in your house besides smoke alarms. They're thuggishly primitive - the internals of this device, which you can buy right now at your hardware store, are fundamentally unchanged from what they were in 1932. They have a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch, like a goddamn pinball machine tilt sensor. They about as technologically advanced as a screwdriver. And when dealing with as energy-intensive an experience as HVAC, the fact that home thermostats are crazy-stupid primitive is infuriating.

It's not without reason, though. Anything that interfaces with UL- and NEC-listed equipment must likewise be UL- and NEC-listed. Your nifty iThermostat has an approval process that takes about four years to get through. It also costs millions or tens of millions of dollars. That's why those of us in the industry started seeing USB charging ports on wall outlets back in 2000... from illegal off-shore markets in China. Home Depot? Home Depot got that shit in 2011. It took Lutron 10 years to take an existing Chinese design and get the National Electrical Code to sign off on it.

Home automation has been here since 1975. It works. You could buy it at Radio Shack, back before they went off the market in 2003. Thing is, to get around all the jankiness induced by the NEC and UL, you have to do stupid shit. Stupid shit annoys consumers. Annoyed consumers don't tell their friends to buy things.

So here we are - a giant VC-funded Apple-raised dream team took three years to produce a $130 internet-enabled rheostat.

Are there other devices around the house that could stand an update? FFS yes. Lightswitches are an embarrassment. Nearly all appliances suck. Lighting fixtures? Don't get me started. But at base level, they're held in place by the inertia of giant life-safety bureaucracies. And while I'd love to see Nest resurrect X10 in all its glory (minus the jankiness) I recognize that it's going to take billions of dollars and a decade or more to do it.

And sometimes I feel like I'm the only one.