Speaking of Cold

My feet just got cold.

For the record, I felt deeply disappointed when I found out about Google's recent purchase of Nest. I've been really impressed with Nest thermostats, and had fantasized about installing one in my house, but when I heard about the aquisition, my mind filled with a cloud black, ill formed visions: Google+ integration, statistics about my activities sent to advertisers, the thermostat getting hacked and running the heater in July, or the thermostat becoming an abandonware brick.

This is all easy to imagine after the shutdown Reader and Wave, and the abandonment of a few other products that worked great. The most frustrating part of cloud computing is lack of control. Once something is gone, its gone.

In retrospect, we're just on the cusp of what can be done with interconnected systems, so the downfall of an bellwether company is just part-and-parcel of the process. Remember BeOS?