Honeywell: Can’t innovate, so sues exciting new thermostat creator

The Nest thermostat, an amazing piece of machinery, re-imagined the idea of the thermostat by putting adaptive learning technology into it and getting it to connect to the internet and your iPhone. It’s pretty slick. You should check out the site.

In response, Honeywell is suing Nest.

The ideas they claim it stole are ideas that are in place in lots of other shittily designed interfaces on other thermometers. But since Nest has buzz, and is being called the Apple of thermometers, Honeywell is going to squat on it with a big lawsuit.

For example, Honeywell’s complaint says, the fact that the Nest thermometer came with a patented “question system” — “What are the lowest and highest temperatures you’d like when you are away?” — is not new. Honeywell’s Prestige thermostat, introduced in late 2008, also incorporates an “interview-based interface.”
Honeywell also says that controlling a thermostat remotely through the Internet is not a Nest Labs innovation.

Interestingly, General Electric also offers consumers — as part of a home-energy management system — the ability to remotely control a GE “smart” thermostat from a smartphone or home computer. “Connect seamlessly to your programmable thermostat to remotely adjust your home climate,” says GE’s Web page for this feature.

When I asked Anderson whether Honeywell had ever examined GE’s system, he simply said, “I don’t know. I’m not familiar with that product.”

Sure, if you can’t innovate, sue.

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on February 7th 2012 at 3:26 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.