Thermostats are made by very large companies with no incentive to innovate. Their customers are contractors or HVAC wholesalers, not consumers. So why spend to make them better? It's a good business.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource.
When I started selling air conditioners early on, customers were willing to pay an extra 200 yuan to buy from Suning. Why? Service was good.
There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.
Every day we are paying more for energy than we should due to poor insulation, inefficient lights, appliances, and heating and cooling equipment - money we could save by investing in energy efficiency.
When you think of technology that gets people excited - long lines at stores, enthusiastic reviews in the blogosphere, passionate evangelists - the first thing to come to mind probably isn't thermostats. Then, along came Nest.
People don't want to give up their SUVs. They don't want to turn the thermostat down in the winter and up in the summer.
The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.
For far too long, America has been without a comprehensive energy plan, and today consumers are paying the price - literally - at the pump and in their heating bills.
Too often, the air conditioners we use to cool down also contribute to climate change - the very force that's fueling extreme heat.
Most thermostats are built by plumbing companies. But you really need to understand how to build a phone to make them better.