&gt; When Google shuts down Nest, people are left with non-working thermostats, and have to spend money and rebuild their systems to continue on.<p>No, they are left with a normal programmable thermostat with a nicer interface than most.<p>&gt; Even worse, if just the internet goes down – not that rare in areas in the US only served by one ISP which doesn’t have to fear competition – one is even left without heating.<p>This is not true.  The Nest operates perfectly fine without internet.<p>&gt; The reaction of the people on the recent case where Nest went down itself, and people were left without heating<p>That&#x27;s not exactly what happened.  What happened was there was a bug in the software that had an issue when their server became unavailable.  But this could happen with any device that is controlled by software.  And even if they had a totally open and accessible API right on the device, this problem still would have happened.<p>I don&#x27;t like the fact that they lock up the data, but we should probably try to stomp out the myth that the device is totally useless without their servers.