Nest CEO is Leaving

According to CNET, Nest has announced today that

Marwan Fawaz will no longer be its CEO. As part of his

departure, Nest will now be folded into Google's home

and living room products team. In a joint interview with

Fawaz, Rishi Chandra, vice president of product

management for Google's home and living room

products,

said that the combination would make it easier for Google

to integrate some of its machine learning technology and

artificial intelligence into Nest products.

This move comes six months after Nest merged with Google's

hardware division. Nest co-founder Matt Rogers left soon after

as well. Now, Nest will live under Google's home devices (like

the Home smart speakers) umbrella, which is led by Chandra.

"This is the natural evolution," he said to CNET. "We thought,

let's connect these things and build experiences that we really

couldn't do before."

According to CNET, Fawaz will stay on at Google as an

executive adviser, and that the Nest brand will stick around.

CNET reports that his exit came after an internal push for

leadership change, where several employees expressed

dissatisfaction and distrust in Fawaz after he replaced co-

founder Tony Fadell. Interestingly, CNET also reports that

when Fadell left in 2016, Alphabet had contemplated selling

off Nest to Amazon, which is now considered to be one of

Google's primary competitors in the smart home space.