Why did Google/Nest buy Revolv?

The Verge has the scoop:

Nest has just acquired Boulder, CO-based Revolv, one of the most flexible smart home platforms on the market. It’s a big move in the growing smart home market, which has two main battles: the individual devices and the platform they run on to make our homes smarter. Nest, with its popular smart thermostat and smoke detector, is in a strong position in the first category. Buying Revolv (and the team behind it) positions it strongly in the second. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, but the Revolv team will stay in Boulder in a new Nest office there.

Why did they buy them? According to the article:

“It’s a super strong group,” says Nest co-founder Matt Rogers. “When it comes to home wireless and home communication, this is the best team out there. They’ve been in this industry for about a decade.”

And it’s really the team that Nest is after — it’s immediately discontinuing Revolv’s product, which was sort of a smart home Rosetta Stone that connected devices from multiple brands across multiple radio standards, from ZigBee and Z-Wav to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

That last sentence makes my guess different: Resolv’s product, in many ways, was the opposite of the Google/Nest strategy. Resolv’s multi-protocol hub said “you, customer, are in control. Buy the products that you like, and we make them work together for you”. Google/Nest says “We will dominate and own your home”.

As ReadWrite wrote on the acquisition:

According to the experts, we may all be living in a smart home before long. Google wants it to be theirs.

Exactly.

It would be a smart move for Google/Nest to take a credible team off the market that might otherwise be acquired by somebody else with big pockets who would invest in that more customer-friendly vision for the IoT. Google continues its take-over-the-world strategy.