Honeywell and Kidde were strong players in the early days of the modern home security industry, focusing on devices like smoke detectors that detect dangers in your home and alert you to them.
In ADT’s model, it’s not the alarms which bring the core value, but the monitoring and security personnel who respond to the alarms.
Nest’s early products combined great hardware design and ‘smart learning’ algorithms to predict what home occupants needed, using a thermostat, smoke detector, alarm system, doorbells and cameras and, later, optional face recognition technology. Nest has now folded into Google Home.
Google Assistant and Google Home transcended any one technology to be in the network orchestration business—with a smart home ecosystem, which connects not only devices from various manufacturers into a network, but also the people in a household. Members can all monitor and interact with the devices in the home from anywhere through apps.
