Alphabet’s CFO says Home and Nest are different entities

Alphabet has two smart home systems: Google Home and separate Alphabet subsidiary Nest. And it’s going to stay that way, said Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat at the Code Conference Wednesday in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

“Our view is that Home is pursuing one path and Nest is looking at a different set of products and go-to-market strategy,” she said.

This view is not necessarily intuitive given the overlap between the two companies, not just from a consumer perspective but from the perspective of companies that work with the products.

“It’s really a huge separation between dealing with the Nest people and product line and the Google Home people and product line,” said HelloTech CEO Richard Wolpert, whose on-demand tech setup and support company installs Nest and Home devices.

The Nest suite of smart home products was originally part of Google before being spun out into its own company when Google reorganized into Alphabet.

That spinout happened before Google introduced the Home device, an artificially intelligent hub that responds to voice commands and controls smart devices from a variety of makers, including Nest.

Nest co-founder and CEO Tony Fadell left the company about a year ago, raising questions at the time about whether there might be a change in direction or whether Alphabet might just sell the company.

“I think that we have evolved the business,” Porat said when Kara Swisher asked about Fadell’s departure.

She said Alphabet was happy with Nest’s performance.

“I talk about them every quarter. We’re very pleased with what they’re doing. They are continuing to expand globally, expand the product suite,” she said. “We have found areas where its efficient to work with the Google hardware team but they are a separate entity within other bets.”

Watch the full interview at Recode’s Code Conference below.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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