Last year, Microsoft and Johnson Controls announced GLAS, a Cortana-powered smart thermostat. The company has remained quiet about GLAS since then but most recently penned a blog post which announced pre-orders. Well, today in the opening Keynote at Ignite, Judson Althoff, EVP of Worldwide Commercial Business, hinted that the Johnson Controls thermostat is coming to Microsoft Stores in August.
To be clear, Microsoft has not yet officially announced the availability of the GLAS thermostat in its own retail stores. Althoff’s remarks, though, came in a segment of his keynote where he discussed Modern Life. The EVP mentioned that customers come into Microsoft Store to see the “very best of modern life come into being, into real form, and take those technologies into businesses.” He then hinted that his favorite part of the Modern Life story is the work that Microsoft has done with Johnsons Controls, saying the following:
Johnsons Controls is thinking forward the future of smart home technology, and you can [see this today] in fact in our Microsoft Stores starting beginning of August. These same products that we build together as a partner ecosystem then become available to produce modern life scenarios. It is our belief that the technology that you love in your life is the technology that you want to carry into your workplace.
Microsoft has actually updated Cortana to support the GLAS thermostat, on both Android and Windows 10, so the timing here makes sense. Though Althoff’s words are a bit cryptic, it would interesting to see Microsoft start selling a smart-thermostat in its own retail stores. Do you think this would help Microsoft take on Google Nest and Amazon Alexa thermostats? Let us know in the comments below.
