"As expected, Project Brillo is based on Android, but pared down enough to operate on a wide variety of day-to-day (and traditionally dumb) objects -- doorbells, baby cameras, ovens and so on that speak to each other via Bluetooth and WiFi."

"Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai spent most of the allotted stage time discussing Weave -- the way these connected devices will communicate. "

"Weave will allow your smart objects to define events such as unlocking or locking a door and letting other devices understand what that event should mean (Door locked? Turn off the oven, etc.)."

All based on short range considerations...all based on a short range router...routers do not stay configuration intact.

Where's the beef?

They have no beef, all they are doing is what they are good at... staging large dramatized productions.

They anticipate, that by dramatizing their economy of scale they are the front runner.

A smart device is when your IP addressed camera security @ your lake cabin notifies you of a problem no matter where you are and invokes pre arranged details.

Google / Dropcam is an important case....where its not a short range issue.

doni