Google announced its answer to Amazon’s surprise success, its digital assistant and home audio speaker, the Echo. The Google Home is a standalone unit, quite a bit smaller than the Echo, which houses the Google Assistant – a rebadged Google Now by the sounds of it, and rival to Amazon’s Alexa. However, the device was very conspicuously designed by the team behind Chromecast, part of a new division that is being led by ex-Motorola Rick Osterloh, who is in charge of uniting Google’s disparate hardware projects. But the big question is not why Google wants to move into the smart home, but why it decided not to use Nest. Logically, Nest should have become the Alphabet brand for the smart…