Back in June, the Thread Group unveiled version 1.2 of its namesake protocol, marking a shift of sorts to focus on commercial buildings as well as smart homes. A few months later, the Google Nest Hub Max smart display became the first publicly available ‘Built on Thread’ device, which was definitely a bit of a late arrival. We had a bit of a rant back in August, when Zigbee announced that it had now certified 3,000 devices, and were a bit despondent about the state of this low-power personal-area-network (PAN) market, where we did argue that Thread should just hurry up and merge with Zigbee properly. But touching base with Thread Group president Grant Erickson, it seems clear that, if…