Sonos One and Google Assistant

#featurerequest please save me from the tyranny of Alexa. I can't tell you the number of times I've asked for something and it comes back with some non-sensical response with me saying "Alexa, you're worthless." or "Alexa, WTF?".

In terms of appealing to the largest volume of customers by functionality changes, it makes sense that google integration would come before additional features on the Alexa integration. Besides that, I would guess that Google is more willing to work with Sonos in order to stay competitive than Amazon is. I would even go so far as to guess that a Google integration will be more robust than the Alexa integration, possibly allowing additional music sources, local libraries, or named groups. That in turn could motivate Amazon to work with Sonos to improve the Alexa integration.

So yea, even if your not a Google Home user (and I'm basically not), I don't have a big problem with focusing on Google integration over other features which may more directly impact me. I see it more as a rising tides lift all boats or sort of thing.

The Internet says that Google was coerced into the partnership by some kind of IP issue. So you've got Sonos with more promises than they have developers, and you've got a reluctant partner in Google. Sigh. Maybe there's some kind of ascetic benefit to the soul from hearing Alexa tell you she has no idea what the heck you are asking her to do.

Sure, good on them for using their leverage to get something that would improve their products. No issue with that. But don't aggressively market features as coming soon, or in a certain quarter/year/etc., if you don't really know how long it will take. Sonos has moved from actively marketing Google Assistant as coming in 2018 to radio silence. The CEO refused to give The Vergecast a timeline, and there's now zero mention of it on the Sonos One or Beam product pages. What I object to is using future features (with a specific promised timeline) to get people to buy your stuff when you're actually far too early in the development process to know if that timeline is realistic (or if it'll work at all).

I work for a software company and we have new features that clients are looking forward to get delayed all the time. But we take care never to promise a timeline (or even certainty that the feature will be implemented) unless we are at the point where we know we can deliver on that promise. Sonos doesn't seem to have that philosophy (though at least they've mostly stopped marketing Google Assistant). They may be a bit of a "little guy", but they're big enough and established enough that they should hold themselves to something more than "aspirational startup" standards in their promises.

@hobobrian, how did you feel about Apple's release of the Homepod? Apple started aggressively marketing the release of Homepod to be ready before Christmas 2017, yet it was not released till February and with several promised features missing. Was Apple wrong to start marketing this new product in Summer 2017 when there were clearly some issues that could and did postpone that date? Should they have just waited unitl they knew for sure, knowing that a lot of potential customers who would want a Homepod are going to spend their money elsewhere?

I think there are pros and cons to give early and late notice on new product and feature releases. Sonos almost always opts for the late notice release strategy, but decided to announce things early for Alexa and Google integration. I would guess they deemed it necessary from a marketing/PR perspective as they would probably look like they weren't doing much to stay competitive if they didn't. Regardless I wouldn't expect them to start making a habit of announcing things early. They certainly didn't with the Beam, which apparently has been in production for quite some time, but was only announced 6 weeks or so before release.