Contributor I

Answered

All Sonos products will continue to work past May

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I wasn’t one of the customers who complained about Sonos’ earlier communication this week. However, I initially had the same reaction as many others who wrote in anger or disappointment in this customer community.

I commend Patrick Spence for his quick reaction, for correcting course, and for the tone of his letter to customers today. I completely understand Sonos’ internal drivers to urge their customers to upgrade their systems. However, as Patrick well said, customer experience and their loyalty is paramount and trumps anything else.

I plan to remain as a loyal Sonos customer and will continue to expand and upgrade my home sound system when it makes sense to do so.

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mark690Answer

Lyricist I

I think people are a lot more surprised than they ought to be, this strikes me as being a fairly predictable issue with any ‘connected’ devices in modern times. You used to buy an amp, which might run for decades, but you only got a 12 month warranty - no ongoing service of any kind. Here we are asking a company to continue delivering a service indefinitely, for no fee (save being baked into the cost of the product). It was probably hubris to imagine they could do this in the first place, it’s not a scalable business model. Maybe we will see a shift towards subscriptions for connected devices in future.

Yes, as another poster said, impossible is a very strong term in software… the core technology of value here is the SonosNet bit that syncs all the devices so well, and it is hard to imagine that needs to change much. New products might want to support higher bitrates or codecs or somesuch, but they could also be designed to support the older protocol and continue to work, albeit by downgrading themselves to the lowest common denominator in any given system.

However continuing to support increasing lists of legacy devices in a single codebase does become harder, more error prone, and less fun for the people doing it. Software definitely has a shelf life.

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jgatie

“Impossible” is a pretty strong term when it comes to software.

So how would you solve the scenario I posted above?

pwt

Virtuoso

Here’s one reason: Sonos often makes changes in their WiFi communications which makes adding an older unit to a newer system via WiFi impossible. You must connect it via Ethernet to add it, then it must update to the current software. If you allow new units to be on the newest software and old units to stay on the old, this difference in communications makes them incompatible. So you are going to say “So don’t make the changes", well some of those changes are wholly necessary (otherwise, why make them?) and the software cannot bring new functions, security, features, etc. without them. This is just one instance where the differences between old and new software makes running them concurrently impossible.

Nothing here that cannot be worked around in software, unless they change L1 standards, in which case a whole bunch more kit is about to get relegated to legacy status.

As you and I have discussed in the past, the obstacle here is one of Sonos choosing not to make the investment in a system architecture that can accommodate different protocol versions simultaneously.

I do not think there’s any chance they are going to reconsider this stance, but in making this choice they’ve made a one-time-only transition from a company that keeps all of its player hardware working well together to a company that sells hardware with a limited lifespan of full support. For me, that has fundamentally altered how I see Sonos products.

4 x P:5 | Sub | 4 x P:1 | 3 x Connect | 2 x Boost | Connect:Amp | 2 x One | Amp | Move | Port | Era 300

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skyschemer

Enthusiast II

“Impossible” is a pretty strong term when it comes to software.

So how would you solve the scenario I posted above?

It’s not clear to me what your problem statement is. What you describe is a scenario that I’ve never seen even on very old Sonos components, but it seems to describe the inconvenience of requiring a wired network connection when adding very old components to a WiFi setup. Nothing in there says the players can’t talk to each other once it is set up or updated. So what is there to fix?

How would I solve this problem in general? Using a bridge device between old and new, that merges the old network with the new one. I seem to recall Sonos having some sort of device that glued a home, wired network to the wireless protocol used by the first gen of players. It was a Sonos bridge device of some sort. I can’t remember its name exactly….Sonos something...

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mark690Answer

Lyricist I

I think people are a lot more surprised than they ought to be, this strikes me as being a fairly predictable issue with any ‘connected’ devices in modern times. You used to buy an amp, which might run for decades, but you only got a 12 month warranty - no ongoing service of any kind. Here we are asking a company to continue delivering a service indefinitely, for no fee (save being baked into the cost of the product). It was probably hubris to imagine they could do this in the first place, it’s not a scalable business model. Maybe we will see a shift towards subscriptions for connected devices in future.

Yes, as another poster said, impossible is a very strong term in software… the core technology of value here is the SonosNet bit that syncs all the devices so well, and it is hard to imagine that needs to change much. New products might want to support higher bitrates or codecs or somesuch, but they could also be designed to support the older protocol and continue to work, albeit by downgrading themselves to the lowest common denominator in any given system.

However continuing to support increasing lists of legacy devices in a single codebase does become harder, more error prone, and less fun for the people doing it. Software definitely has a shelf life.

jgatie

It’s not clear to me what your problem statement is. What you describe is a scenario that I’ve never seen even on very old Sonos components, but it seems to describe the inconvenience of requiring a wired network connection when adding very old components to a WiFi setup. Nothing in there says the players can’t talk to each other once it is set up or updated. So what is there to fix?

If the old software cannot communicate with the new software unless it is wired, and you can’t update legacy units with the new software, how are you going to use it wirelessly?

How would I solve this problem in general? Using a bridge device between old and new, that merges the old network with the new one. I seem to recall Sonos having some sort of device that glued a home, wired network to the wireless protocol used by the first gen of players. It was a Sonos bridge device of some sort. I can’t remember its name exactly….Sonos something...

And that “Bridge” would need to process 32 different streams at once in order to accommodate the maximum number of Sonos devices. I’m not sure (if it is even possible to build) that the cost would be something that wouldn’t reach a level of uproar equal to the current level.

jgatie

Nothing here that cannot be worked around in software, unless they change L1 standards, in which case a whole bunch more kit is about to get relegated to legacy status.

As you and I have discussed in the past, the obstacle here is one of Sonos choosing not to make the investment in a system architecture that can accommodate different protocol versions simultaneously.

I do not think there’s any chance they are going to reconsider this stance, but in making this choice they’ve made a one-time-only transition from a company that keeps all of its player hardware working well together to a company that sells hardware with a limited lifespan of full support. For me, that has fundamentally altered how I see Sonos products.

Right. The choice was made. That’s the reality now.

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mark690

Lyricist I

...to a company that sells hardware with a limited lifespan of full support. For me, that has fundamentally altered how I see Sonos products.

I personally see every connected hardware manufacturer heading that way, unless they can charge subscription… and even then…

If they put sufficient resources into maintaining support for every legacy unit, a competitor with no legacy devices will be quicker to market with new ranges and features, so they lose share, then have less resources to continue supporting old devices that don’t create revenue, ad mortem.

jgatie

I think people are a lot more surprised than they ought to be, this strikes me as being a fairly predictable issue with any ‘connected’ devices in modern times. You used to buy an amp, which might run for decades, but you only got a 12 month warranty - no ongoing service of any kind. Here we are asking a company to continue delivering a service indefinitely, for no fee (save being baked into the cost of the product). It was probably hubris to imagine they could do this in the first place, it’s not a scalable business model. Maybe we will see a shift towards subscriptions for connected devices in future.

Yes, as another poster said, impossible is a very strong term in software… the core technology of value here is the SonosNet bit that syncs all the devices so well, and it is hard to imagine that needs to change much. New products might want to support higher bitrates or codecs or somesuch, but they could also be designed to support the older protocol and continue to work, albeit by downgrading themselves to the lowest common denominator in any given system.

However continuing to support increasing lists of legacy devices in a single codebase does become harder, more error prone, and less fun for the people doing it. Software definitely has a shelf life.

The bolded is exactly what Sonos is doing. If a legacy device is the lowest common denominator, you are downgraded to legacy functionality.

User884294

Avid Contributor I

The announcement is a mere rewording with a softer touch.

jgatie

The announcement is a mere rewording with a softer touch.

In what way? The original announcement said there would be no updates whatsoever, thus bugs were not going to be fixed, security was not going to be enhanced, and service changes would cause loss of that service. Now those things are going to happen. Not a “rewording” to me (and is most certainly a large number of manhours to develop and test these things in the legacy software that they were not willing to spend before).

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