End of Software Support - Clarifications

I don’t expect 50 or 80% off upgrade products. I don’t expect my speakers to do anything beyond what they always did. What I expected is that my system would continue to work together. I guess I don’t appreciate the problem Sonos is facing. But then again the lack of transparency on why memory/cpu power are a issue streaming the same music today as I did in 2012 with my first purchase. You terminated the dock with little explanation so maybe you could win some empathy from your customers if we understood why that had to be done and how that situation is similar or different that the new round of legacy products. Surely explaining the difficulty is better for business than letting the customers create their own conspiracy theories of why support is being eliminated.

That said I really don’t see how the company can overcome the fall out as too much damage has been done, poor reviews, core long time customers loosing confidence in any future purchases and a huge drop in the word of mouth attributed sales.

Kind of reminds me of another great audio companies collapse. I loved Thiel audio speakers but after Jim thiel died and the company was sold it never regained its heights. It just passed from one management team to another which ran the company to bankruptcy. I sure hope you guys can turn it around

Nothing new in the CEO’s email

whats the point in separating a system that I bought to work together into two seperate systems !

I think it’s ironic that I just connected a record player to my now obsolete Sonos Play5 Gen 1.

I admit that I was upset at the first announcement even though I only have a few legacy products.  But, as a software engineer, I can understand what they are facing.  Consider, for example, the 65K song limit for sonos library.  The fact that this hasn’t changed is pretty simple to understand: someone made a decision long ago to specify a limit of 65K songs and they built the hardware to support that and no more.  The song index must reside on a single device and its clear they did not design a distributed system where a portion of the database resides on each device so that you could have a larger database as you add devices.  A neat idea, but it will lead to reliability issues as the number of nodes grow.  So that’s why that decision made long ago constrains devices today, so long as older devices with real physical limits are supported for music library hosting. Its likely that current or future HD protocols exceed the capability of a decades old design.

That is all fine with me because there are external ways to work around these limitations (downcoding, external streaming services, cloud libraries, etc), so long as I can still group the older speakers with newer speakers, similar to the way that one can use a modern Sonos speaker with Airplay2 and stream that source grouped with non-Airplay2 speakers. I understand that some sources, like extreme HD audio would not work, but I expect common stream services (Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Tune-In) to continue to work in a hybrid system. It is very unlikely these services will change in such a way that new hardware is required - just software patches.

Grouping is a key function.  That must continue to work.  Make that so and I will continue to incrementally buy new and replace old Sonos products as you add features that I want.  But make me upgrade the entire system?  I can rewire the damn house with a centralized multi-amp and do what I did with Sonos today.  Inconvenient, less flexible and something I don’t want to do.  So, Patrick, do the right thing. Grouping should not just work as long as possible. It should work forever.  Period.

Wait my Sonos Play:3 is now considered a “legacy” product?  What a joke. Clearly this is a poor business choice in view of the fact that 92% of your products shipped are still in use.  Please honor your devoted customers by changing course. Your 30% off “deal” and “recycling” plan cannot save this utter BRICK by Sonos.  

So my $4k investment could only have a 5 year shelf life. This Information would have been helpful at time of purchase.  Basically an $800 per year rental.  

I have 24 and 11 of them are now on the chopping block.

I just received a new message from SONOS support reiterating the same message.  They have not changed course on anything.  We have the exact same options as we did with the original announcement.

The longer it goes on, the more upset I get about this whole thing.

Dear Mr CEO (Patrick),

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”  -- Warren Buffett

Should’ve taken Warren’s advice.  You’re toast.  

Regards,

Zach

P.S. Been with Sonos since the beginning.  Your latest statement and email is practically meaningless.  

Some constructive feedback — I agree with earlier comment that I would really like to be able to play the iTunes music on my iPhone on my Sonos again, frustrated when Sonos removed this feature last year. 

I just read your “announcement” and then you CEO response to the backlash.  I have been a huge Sonos supporter investing thousands on speakers and the connect / amp products.  In addition I have told many people about the product.  After seeing these emails I will never invest another dollar in the Sonos ecosystem and will never recommend this again to anyone.  You are a hardware company that needs to integrate with software.  Trying to pretend like you are a software company that can force your customers to upgrade hardware so you can make more money will not work….at least not with me.  Sorry, but you are not Apple….and speaker technology does not change that much to require significant software upgrades that could not be ported to 4 year old Sonos devices. 

I purchased your ecosystem to get seamless integration between Sonos devices, the Sonos App, subscription music services, Control4, etc.  Anything less than fully supporting and upgrading that ecosystem is not acceptable to me.  

FYI - The devices I purchased where purchased new in the last 4 years and are on your unsupported list, so I dont get where you come up with the 2011 reference in your email.