End of Software Support - Clarifications

If I worked for a competitor I would be implementing a huge marketing campaign with deeply discounted products to pick up disgruntled SONOS owners.  Someone with real savvy could seriously clean up.

Since this announcement a few days ago the share price has dropped 6.5%.

Thats a billion dollars wiped off the company value.  A fair few “trade ups” would need to be sold to recover that.

Hows about just going back to plan A and not treating your existing customer base like a cash cow adn expecting them to just suck it up that their home sound system which has been added to over the years is about to get ripped apart.

Let’s be clear, if my $3000 home setup that works perfectly today (lots of connects enabling built in speakers) suddenly stops being able to stream from my subscription services, Sonos is done in my house forever. Why would I upgrade when I know products that have historically lasted a lifetime (music and speakers) will expire?  This was never mentioned as a possibility until this week, and no where in history have speakers just stopped working.  No one who invested thousands in Sonos saw this coming. 
 

I have recommended and installed Sonos in at least a dozen friends’ homes. Embarrassing. 
 

I don’t care about updates. I care about a system that works perfectly continuing to work perfectly. 
 

sonos has really stepped in it this time. 

They also might not realize how much of that 63% was potentially brought on by word of mouth from the existing households as well. To have such shortsightedness (where you would make decisions that might upset part of your market that is responsible for a third(+) of your sales), is scary. Shareholders and board members should be calling for heads to roll.

Amazon releases an amplifier that I can address just like my sonos ones, and a small independent sonos 1 stayle speake and I will happily replace my entire 17 unit system.  Sonos can shove it up their backside, Ive spent years putting my system together as and when I wanted to get another unit for the house or garden.  To find its going to be split into non communicating groups is ridiculous.

Its a music streaming device, its absolute bull that the memory limits are the issue.  Its a thin TCP client playing an audio stream.  They could if they chose offload the heavy lifting to a more powerful unit on the system, and have that relay the simple stuff to other units and allow them to simply play a stream.

Its lazy programming and instead of going down the development route they have chosen to go down the built to fail route, atempting to make an entire whole home audio system a consumable item.   This will fail, hard imho.  Quite why the CEO of a company like Sonos cant see this I dont know.

Sell the IP to somebody like Amazon or Google and move over.

Sonos have had to adapt fast to the release of alexa and google home, and this is now their last ditch attempt, 5 year disposable design peddled at premium prices.  No thanks.

Looks like it may be time to drop sonos, like other people in this post we work hard for our money and at 700 a pop on a connect amp to only have owned them for less than 2yrs and all you are offering is 30% off that's ridiculous. And as you say they will "eventually stop working "  My opinion putting an expiration date on products we spent good money on is a really bad  decision for sonos and I don't think I'm alone with this.  Make it right or lose a lot of customers 

My deepest apologies to all of my friends and family….You all spent so much money on my recommendation of Sonos products. oh yeah, I forgot about my constant bragging, so sorry.

There’s some sort of saying:  “please a customer and they will tell 2 people,  offend a customer and they will tell 10 people”

So true!! So disappointed, Sonos.

Damian

Dear Sonos,

If your strategy is to encourage existing customers to upgrade because of the new features, and not because of a profit motive, I have an answer.  Let us upgrade at your cost.  That way we are happy, you keep us current, and we all win.  How about it?

ps 30% discount is not your cost 

Here’s an extract from today’s Evening Standard:

 

Spence said the company is working on a way for customers to split these systems so the speakers still work together but receive the appropriate updates for each device. 

 

This reiterates my earlier speculation from a BBC article that its the legacy units’ inability to handle greater memory requirement updates which necessitates creating two populations of Sonos units - legacy and modern.  The ES article goes further by saying that the speakers still work together but receive the appropriate updates for each device. 

 

If the storm (hopefully in a train cup) is ONLY about handling software updates and they can indeed work together after having been updated, I’m HAPPY again.

The speakers WILL NOT work together if you choose to update. See reply that I got via Twitter today. 

 

 

 

 

Confirmation of what we’ve been saying all along.

If you have old and new speakers you cannot group them anymore - so lose the key function of the sonos system.

Only if you are interested in continuing down the path of future updates. I for one am going to embrace “Legacy” network, and purchase any additional expansion unit for my environment from a drastically (enormously so compared to valuation of old units in the past) 2nd-hand used market. It isn’t ideal, but I’m personally not much interested in future voice integrations and the like which are clearly driving what’s coming for future “modern” software iterations. After considering all of this for several days now, this will make the future far more affordable (and perhaps more stable) for legacy users.

 

Fair enough, and genuinely good luck to you - I hope no API’s (that you use) break for you I really do.

But I wasn’t sold Sonos on the basis that I cannot get updates if I want to use my old and new speakers in a group. For me having a mixture of old and new is where I am, and I was never warned or told this could or would happen. I will never buy another Sonos item again if this comes to pass, and I will actively dissuade my friends by explaining what happened to me. These are simple systems, not laptops or mobile phones all they do is stream audio - they should last longer than this, and the environmental impact of bricking them and putting them in landfill in return for a 30% discount is beyond appalling.

Yup. I’m resigned that potentially ALL the APIs I use could break, but the least likely would be local media streaming and even less so, simple speaker grouping and connectivity. It will all potentially become not much more than a wireless speaker network, but it can be fed via line-in from another streaming source (I do this already sometimes) that is not a Sonos device. One can also still currently direct-cast from certain applications to a given Sonos speaker singly, so at least there’s that. NONE of this is ideal, but I’ll not be “moving forward” under conditions as they now seem to be. I’ll make it work until I can no longer. 

And I’m with you otherwise; no one expected this and I’ve converted plenty of other households myself as well and will no longer do so. I’ll also advise on the risks of moving forward to those I know that have Sonos now, and warn those that do not. This is all part of the reason I’m resigned to stay behind.
The recycling bit is another issue to me entirely, and I think that policy indefensible and deplorable.

WE “WERE” WALKING,TALKING BILLBOARDS FOR THEM, THEIR BEST SALESPEOPLE”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!