End of Software Support - Clarifications

 Exactly Danny “customers that have several legacy products  have a much bigger problem to deal with, and that it can’t be handled cheaply if you want to continue getting regular updates and don’t want to deal with a split system.”

This is the core of it

Well i stand by my opinion that it is a “won’t” rather than a “can’t” problem, based on the grounds that it is highly unlikely that it is technically impossible to make, what works today, not work in May.

I can fully accept the “There is no room or processing power to add new features” but that they are unable to keep the features of today, working in the future is plain rubbish. Why would my play 5 suddenly be unable to do what it is doing today, based on a claim of hardware limitations.

The “Same firmware on all devices” is just being lazy.

 Can I ask Danny, would you feel the same if you say had 50% of your units declared legacy and you faced a cost of several thousand $ or would you be rather miffed?

I am not understanding the ‘bricking’ of a speaker. The speaker itself is a mechanical device which, in this case, has a circuitboard controller attached. If this controller is disabled, can it be removed and/or replaced with an open-source (bluetooth LE) controller board?

At the end of the day, we purchased speakers (enduring mechanical devices), and if the (obsolete) integration circuitry and software fails or is unsupported, can these components be separated?

https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/bluetooth-technology/le-audio/?utm_campaign=le-audio&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=bluetooth-audio-gets-a-big-upgrade-at-ces-2020

I’m not quite sure how you think I feel, as I’ve tried to stay away from that as much as possible.  So perhaps I’ll try and accurately say how I felt, when I first heard the news.  Shock is probably the best description as I did not see it coming, not like this anyway.  I expected that the ZP products would go first, since they are older.  I did not realize that relatively newer products had the same hardware, and was disappointed to find out that they did.    I wouldn’t say I was miffed.  I immediately rejected the idea of staying on a legacy system as it makes little sense for me.  I do not like that I won’t be able to use my Connect:amp anymore. and have debated whether I need that room to be a part of the whole Sonos system.  Is it worth the 400+ dollars to get a Sonos amp?  It is not.  I’ll likely be re-arraigning things and using two Sonos Ones (that I already have) instead.

Now, if I had more units that were legacy, I think I’d be rather pissed off at first. I certainly have been in similar situations with other companies (not the exact scenario, but where I had a large unexpected expense)  I don’t think I would be fully blaming Sonos, just because I’ve had more interaction with them, but if I lacked, not quite sure what I would do.  I think I would probably stay legacy for awhile but plan on moving off in time.  I would not switch to bluesound, denon, or other like services as I don’t trust them more than Sonos.  I would strongly consider going to a more traditional setup using amazon alexa for control, but that has it’s downside of not really intergrating with TV.  I definitely would be re-evaluating how I look at smart speakers and and multiroom audio in general.  I can’t say I’d be done with Sonos, but that option would be on the table.

Even saying the above, it isn’t exactly fair as I tend not to get upset about certain things that other people do.  It’s just my personality. life experience,  and how I tend to approach problems.  That doesn’t mean to say that other people’s emotional reactions are wrong. as I don’t think that way either.  In a very very generic sense, I don’t think emotions are ever wrong, they are what they are.  How we choose to react to them is what matters.

No, that's the problem with this corporate approach Sonos has taken.  No further clarifications, no transparency; it feels like we've been ghosted. Until May?

I have to take the same approach you have.  Honestly, I have more hope that 3rd party workarounds will keep my Sonos devices working than Sonos coming through for their customers.

So like a lot of folks I’ve been thinking about this.  It’s always been an interesting decision every time I’ve added to my system.  Lots of folks, myself included have always contended that the price we were paying for each component was a large premium over what the component should cost.  So I sat down to figure out why I kept paying it.  It was something I did think about each time as this is a big expense for me ever time I added something.  I didn’t want to throw this money away and I’m not someone who tries or has one of everything.  So here is why I believe Sonos was able to command a premium for their devices which I determined justified my purchase.

1. Sonos commanded a premium as a first mover
2. Sonos commanded a premium due to exclusive syncing technology
3. Sonos commanded a premium as an upgradable solution - this one was big and one the sales folks hammered home, and for a period of time was true
4. Sonos commanded a premium because you could grow into the system (i.e. I can’t afford an entire system today, but eventually I’ll build the entire system) this is also lock in so if I already had 1 piece… why not add more.
5. Sonos commanded a premium due to ease of setup
6. Sonos commanded a premium due to interoperability with other services - there were lots of services that they could work with and services wanted to be on their platform to reach their customer base.
7. Sonos commanded a premium due to customer loyalty/trust and by extension other potential customers trust in the influencers that were recommending the product.
8. This all culminated into they could command a premium because of their name… Sonos

The current problem is that the above list has changed a lot since I purchased my first device.  I won’t say they are untrue, just that they are no longer in a position to enjoy the premium that they were able to get do to the above.  So this is feeling a bit like a house of cards. 

1. First mover only matters until you get passed either in functionality or even more of an issue price for functionality
2. Others now have similar syncing technologies
3. Upgrades - this was the big one left which is now gone
4. Build over time is now showing why that’s a bad investment for the customer - lock in is generally bad for the consumer over time as you end up in these rip and replace situations which can be extremely costly
5. Setup is still easy - but not easier than other systems out there
6. Services are now widely available on competing products.
7. Loyalty - they just burned a lot of it by not handling their need to remove high cost support items.
8. I think they still can command a bit of a premium due to their name, but not the amount they used to and depending on how this whole thing ends maybe that’s gone too.

I think they have opened a lot of peoples eyes on the downfall of IoT or smart devices.  With no open standard (and even with) there is a limit to what you can do with hardware.  The problem is that the audio community isn’t used to throwing out their speakers (which are perfectly good).  Quality speakers get fixed, not thrown away.  

So where does this leave Sonos?  They could have rode the loyalty/influencer tide for a while, but needed to do something to compete with Amazon and Google.  They chose retire method, which would allow them to focus elsewhere.  They still want their premium, but I”m not sure what I would currently list as a reason to command a premium.

The future seems to be invest in commodity items like google/amazon streaming devices and feed them into speakers that you can invest in and count on for years.  The wireless speakers will be more difficult to replace but something like a small chromecast/echo device would make it doable, feed the standalone speaker (which a device that can be hidden on the back of the device) and allow you to move to the new platform for a fraction of what it would cost to upgrade my Sonos system to stay current.  I’d also end up with better speakers.  I’m not knocking Sonos speakers, they do a fine job where I have them, but for the same money I can get better ones.

The other option I see for groups like Sonos is to add in upgrade modules.  Let me pull out and replace memory, processor, etc.  This would further increase the price though so not sure this is really doable, but it would separate the durable good (the speaker) from the disposable good (the computer).

Loyal Sonos Customers…

It’s truly this simple… Yesterday Sonos announced  Q12020 Earnings ARE Expected to Decline.  This is no doubt a direct result of the legacy announcement… SONOS already Missed Q3 EPS...Q4 will be announced on Feb 5th and Now Q12020 is already expected to go down…  Three-Quarters of EPS misses in a row will not kill SONOS because Partick and the Board know that Wall Street expects a year-over-year decline in earnings on higher revenues.  The danger here is if higher revenues are not realized this could impact its near-term stock price.  I think most legacy customers have held off purchasing until the solution of the issue is better understood and TRUSTED…  I would expect SONOS to be relatively quiet until the February 5th earnings call... 

I'm my humble opinion the ONLY way to turn this around is to allow Legacy and Modern devices to work seamlessly until the Customer is willing to upgrade or in the rare case the Device actually dies.

Good Luck...

I can’t believe I’m going to give out this information for free, so SONOS management can thank me now.

• All future products should have a removable memory & chip.  It can be on a USB key or something proprietary.
• No user will be irate, maybe disgruntled, when told their unit is out of date and needs to buy a $35 upgrade memory unit
• Charge every user 50¢ / month as a on-going programming charge.  Sure I have (had) 10 units, but $5 per month to know my unit will NEVER go obsolete until I decide to upgrade it, would be very satisfactory over bricking the entire system after five years and watching $3,500 go down the drain.

There’s an automatic spam filter that sometimes catches posts which aren’t spam. I can’t say why for certain that it grabbed your post, maybe because it was mostly just a quote with one word and an extra character. But I’ve retrieved it. The spam filter only checks content of posts, not the user who posted it, so my posts go through the same filter that yours does. If you’re posting behind a VPN, that can sometimes cause the filter to flag things too.

  We do not and will not hire people to join the community without having them clearly identified as Sonos employees. It’s not something my team would stand for. 

@Goodbye Sonos, @DK_Madsen, and @Johnas, I want to nip this very clearly. We do not and will not hire people to join the community without having them clearly identified as Sonos employees. It’s simply behavior my team would stand for or allow on our community

@izziny, we don't expect any immediate impacts from ending software updates. The legacy devices have reached the limit of their memory and processing power, and while we’ll continue to provide what bug fixes and fixes we can, as technology evolves over time and partners evolve their own services and features with it, there will be things that the legacy devices are incapable of supporting. 

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