End of Software Support - Clarifications

Actually, renting is an excellent idea; for a known cost one gets a known service result. Why get hung up on ownership? Industry follows this practice for many utilities like captive power plants, where the plant supplier gets paid for units consumed, not for plant delivered. As is done with cars under company leases.

And in the home this is exactly what is now being done to play music via Sonos - why buy the CD when the liked tracks can be heard on a pay per use basis? Why not the same for the upstream equipment that plays the music?

This is also good for the user in the way it forces the supplier to a 24/7 service delivery standard instead of being able to sell the kit and then run away when it gets inconvenient to support the product, having already pocketed the money due for such support.

The more I think about this renting idea, the more it makes sense to me - based on actual experience of running a building automation business with a performance contracting division in it. Most of the business was involved in selling, as an example HVAC control systems, while the performance contracting guys were selling the provision of temperature maintenance to specified standards for a defined space. 

The selling guys used to conspire with consultants to force ever “better” products on customers - I have personally been guilty of promoting a 16 bit controller over an 8 bit one. The performance contracting guys had to deliver their promised outcomes at the least cost, and refused to use our 16 bit controllers when the cheaper 8 bit ones served their purpose just as well.

Easy to see many comparison points with how the entire industry pushes audio products on to us - for 8 bit and 16 bit in my case twenty years ago, substitute 16/44 file formats and 96/24 ones. The more things change, the more they stay the same as the French say, a lot more elegantly in French.

And in such a model, competition would deny speaker makers like Sonos the chance of passing on all the costs of obsolescence to us, because they today have no incentive to hold back a move to the “better” product, as they would have in a service/outcome provider model.

Best Buy had an almost-half-price sale this week on a Sonos Amp, speakers and controller bundle -- precisely what I had in mind for expanding my Sonos system onto the patio. That was my next planned upgrade and had the deal come up during Black Friday i would have definitely bought it without hesitation  But considering what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, I passed on it. That $700 stayed in my pocket.

The announced deprecation of Sonos products has made me re-think my strategy. I no longer think it makes sense to invest in expensive pieces of equipment that are so dependent on the manufacturer to keep them working. It’s far more sensible to spend that kind of money on traditional high-quality amps and speakers, and then use less costly devices to feed the multi-room music to each of them. The Chromecast or Amazon Dot/Input come to mind, but there’s rapid growth happening in that sector right now and I think we’ll be seeing more and better multi-room options in the next little while. I’ve just been reminded that good amps and speakers should be able to stand the test of time, and replacing the music source component instead of deprecating or bricking the whole integrated system whenever it’s time for an upgrade is the only way to go.  

In hindsight, I should have known better. I own some wonderful vintage audio gear including 50-year-old AR speakers that still outperform many of today’s highly rated models. In fact, I'm feeding them with my Sonos Connect which is the one part of my Sonos system that actually conforms to this strategy, just to illustrate my point.  But the rest of Sonos product line does not.  Luckily, I’m not too heavily invested in Sonos gear yet. I only have 5 components, most of them being Sonos One speakers which can still be sold without taking too much of a loss. So as Todd accurately predicted, I’ve already been motivated by this to move brands and change strategy.

@Winter S : I suggest that time invested in reading the linked thread will be a good investment.

https://en.community.sonos.com/controllers-software-228995/the-sonos-brexit-and-pragmatic-ways-past-it-6836056

Hello everyone,

I’ve been watching this issue and reading this thread with total fascination! It is quite astonishing for me to see some of the reactions posted here, towards an absolutely non-critical issue. It’s only a music system we’re talking about here and it isn’t going to go up in flames after May.

The way I always viewed Sonos as a company and the system is that it is a mid range, good quality system with very good service by their staff (even for old products). I’ve used the service on very few occasions when something wasn’t working and they were excellent.

I have devices dating back to approximately 2006 and I also have some new devices, including a MOVE.

I’m betting on the following:

1. My legacy items won’t have any new updates with features added after May this year. They will continue to work at least another 5 to 7 years (unless the electronics fail). This will be a very decent “shelf life” in the case of WiFi connected devices.
2. My newer devices will continue to get updates and work at least another 7 to 10 years. This will be a very decent “shelf life” in the case of WiFi connected devices.
3. Sonos will figure out a way to use one controller app to control both systems, but separately. The way I am thinking about it is that the app will have 2 sections: System A (legacy) with rooms A, B, C etc. and System B (new devices) with rooms D, E, F etc. You can then toggle in between system A and B before selecting your room / music on the App.

Why do I think this way? Because Sonos has shown over the last many years that they can maintain products with very old, outdated technology for a very long time.

I agree with above and would add - if the Sonos ambition is to be a smart speaker IoT company it will probably fail. It’s products are relatively expensive and intended to work in multi component systems. Apart for the mobile phone market (where consumers only tend to have one device at a time) a business model that relies on user willingness to replace high cost products on a regular basis seems flawed at best. Most IoT devices are low cost so replacement is not such a significant factor when considering cost of ownership. 

Its sometime said “evolve or die”. The path Sonos is currently on looks like an evolutionary dead-end to me. 

Yes, it’s “only a music system” - but a relatively expensive one. Personally I don’t consider 7 to 10 years to be a decent shelf life for a premium price product. 

Regarding point 3 - I have an device arrangement where a Connect:Amp is always used with some Play 1s. So, a “sectionalised” system will not do what I am used to (paid for).

I’m feeling quite pragmatic about this - I don’t expect Sonos to deliver a solution that will enable me to continue using my system as I want to. I’ll move on, but it won’t be with Sonos as I feel let down them. In some ways that’s a shame as until two weeks ago my experience as a customer had been great. 

A lot of the damage here is towards future plans, and sales. I found out that my Connect is modern so I am unaffected by this whole issue… in the short term. But that Connect, my Play:3 and Play:1 all have me wondering “”how long”. And THAT has made me hit the stop button on Sonos as far as buying anything new is concerned. I just bought a Move recently and that will be my last ever Sonos purchase unless they come up with a better solution for this. Because it’s not just this event that matters - it’s the perception of how they will deal with this next time… and my current perception is that they will not deal with it well.