End of Software Support - Clarifications

For the record, I don’t think any of the fanatical Sonos defenders are on the Sonos payroll, but its certainly not absurd. Sonos could easily have several user accounts that different (dozens?) employees over the years could have control of and post thousands of messages. You’d just need the log-in credentials.  Maybe writing style would be different, but it wouldn’t be the most diabolical thing that any one of us could imagine. It’s also not bonkers to imagine that some of the most avid posters have received “free” Sonos gear for their contributions to the community.

Anyway, again, I don’t think this is the case. I just think that forums like this attract some of the same personalities that inhabit sports forums. There is going to be a small fraction of very industrious posters who are zealots and entrenched in their views. I think we are seeing them on both sides of this issue.  

Only one person on here has had multiple user accounts, and I know it isn’t me!  And Sonos checks IPs for multiple socks and bans those accounts. (as some here very well know)

IMO, if a fact is stated, it does not matter who stated it.  If you’re going to makes assumptions or speculate, does it fit with the facts we already know?  It really doesn’t matter whether someone likes Sonos or not.

As well, I think when an ‘industrious poster’ actually points out negative/positive points on the other side of a discussion, it tends to be overlooked.  I’ve said several times that I think Sonos should have given more notice, and I completely understand why people are upset, particular those with big investments.   At the same time, I’ve seen people that are very frustrated admit that they do believe that are real technical issues involved here.  These posts just don’t get the same attention.

I don’t disagree with you. My personal rub with the community is when people state their opinion or speculation as fact possibly in an effort to influence visitors who aren’t as informed as others. For many, it may just be venting and the influence that could occur would be collateral. 

Statements like “Sonos is going to make our speakers useless in May.” as well as statements like “Your devices will continue working just as they always have for a long time, there is nothing to worry about.” are both wrong, but frequently stated. The truth is somewhere in between. Added to this confusion is the ambiguity in the limited statements that Sonos has made.

Part of that has to do with posters not wanting to spell out all the details with every post.  The poster may know exactly what’s going on but feel that a speaker that lacks future updates is useless (stretching a bit here).  They would assume readers know what they are talking about.  On the other side, posters are not wanting to always get into the unlikely but possible scenarios where legacy systems could lose partial functionality at some possible future date.  It takes time, and tends to open the discussion up to speculation on the possibility of these scenarios….again.

It’s true, but it usually only takes a couple of extra words to qualify a statement to let it be known that there is more to the situation.

On a slightly different note, regarding the “unlikely by possible scenarios”, I don’t think this is accurate as Sonos themselves have said that it is going to happen, so reduced functionality of legacy devices is not an “unlikely” event. It is expected at this point. The main question that has not been answered is when? Maybe it will be 10 years down the line or more (that would be great). Maybe it will be 5 (the minimum Sonos has guaranteed if you purchase directly from them).

Maybe Sonos will walk back some of their statements. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll offer a program to keep streaming music services going on older devices for a fee. No one knows at this point.

I made the statement in context of the previous statement...“Your devices will continue working just as they always have for a long time, there is nothing to worry about.”     It is unlikely, but possible, that a device will stop working as they always have in the near future (in contrast to ‘long time’).  Also, I was not referring to the transition of a modern device to legacy device.  I assumed ‘device’ in the italics statement was also referring to legacy devices.  Regardless, I think this goes to the argument that it’s a complicated issue that can be difficult to explain, and statements are often misunderstood.  That could be fixed by posters like me communicating better.  It also would be nice if Sonos made things less complicated.

I’ve never seen Sonos fully walk back a change before.  They do make adjustments from time to time, but never fully walk things back.  I also doubt they will here as that would mean that the change is not for technical necessity reasons as they claim it is.  So a lot of customers would likely still be upset with Sonos.  Just my guess.

As far as charging a fee to continue legacy streaming, they have stated that they will provide fixes within the limitations of the hardware to legacy systems.  So it sounds to me like they are offering it for free.  But if things changed, I don’t think we’re going to see any fee system in place for 3 main reasons.

1 - People don’t like paying a fee for something they have historically got for free.

2  - Managing a subscription fee systems has some costs to setup.  Sonos doesn’t really do that anywhere right now, so I don’t know they want build that system out for this case.

3 - The market size for people who would pay the fee will always be shrinking as people move away from Sonos or move to modern systems.

Understood.

I’m not anticipating that Sonos is going to alter their path significantly from what they have laid out, but I don’t see it as something that couldn’t be done.  They haven’t stopped updates for music playing devices in the past, so personally, I’m not going to apply other things they have not historically done to this situation.

They haven’t explicitly said that they would work to keep streaming music services going.  They said in the original communication that they would not. In the follow up message from the CEO, he said that legacy devices would receive bug fixes and security updates, but never did he address updates to ensure streaming music services continue to work. It has been left up to our interpretation what “bug fixes” means. Perhaps, this includes this service, but there is no way for any of us to know at this point.

I don’t think Sonos is going to offer a subscription update service. I was only illustrating the uncertainty.

@Ryan S stated in the first post in this thread…

Sonos will work to maintain the existing experience and conduct bug fixes, but our efforts will ultimately be limited by the lack of memory and processing power of these legacy products.

In my opinion, you can’t claim to work to maintain the existing experience if that doesn’t mean attempts will be made to keep streaming services running, but I can see where that’s open to different interpretations.   There may be other posts where Sonos has clarified this further, but I don’t trust my memory and am not going to go hunting for it.

I think it’s very open to interpretation considering the original statement said explicitly that music services would stop working (over time). If they intended to reverse that statement, I think it would make more sense to address it directly rather than something so ambiguous. Again, I suppose this gets back to poor communication. If Sonos does indeed intend to provide updates that would allow legacy devices to continue streaming from services like Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, etc, then it would behoove them to let us know in the most unequivocal way possible. Thats about the only bone to pick I have at this point. I’ve never expected new features.