End of Software Support - Clarifications

You bet!

I have emailed Jeff Bezos suggesting that Amazon buy them for a song, the patents alone would make it worthwhile.

Where i come from, that is called insider trading.

Maybe its the same in the US….have you tried alerting the authorities ?

I sent the below to the CEO

Hi Patrick

You must be getting overwhelmed by these emails. A couple of things struck me when reading your announcements.  

You may or may not be actually vulnerable to the whims of your streaming service providers’ API updates. But the message you sent out suggests that you are. If a software change on their side of things renders your products useless, then you are highlighting a giant risk to your business model. Is that factual?  If not, why pose that doubt?  Highlighting your vulnerability to Spotify software changes is bad optics if not true. If it is true, the message should be to rally your customer base to address the idiot move on THEIR part. 

Second thing I thought was that you know exactly what is coming, and after the backlash, you’ve proposed the bizarre idea of a split system in order to address it. Why suggest a solution that is so antithetical to what you do?  You wouldn’t suggest something so bizarre without knowing what the problem is that is headed our way. 

Hiding the ball never turns out well. When the time comes for you to unveil what you know to be on the way, all this posturing, the vagaries, the apologies will come into focus, and the disingenuous messaging will be laid bare. 

I understand your challenge of staying steps ahead of the competition. You have shareholders to consider, and the google wolves are at the door. I imagine these changes are an effort to do just that, and likely to integrate the voice recognition start up you acquired.  

Your advantage over these other services is twofold. One is you have excellent hardware. Second is your customer loyalty. So the decision was to threaten your customer loyalty by pointing out their hardware is not viable?  You’ve shot your left AND your right foot! 

FYI, I have 14 devices over 2 homes. They all work just fine.

Count me in as yet another bitterly disappointed ten year Sonos customer. I have nothing new to add to all of the comments above other than to add my name and voice to the host of angry customer

AND YES-- I AM GOING TO TEXT SCREAM FOR JUST ONE MOMENT

I initially purchased Sonos because I thought it represented cutting edge technology at a (premium) price but also with strong customer support. 

Over the years -- like so many others, I have bought over ten units and was going to invest in the sound bar 

But not anymore-- this idea of planned obsolescence is horrible 

not sonos 

not anymore

Well right now, it seems that even though i am not particularily clever, i could have foreseen these things BEFORE they went public, so atleast it seems that i am smarter than the people that decided this was a good idea.

OR there is some hidden motive that i dont know of.

Feels a little bit like that time, the city planners in my city decided that a particular road had to much traffic, so they closed it off for cars, and then immideately got surprised when the amount of traffic on the roads near to this road, suddenly saw a sharp spike in traffic.

I mean, even a 5 year old would be able to understand that just because they decided to shut down a road, people were still needing to get from point A to B and would just find other ways of getting there :)

Exactly my setup - for use with the phonograph. 

I sent Patrick, CEO, a follow up Email with follow up questions. I am including the response.  They obviously are not reading email, since they referred me to the email I had follow up questions  

man this company is all in with the blinders.

no credibility  no customer service  no customer loyalty  

Hello Richard, My name is Andrew, and I'm a member of the Customer Experience Team here at Sonos. Our CEO, Patrick Spence, let me know you had some concerns about our recent End of Software Updates announcement. Patrick recently sent a follow-up email to all affected customers, which I believe should address your questions and feedback. If you haven’t seen it, you can view a copy on our website at https://blog.sonos.com/en/a-letter-from-our-ceo As mentioned in the letter above, all Sonos products will continue to work after May and our Trade-Up program is completely optional. You can find additional information about this announcement here: https://support.sonos.com/s/article/4786  If you have any other questions I can help answer, please let me know by replying to this email and I will be happy to assist. Cheers, ______ Andrew K

( initial email copied below)

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for the response.

I did see that email, unfortunately, it states nothing different than was initially announced.

It does not address the majority of your legacy (oldest) customers' dismay of a fractured"whole home" audio system. In fact, it reaffirms our worst fear of your commitment to breaking them... "eventually", as you say. While you say the "upgrade" program is "voluntary", you are certainly taking every action to make that untrue.

Not only has this decision blindsided your oldest and most loyal customers, it has seemingly disregarded our investments without consideration of alternative (and/or less costly) solutions that are not as devastating to our systems. Honestly, we don't know this because we've received little to no actual info regarding these new features or services that will cause such irreparable damage or the workaround.

The fact that we are still being told to wait until May for more info, and that Mr. Spence said "We got this wrong" but proceeded to simply rehash the verbiage of the original scheme, shows that we are still on this path to mutually assured destruction.

Personally, I feel my trust in your company has been betrayed, then my intelligence insulted, and I am (still) no longer planning to purchase additional Sonos products unless a more amicable solution is presented. Proceeding with your plan to delete my $500 speaker from a singular, unfragmented, unsplit, secure, properly working system is unacceptable.

I truly want your company to succeed, but that should not come at the disregard of your earliest adopters and (formerly) most fervent supporters. Honestly, take a look at the rapidly growing thread on your website and see - a high percentage of those participating are long time customers, many with far more extensive systems than mine: https://en.community.sonos.com/announcements-228985/end-of-software-support-clarifications-6835969 (P.S. - There are lots of good ideas for workarounds in there)

I sincerely hope that Sonos can deliver a better solution than we have at this time.

From,

Steve K

On Jan 24, 2020, at 10:30 AM, Sonos Support <support@sonos.com> wrote:
 

Hello Steve, My name is Andrew, and I'm a member of the Customer Experience Team here at Sonos. Our CEO, Patrick Spence, let me know you had some concerns about our recent End of Software Updates announcement. Patrick recently sent a follow-up email to all affected customers, which I believe should address your questions and feedback. If you haven’t seen it, you can view a copy on our website at https://blog.sonos.com/en/a-letter-from-our-ceo As mentioned in the letter above, all Sonos products will continue to work after May and our Trade-Up program is completely optional. You can find additional information about this announcement here: https://support.sonos.com/s/article/4786  If you have any other questions I can help answer, please let me know by replying to this email and I will be happy to assist. Cheers, ______ Andrew K Sonos   |   Supervisor   |   Customer Care   |   Contact Us Ask questions, find answers, and share your thoughts on the Sonos Community.

Gotta admit I’ve seen a fair few posts like this and while I’m mad at Sonos at getting this so wrong I do want them to turn this around, ongoing support for any and all of their products depends on this - Sonos failing completely would be worse that what is proposed. 

While stupidly they are giving many people a good reason to go out and replace their Sonos kit overnight,  I honestly don’t think any of their rivals offering comparative products have supported them as long, I doubt those lower priced products will still be supported in 5 years from sale. 

I have play 5 (2nd gen) & a play 3.

Didn’t think a £500 speaker or any speakers come to that, could potentially become defunct because it can’t handle the updates .

its a speaker, not a space rocket.. please!!!

Although non of this affects my speakers at the moment, the situation has immensely disappointed me.

Very unlikely I’ll be adding any more Sonos speakers to my two, unless there’s a satisfactory conclusion to all this .

Even then , no confidence even if they don’t do it now, they won’t do it later.

Strikes me as a red hearing to try to force customers to prematurely upgrade.

Ridiculous

So my Connect:Amp that I bought in 2017 is End Of Life.  A tough pill to swallow. Only %30 off to replace a perfectly functioning amp with the newer model is a tougher pill to swallow.  But the Sonos Amp has been out for what, a year now? What if they come out with the next generation of Amp soon? Yay, I’m guaranteed updates for 5 years from when it gets discontinued - that is actually very nice.  But if I had waited a bit and got the next one I’d be guaranteed a considerable amount more years in updates.  

Anyone that buys Apple products should be familiar with MacRumors’ “Mac Buyer’s Guide” that lets you know if you should buy a certain Apple product based on typical product lifecycle. 

Now we’ll need a “Sonos Buyer’s Guide”.