End of Software Support - Clarifications

I don’t expect 50 or 80% off upgrade products. I don’t expect my speakers to do anything beyond what they always did. What I expected is that my system would continue to work together. I guess I don’t appreciate the problem Sonos is facing. But then again the lack of transparency on why memory/cpu power are a issue streaming the same music today as I did in 2012 with my first purchase. You terminated the dock with little explanation so maybe you could win some empathy from your customers if we understood why that had to be done and how that situation is similar or different that the new round of legacy products. Surely explaining the difficulty is better for business than letting the customers create their own conspiracy theories of why support is being eliminated.

That said I really don’t see how the company can overcome the fall out as too much damage has been done, poor reviews, core long time customers loosing confidence in any future purchases and a huge drop in the word of mouth attributed sales.

Kind of reminds me of another great audio companies collapse. I loved Thiel audio speakers but after Jim thiel died and the company was sold it never regained its heights. It just passed from one management team to another which ran the company to bankruptcy. I sure hope you guys can turn it around

Nothing new in the CEO’s email

whats the point in separating a system that I bought to work together into two seperate systems !

I think it’s ironic that I just connected a record player to my now obsolete Sonos Play5 Gen 1.

I admit that I was upset at the first announcement even though I only have a few legacy products.  But, as a software engineer, I can understand what they are facing.  Consider, for example, the 65K song limit for sonos library.  The fact that this hasn’t changed is pretty simple to understand: someone made a decision long ago to specify a limit of 65K songs and they built the hardware to support that and no more.  The song index must reside on a single device and its clear they did not design a distributed system where a portion of the database resides on each device so that you could have a larger database as you add devices.  A neat idea, but it will lead to reliability issues as the number of nodes grow.  So that’s why that decision made long ago constrains devices today, so long as older devices with real physical limits are supported for music library hosting. Its likely that current or future HD protocols exceed the capability of a decades old design.

That is all fine with me because there are external ways to work around these limitations (downcoding, external streaming services, cloud libraries, etc), so long as I can still group the older speakers with newer speakers, similar to the way that one can use a modern Sonos speaker with Airplay2 and stream that source grouped with non-Airplay2 speakers. I understand that some sources, like extreme HD audio would not work, but I expect common stream services (Apple, Pandora, Spotify, Tune-In) to continue to work in a hybrid system. It is very unlikely these services will change in such a way that new hardware is required - just software patches.

Grouping is a key function.  That must continue to work.  Make that so and I will continue to incrementally buy new and replace old Sonos products as you add features that I want.  But make me upgrade the entire system?  I can rewire the damn house with a centralized multi-amp and do what I did with Sonos today.  Inconvenient, less flexible and something I don’t want to do.  So, Patrick, do the right thing. Grouping should not just work as long as possible. It should work forever.  Period.

Wait my Sonos Play:3 is now considered a “legacy” product?  What a joke. Clearly this is a poor business choice in view of the fact that 92% of your products shipped are still in use.  Please honor your devoted customers by changing course. Your 30% off “deal” and “recycling” plan cannot save this utter BRICK by Sonos.  

So my $4k investment could only have a 5 year shelf life. This Information would have been helpful at time of purchase.  Basically an $800 per year rental.  

I have 24 and 11 of them are now on the chopping block.

I just received a new message from SONOS support reiterating the same message.  They have not changed course on anything.  We have the exact same options as we did with the original announcement.

The longer it goes on, the more upset I get about this whole thing.

Dear Mr CEO (Patrick),

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”  -- Warren Buffett

Should’ve taken Warren’s advice.  You’re toast.  

Regards,

Zach

P.S. Been with Sonos since the beginning.  Your latest statement and email is practically meaningless.  

Some constructive feedback — I agree with earlier comment that I would really like to be able to play the iTunes music on my iPhone on my Sonos again, frustrated when Sonos removed this feature last year. 

I just read your “announcement” and then you CEO response to the backlash.  I have been a huge Sonos supporter investing thousands on speakers and the connect / amp products.  In addition I have told many people about the product.  After seeing these emails I will never invest another dollar in the Sonos ecosystem and will never recommend this again to anyone.  You are a hardware company that needs to integrate with software.  Trying to pretend like you are a software company that can force your customers to upgrade hardware so you can make more money will not work….at least not with me.  Sorry, but you are not Apple….and speaker technology does not change that much to require significant software upgrades that could not be ported to 4 year old Sonos devices. 

I purchased your ecosystem to get seamless integration between Sonos devices, the Sonos App, subscription music services, Control4, etc.  Anything less than fully supporting and upgrading that ecosystem is not acceptable to me.  

FYI - The devices I purchased where purchased new in the last 4 years and are on your unsupported list, so I dont get where you come up with the 2011 reference in your email. 

The new CEO letter does not really change much does it.

The thing that screamed out at me was that he did not address the 5 year support of products issue. So  I assume they are continuing with this policy….5 years from product release and the clock starts ticking….so why would people continue to invest in Sonos if they only get a promised 5 years from new equipment. And please note that we were not aware of this when we originally bought our gear.

As well, he says ‘we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible’. As long as possible can mean alot of things. I have absolutely no trust for this company anymore so that does not mean much to me.

hi Patrick Spence - thanks on behalf of your huge number of Sonos fans for backing down and ensuring that legacy products will still work for many more years!

Your email blast earlier this week was ill considered and I am personally glad you have ‘seen the light’!

Note to your management team. The real cost of selling premium products is that they come with premium expectations.

Incredibly disappointing.  Nothing new here.

One star reviews for CEO follow up email, Sonos integrity and credibility.

My perfectly awesome and expensive whole home speaker system will be dead soon.

I bought my Play 5 in Oct 2017 - barely 28 months ago.  No-one said anything about it being a generation 1 or old stock and now i get told it is “obsolute”? 
not at all happy!

“We heard you.”

I don't think so Patrick.  Otherwise you would not just restate exactly what your original email said.

“We will offer you an alternate solution”

You already did offer an alternative solution yesterday and it is unacceptable!

We want assurance that the multi thousand dollar Sonos systems we own will function for the long term.  Prorate our investment over 20 years.  If the functionality is less than that for any of the products, offer an equivalent credit on new equipment or a cash refund. That would be a fair offer.

Also - It is fine to have to update one piece of the system every once in a while (every 10 years?) if that maintains functionality but we don’t want to have an separate old system that won’t talk to a new system - that’s crazy!

I don’t think you have weeks to figure out what you are going to do Patrick.  If that’s what it takes, you would be better off spending your time updating your resume...I am sure there are still a few people out there that have not heard about the mess you have created.

tony 123 wrote:

Does this actually change anything or just a bit of spin ?

 

Spin !

There is no reason why any speaker should stop working with the current sound file formats 

The CEO message is a good start. It’s nice to know we’ve been heard, but he’s not clear on THE most important detail.

Will legacy and modern devices be able to be grouped together to play the same music at the same time?

If the answer to that is yes, I think this would be a non-issue.

I think it’s fine if you only have legacy devices in your system, you won’t get new software features. If you want those, you need at least one modern device in your system. If modern and legacy exist as completely separate systems that can’t be grouped for playback, then Sonos has broken it’s core value prop which is synchronized multi-room audio.

I’ve been a big fan and invested in Sonos since it’s beginning. Like others, I have many $1,000s of dollars of Sonos gear. I’ve gotten my family and friends into them as well. I want them to succeed. I hope the answer to my question above is yes.

Funny, tonight I was looking at our house and had a chat with my wife, ”honey...I’m going to the garage to dust off the Onkyo and get my drill and some wire….we don’t need Sonos”. 

Maybe the blame is not on Sonos as much as my own decision. I am turning 50 this year and come from an upbringing that 10 years is not considered a lifespan of a speaker. I ‘thought’ Sonos was something that would be there longer….but maybe that’s just me…..

This is very unfortunate. Like many others, I spent a considerable amount of time researching products that would suit my needs. I chose Sonos after hearing a co-worker’s system. I felt that I made a wise investment decision, especially after my first sonic experience in my house after I bought my first  pair of Play:1 speakers.

$4000 dollars later, I read a story about Sonos ending support on some of my products.  
 

I chose Sonos and remained loyal. Sonos craps on their customer base by choosing larger profits and damaging the environment. Why am I not surprised?

If I was on the Sonos board of directors I would be asking for Patricks resignation as a step to restoring the trust back to the Sonos brand.  Make no mistake this irresponsible act has caused a great deal of anxiety for those loyal long term customers from losing thousands of dollars.  This is such a unique event.  The most loyal customers are the ones who pay the heaviest price.  

Lame CEO apology with no real action, "we apologize that we did not clearly communicate that the shakedown to buy new products will be death by loss of features vs. instantaneous bricking of your multi-thousand dollar investment". Once enough features are lost I will replace my amps and connects with the much less expensive Amazon equivalent. Will need to come up with something to replace my play 5s but maybe will use the line-in (unless you disable that and render them completely useless). Calculating the the cost of replacing everything I have every 5 years or so and can't justify how expensive your stuff is if it has a relatively short shelf life.

No trust, no brand, no business. Good luck.

trust, no brand, no business.

you have lost a loyal fan forever.  shame on your greed!  the rest is all non sense

Sonos new slogan

Welcome to the new Sonos

THE DISPOSABLE SPEAKER COMPANY 

Your updated clarification, clarifies nothing. Telling people they need to quarantine legacy and new equipment into two separate networks breaks the reason people bought a single whole house system. You claim the old products won’t be able to support new updates and play music from newer components, then sell a bridge that enables them to communicate to each other. Your existing software already enables music from one speaker to be sent to another, you only need one modern unit to get the signal.

You claiming new devices won’t be able to talk to old devices makes no sense, your software already does this...

As has been said by many others, I see nothing new in the open letter from the CEO. 

We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, while legacy products work together and remain in their current state.

The most amazing thing about this to me is that they are still “working on a way” to achieve what still appears to be an unacceptable outcome to most of the commentators in this community. How can you announce such a bad outcome without knowing how you will achieve it? What was the alternative, simply telling us that we are out of luck? 

The fact remains that the message remains that legacy components will not coexist with modern components unless what you mean by coexist is that they can exist on the same wifi network (i.e. the same way they coexist with my wireless printer). The picture that your message has left me with is that you are working to update the app so that you it can flip from one Sonos network to another without changing wifi networks.

If this is what you are working on, please direct your attentions to actually addressing the issues being raised in these forums and not on creating an environment that doesn’t allow us to continue using our systems as we do today. As a single, unified multi-room audio system. 

As I have stated before, I don’t care about having voice assistants in my music speakers. I have stand alone devices that do this specifically because I always understood that this would limit the usable lifespan of the integrated device. For this same reason I never bought a TV based on the apps that come bundled with it. I know that those will become obsolete before the screen and I there purchase relatively inexpensive android boxes that can be easily swapped out at low cost (FireTV 4K stick = $25USD on black Friday). Even the Nvidia Shield costs only $200USD. Given that I only need one per TV this is something I can replace every 4 or 5 years. If you want to be in the disposable electronics market then you need to price yourself accordingly. We believed that Sonos was in the audio market, a market that can fetch a higher price because people buy equipment that will last. 

Suffice to say that I feel duped, I believed I was dealing with an audio company only to find out that Sonos has apparently become no better than a maker of smart TVs that decides to not provide any HDMI inputs. I wouldn’t buy that TV because I know that they won’t be able to maintain the services that I want on an ongoing basis and unless this issue is resolved I won’t be buying any more Sonos because apparently neither will you.