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Not making excuses for this issue, but it seems to me that keeping a company like Sonos (upscale audio hardware) alive & prosperous with the crazy megalithic co

Not making excuses for this issue, but it seems to me that keeping a company like Sonos (upscale audio hardware) alive & prosperous with the crazy megalithic competitive forces that lurk on all sides must be a nightmare. On the one hand you have Apple and their half-hearted (for now) entry, and at the low end you have Alexa/"Talk to it" speakers. These alternatives seem destined to encroach on the Sonos turf come hell or high water. I will say that for their intended purpose--streaming music to a network connected speaker, Sonos speakers just work great! Their app interface, while not a great experience, functions. When I click "Play," stuff immediately comes out of my speakers. NOW. There is never a delay, never a spinning pizza, never, never NEVER! (anecdata, of course) So I (me, not you) can't blame them for wildly thrashing a bit on the data collection side. I get it. They are terrified they are going to get squeezed eventually. Do I wish they would reconsider advertising and related marketing shenanigans as business models? Yes, I do. For now they meet my needs and they just work. It's a trade off I'm (me, not you) are willing to make for now.

adkadskhj 6y ago
Sonos have had me curious for a while. I often use in-home small bluetooth speakers and frankly i'm happy enough with them - i just want more of them, with more power. So for louder, phone connected speakers would you still recommend Sonos? Ie i'm not sure i need the idea of multiple rooms playing the same thing. I'd love it, but my wife wouldn't hah. However i do want (decent) quality speakers in all rooms that i can play music on, and i'm largely satisfied with the bluetooth-phone experience. I'm just not satisfied with my tiny bluetooth speaker quality or sound level. Any opinion of if i should look into Sonos? Or would cheaper bluetooth speakers fit better? (edit: Sidenote, the voice assistant option is a downside for me. Otherwise i'd probably own a few Apple HomePods)
- HeyImAlex 6y ago
  I have three of their little speakers and a sound bar and I’m pretty happy. No connecting/disconnecting bluetooth, no walking out of range and the sound getting choppy, I can select which speaker I want to play directly from spotify or open the app and play multiple rooms at once. Not sure how well it works (or if it even can) as a direct bluetooth speaker. I think it’s more like a little music server and your phone is just the remote.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    I had wanted the 5, but it turns out the One is vastly more powerful than I need. The volume has never been above 1/3rd. They are really good. The creepiness factor is a significant problem but I hope to beat it with network changes and send them some feedback. It certainly makes me reconsider further purchases.
- nxc18 6y ago
  Sonos works well and I love it generally, but I’ve been really disappointed with their business practices the last few years. The S1->S2 debacle really shook my confidence and reminded me that I’m tying up a very expensive speaker with cheap digital services that could disappear or be obsoleted at literally any moment with little notice. Their whole recycling/permanently destroying speakers debacle was also quite annoying. If you go into expecting the third year and beyond of service to be bonus and that you’re the product not the customer, it’s a great fit for your needs.
- cube2222 6y ago
  I've read the article and as far as I understand they use my location and data all around my music listening. (I don't have voice enabled) To me that's not a dealbreaker, it may be to you. I've got a few Sonos speakers, and all around they sound great, so I can only recommend them! I've also never had any troubleshooting to do with them.
  - avianlyric 6y ago
    I do wonder if they actually take your location. I know in iOS a bunch of non-obvious APIs are attached to location permissions. Including access to your current WiFi network name, which would be used by Sonos to configure your speaker during setup.
    - secabeen 6y ago
      Yep. This is a key factor. To discover new devices, Sonos uses a wireless scan. That requires location permission, because knowing the MAC of a nearby AP can be easily turned into location. (Yes, in theory Sonos could do device discovery through some other method, but this is the one they chose.)
      - sova 6y ago
        Meaning every device is sharing its location? I'm confused, please clarify.
        avianlyric 6y ago
        Not quite. But if you know the MAC address of nearby access points, there are multiple location services that can turn that into a lat/Lon location (e.g. Skyhook [1]). Indeed iOS/Android does this to estimate phone location without GPS. Of course this requires someone to have already uploaded the estimated location of the access point. But loads of apps and OSs do that all the time. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
- pletnes 6y ago
  I prefer sonos for my own reasons. Bluetooth sucks power from my phone. Sonos connects over wifi and the phone isn’t involved in the streaming. I can remote control sonos from the spotify windows app or webapp on my laptop. Also the multi-speaker functionality is great. I don’t use it often, but if doing work around the house it’s nice to hear the audio stream just continue. Not a gamechanger itself though.
- shadowoflight 6y ago
  I, personally, am moving to Wi-Fi speakers because the audio quality and connection consistency have been considerably better than Bluetooth, both with my Sonos Beam and JBL Link Portable. If you want the fluidity of Sonos without the voice assistant, check out the Sonos One SL - it's the Sonos One without the microphone and voice assistant, and is $20 cheaper because of it. There's also the IKEA Symfonisk, which is basically a bookshelf speaker variant of the One SL, from what I've read.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I'm personally happy with Bose Soundlink speakers for Bluetooth. They're not the cheapest, but they have good sound quality. If I were going to go for a wifi speaker, though, I'd seriously look at Bluesound's product line. They're a Sonos competitor and they're not nearly as well known, but they're part of the same little group that owns NAD Electronics and PSB Speakers and use amplifiers and acoustics from those sister companies. If you're an audio nerd (or even if you're not), that's a pretty good pedigree. AFAIK Bluesound products work with various voice assistants, but don't build them in. (Edited to add: I don't own a Bluesound device, but I do own a NAD T758 receiver, which uses an earlier version of BluOS for its streaming/wifi capabilities and it's pretty solid.)
fivre 6y ago
"the big players are already fuckers, flaunt the law, and will eat competitors' lunches if they don't do same" seems a rather sad outlook. if we can't ask companies not to be horrible because their predecessors are already horrible, and that we should instead just permit everything after to ramp up the horribleness in the name of competition, the endgame seems rather bleak. we can't just demand that companies be better? given Sonos' track record with the "lol, can't have anyone using an OLD PRODUCT THAT STILL WORKS FINE" thing i'm rather unsure we should really give them the benefit of the doubt here ref https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086 for "recycle mode" fiasco
- jkmcf 6y ago
  I've been very critical of Sonos since before these incidents, but TBF, they've properly addressed both. I'm not sure WHY the client depends on the speaker's hardware capabilities, but I'd guess the old client source code was complex enough to warrant a rewrite and it wasn't cost effective maintaining backwards compatibility. I don't think there was malice involved. Sonos seems like a company that has a very tough time making money, and since they IPO'd two years ago they are "responsible" to shareholders now (their stock opened at 15 and as of Oct 2 it was 15 -- could be worse!). Bricking old products would give a profit boost if everyone said ok and bought new products, but they underestimated the backlash. It's the same reason their client sucks -- it will cost a lot of money to make native apps that take advantage of the respective eco-systems. The client suffices for most people so why bother? That said, I'll go back to being pissed if they release new hardware I want and get rid of the 30% discount.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > it wasn't cost effective maintaining backwards compatibility Open-source the last compatible version of the client and let the community maintain it? Or at the very least publish the API specification and let the community build a new one from scratch?
    - kelnos 6y ago
clairity 6y ago
the core business problem for sonos is that they were a one-trick pony that didn't strategize. they assumed they had cornered their little market segment and focused on feathering their nest, rather than monitoring and adjusting to wider market dynamics. entrenchment is not a (sustainable) business strategy. when sonos came to market, they were the best repositionable home speaker system, hands down. their primary differentiator was their superb and resilient audio-syncing capabilities (not it's less-defensible content catalog, though that helped as a flanking feature). they had the chance to become the brand in home audio, and they blew it. phenomenally. likely because they were under-/mis-invested in r&d, and possibly also under-capitalized (often because founders don't want to risk devaluation/dilution). from that base of home audio, they were perfectly positioned to become the home hub of the future, the nerve center for everything audiovisual (and beyond) in the home. instead, they got distracted by clouds, analytics, big data, and every other tech buzzword floating about. it's business strategy 101, and the perfect business case fodder.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  How have they blown it? I have tried a few systems and none work as well as theirs. I’m not interested in voice activated anything, which may make me an outlier. This article (and a post yesterday that said similar) have me making some system tweaks and the Pihole is part way their. I think I’ll just block the speakers at the firewall to keep things simple.
  - echelon 6y ago
    You can only sell so many speakers to your customers. They're not disposable commodities that need annual refreshes. I'm not buying any more Sonos equipment. I was done five years ago. Sonos is trying to deprecate their older models and introduce planned obsolescence. They had a program to brick your old equipment in exchange for rebates on newer models. That was totally wasteful and wanton, and the Internet called them out on it. They have so many competitors now, including the tech giants which control streaming. Google is in a feud with them and could cut off access. Sonos is in a very precarious spot.
  - clairity 6y ago
hakfoo 6y ago
What's odd to me is wireless and self-contained/smart as a selling feature. I know there's some appeal in some of the integration and multi-room features, but there are plenty of platforms offering those features in a wired format with far more flexibility and choice. I feel like even if I had an infinite budget, something like Sonos doesn't feel like a great solution. The higher-end you're going on audio, the more static things become. Yeah, you might take your iPhone dock or Bluetooth speaker and move it around, but if you spend $1000 on speakers (or 10k on building a listening room), you're gonna want the speakers in the sweet spot and left there. If I'm working with that constraints, why is having a wireless smart speaker I have to tether to a phone or hub any better than if I had just ran speaker wire to a receiver? Especially since it still has to be wired for power. At least I know my amplifier isn't spying on me or monetizing my endless appetite for Rise Against. Because it was built in 1980 but still sounds as good as anything in the same price class today.
- rtsil 6y ago
  Sonos packages practicality, ease of use and WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). They're not the best in pure sound quality, flexibility or, it appears, privacy.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  One of the big factors with Sonos that you won't get out of receiver setups is the ability to mix-and-match inputs and outputs over a whole house: having one speaker by itself playing the news in the morning, having everything in the house playing synced music on low in the afternoon, and having the home theater set playing a movie in the evening. Not needing speaker wire adds to that convenience: you can then stick a speaker in the garage or the bathroom in the future without laying more wire, as long as you have an outlet. Of course, all of this isn't exclusive to Sonos, but from what I understand none of the copycat competitors have matched their ease of use so far.
pdonis 6y ago
> for their intended purpose--streaming music to a network connected speaker, Sonos speakers just work great! And that should mean they do not need to play these games with data collection. > They are terrified they are going to get squeezed eventually. Squeezed by what? I wish more manufacturers would just make a simple freaking product that works great for its intended purpose, and nothing else. That should be an advantage to Sonos against all the other companies that refuse to just do that.
- dylan604 6y ago
  But if a company can make money making a product && make money by storing some text in a database why wouldn't they? /devilsAdvocate
  - pdonis 6y ago
    "Make money" could mean two things. If it means "make more short term profit", then yes, they can do that by selling people's data. But if it means "make long-term sustainable earnings", that's different; I'm not sure Sonos selling people's data does anything to help them vs. the competition in the long term. It might be that they don't care about the long term--that the owners of the company simply want to extract as much short term profit as possible and then get out. If that's true, IMO it's sad.
Nextgrid 6y ago
> keeping a company like Sonos (upscale audio hardware) alive & prosperous with the crazy megalithic competitive forces Make good hardware and sell it at a profit. Problem solved. Sonos still has an edge on the actual audio hardware (that none of the existing "smart speaker" competition can match, besides maybe the HomePod but the lack of Spotify support is a major dealbreaker for a lot of people). In any case, I don't see how data collection helps with any of this; selling consumer data alone isn't going to be enough to keep the company afloat, and introducing ads into the audio stream itself will be a major no-no (unless the speakers are given for free, but then the costs of that would outweigh the advertising profits). I don't think speakers are a thing that can be monetized with data, full stop - and that's okay. Most likely the whole idea behind the data collection & analytics is to justify the salaries of their marketing department and give the engineering department something to do (analytics show that X percent of customers loved this new feature, let's rebuild/expand it) while ultimately all that people want is a speaker that plays their Spotify and gets out of the way (and unlike other hardware, people aren't - and shouldn't be - used to replacing their speakers every year).
- cortesoft 6y ago
  > Make good hardware and sell it at a profit. It really isn't that simple, and I wish people would stop acting like making ANY profit is enough to keep a business around. First, making a profit isn't enough... you have to make more profit than the people investing money in the company could make elsewhere. If you make $1 for every $100 invested, and some other company can make $2 for every $100, why would anyone invest in the $1 maker? It isn't just about profit, it is about the opportunity cost of using capital on something that isn't as profitable as other capital uses. Second, let's say the profit margins are actually pretty good, and you make a nice return on this quality hardware you make. However, if the quality actually is really good, what do you do after everyone who needs your product buys it? You either have to build in obsolescence, which everyone rightly hates, or you have to switch to making another product. That switch is expensive, and cuts into your profit margin... assuming your new product is even successful. This is a lot of risk. What that risk means is that investors don't want to be left holding the bag when your product reaches market saturation and your pivot fails... which is going to make it harder to get investment. Really, Sonos is a great example of what happens when you follow your instructions to "make a good product and sell it at a profit"... they did that for many years, and made money.... but now most people who want a speaker like Sonos makes already have them, and their growth has stopped. They can still make money on each speaker sold, but they are selling fewer of them. So they are trying to pivot to make money some other way, and it sounds like it might not be going great. The only sustainable hardware business is to make and sell a huge amount of commodity hardware at small margins, and simply switch to the next thing once some OTHER company does the expensive research and experimentation to create the next thing people want to buy.
tomc1985 6y ago
Sennheiser seems to be doing just fine....

adkadskhj 6y ago

Sonos have had me curious for a while. I often use in-home small bluetooth speakers and frankly i'm happy enough with them - i just want more of them, with more power. So for louder, phone connected speakers would you still recommend Sonos? Ie i'm not sure i need the idea of multiple rooms playing the same thing. I'd love it, but my wife wouldn't hah. However i do want (decent) quality speakers in all rooms that i can play music on, and i'm largely satisfied with the bluetooth-phone experience. I'm just not satisfied with my tiny bluetooth speaker quality or sound level. Any opinion of if i should look into Sonos? Or would cheaper bluetooth speakers fit better? (edit: Sidenote, the voice assistant option is a downside for me. Otherwise i'd probably own a few Apple HomePods)

HeyImAlex 6y ago
I have three of their little speakers and a sound bar and I’m pretty happy. No connecting/disconnecting bluetooth, no walking out of range and the sound getting choppy, I can select which speaker I want to play directly from spotify or open the app and play multiple rooms at once. Not sure how well it works (or if it even can) as a direct bluetooth speaker. I think it’s more like a little music server and your phone is just the remote.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  I had wanted the 5, but it turns out the One is vastly more powerful than I need. The volume has never been above 1/3rd. They are really good. The creepiness factor is a significant problem but I hope to beat it with network changes and send them some feedback. It certainly makes me reconsider further purchases.
nxc18 6y ago
Sonos works well and I love it generally, but I’ve been really disappointed with their business practices the last few years. The S1->S2 debacle really shook my confidence and reminded me that I’m tying up a very expensive speaker with cheap digital services that could disappear or be obsoleted at literally any moment with little notice. Their whole recycling/permanently destroying speakers debacle was also quite annoying. If you go into expecting the third year and beyond of service to be bonus and that you’re the product not the customer, it’s a great fit for your needs.
cube2222 6y ago
I've read the article and as far as I understand they use my location and data all around my music listening. (I don't have voice enabled) To me that's not a dealbreaker, it may be to you. I've got a few Sonos speakers, and all around they sound great, so I can only recommend them! I've also never had any troubleshooting to do with them.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  I do wonder if they actually take your location. I know in iOS a bunch of non-obvious APIs are attached to location permissions. Including access to your current WiFi network name, which would be used by Sonos to configure your speaker during setup.
  - secabeen 6y ago
    Yep. This is a key factor. To discover new devices, Sonos uses a wireless scan. That requires location permission, because knowing the MAC of a nearby AP can be easily turned into location. (Yes, in theory Sonos could do device discovery through some other method, but this is the one they chose.)
    - sova 6y ago
      Meaning every device is sharing its location? I'm confused, please clarify.
      - avianlyric 6y ago
        Not quite. But if you know the MAC address of nearby access points, there are multiple location services that can turn that into a lat/Lon location (e.g. Skyhook [1]). Indeed iOS/Android does this to estimate phone location without GPS. Of course this requires someone to have already uploaded the estimated location of the access point. But loads of apps and OSs do that all the time. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
pletnes 6y ago
I prefer sonos for my own reasons. Bluetooth sucks power from my phone. Sonos connects over wifi and the phone isn’t involved in the streaming. I can remote control sonos from the spotify windows app or webapp on my laptop. Also the multi-speaker functionality is great. I don’t use it often, but if doing work around the house it’s nice to hear the audio stream just continue. Not a gamechanger itself though.
shadowoflight 6y ago
I, personally, am moving to Wi-Fi speakers because the audio quality and connection consistency have been considerably better than Bluetooth, both with my Sonos Beam and JBL Link Portable. If you want the fluidity of Sonos without the voice assistant, check out the Sonos One SL - it's the Sonos One without the microphone and voice assistant, and is $20 cheaper because of it. There's also the IKEA Symfonisk, which is basically a bookshelf speaker variant of the One SL, from what I've read.
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I'm personally happy with Bose Soundlink speakers for Bluetooth. They're not the cheapest, but they have good sound quality. If I were going to go for a wifi speaker, though, I'd seriously look at Bluesound's product line. They're a Sonos competitor and they're not nearly as well known, but they're part of the same little group that owns NAD Electronics and PSB Speakers and use amplifiers and acoustics from those sister companies. If you're an audio nerd (or even if you're not), that's a pretty good pedigree. AFAIK Bluesound products work with various voice assistants, but don't build them in. (Edited to add: I don't own a Bluesound device, but I do own a NAD T758 receiver, which uses an earlier version of BluOS for its streaming/wifi capabilities and it's pretty solid.)

fivre 6y ago

"the big players are already fuckers, flaunt the law, and will eat competitors' lunches if they don't do same" seems a rather sad outlook. if we can't ask companies not to be horrible because their predecessors are already horrible, and that we should instead just permit everything after to ramp up the horribleness in the name of competition, the endgame seems rather bleak. we can't just demand that companies be better? given Sonos' track record with the "lol, can't have anyone using an OLD PRODUCT THAT STILL WORKS FINE" thing i'm rather unsure we should really give them the benefit of the doubt here ref https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086 for "recycle mode" fiasco

jkmcf 6y ago
I've been very critical of Sonos since before these incidents, but TBF, they've properly addressed both. I'm not sure WHY the client depends on the speaker's hardware capabilities, but I'd guess the old client source code was complex enough to warrant a rewrite and it wasn't cost effective maintaining backwards compatibility. I don't think there was malice involved. Sonos seems like a company that has a very tough time making money, and since they IPO'd two years ago they are "responsible" to shareholders now (their stock opened at 15 and as of Oct 2 it was 15 -- could be worse!). Bricking old products would give a profit boost if everyone said ok and bought new products, but they underestimated the backlash. It's the same reason their client sucks -- it will cost a lot of money to make native apps that take advantage of the respective eco-systems. The client suffices for most people so why bother? That said, I'll go back to being pissed if they release new hardware I want and get rid of the 30% discount.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > it wasn't cost effective maintaining backwards compatibility Open-source the last compatible version of the client and let the community maintain it? Or at the very least publish the API specification and let the community build a new one from scratch?
  - kelnos 6y ago

clairity 6y ago

the core business problem for sonos is that they were a one-trick pony that didn't strategize. they assumed they had cornered their little market segment and focused on feathering their nest, rather than monitoring and adjusting to wider market dynamics. entrenchment is not a (sustainable) business strategy. when sonos came to market, they were the best repositionable home speaker system, hands down. their primary differentiator was their superb and resilient audio-syncing capabilities (not it's less-defensible content catalog, though that helped as a flanking feature). they had the chance to become the brand in home audio, and they blew it. phenomenally. likely because they were under-/mis-invested in r&d, and possibly also under-capitalized (often because founders don't want to risk devaluation/dilution). from that base of home audio, they were perfectly positioned to become the home hub of the future, the nerve center for everything audiovisual (and beyond) in the home. instead, they got distracted by clouds, analytics, big data, and every other tech buzzword floating about. it's business strategy 101, and the perfect business case fodder.

lostlogin 6y ago
How have they blown it? I have tried a few systems and none work as well as theirs. I’m not interested in voice activated anything, which may make me an outlier. This article (and a post yesterday that said similar) have me making some system tweaks and the Pihole is part way their. I think I’ll just block the speakers at the firewall to keep things simple.
- echelon 6y ago
  You can only sell so many speakers to your customers. They're not disposable commodities that need annual refreshes. I'm not buying any more Sonos equipment. I was done five years ago. Sonos is trying to deprecate their older models and introduce planned obsolescence. They had a program to brick your old equipment in exchange for rebates on newer models. That was totally wasteful and wanton, and the Internet called them out on it. They have so many competitors now, including the tech giants which control streaming. Google is in a feud with them and could cut off access. Sonos is in a very precarious spot.
- clairity 6y ago

hakfoo 6y ago

What's odd to me is wireless and self-contained/smart as a selling feature. I know there's some appeal in some of the integration and multi-room features, but there are plenty of platforms offering those features in a wired format with far more flexibility and choice. I feel like even if I had an infinite budget, something like Sonos doesn't feel like a great solution. The higher-end you're going on audio, the more static things become. Yeah, you might take your iPhone dock or Bluetooth speaker and move it around, but if you spend $1000 on speakers (or 10k on building a listening room), you're gonna want the speakers in the sweet spot and left there. If I'm working with that constraints, why is having a wireless smart speaker I have to tether to a phone or hub any better than if I had just ran speaker wire to a receiver? Especially since it still has to be wired for power. At least I know my amplifier isn't spying on me or monetizing my endless appetite for Rise Against. Because it was built in 1980 but still sounds as good as anything in the same price class today.

rtsil 6y ago
Sonos packages practicality, ease of use and WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). They're not the best in pure sound quality, flexibility or, it appears, privacy.
crooked-v 6y ago
One of the big factors with Sonos that you won't get out of receiver setups is the ability to mix-and-match inputs and outputs over a whole house: having one speaker by itself playing the news in the morning, having everything in the house playing synced music on low in the afternoon, and having the home theater set playing a movie in the evening. Not needing speaker wire adds to that convenience: you can then stick a speaker in the garage or the bathroom in the future without laying more wire, as long as you have an outlet. Of course, all of this isn't exclusive to Sonos, but from what I understand none of the copycat competitors have matched their ease of use so far.

pdonis 6y ago

> for their intended purpose--streaming music to a network connected speaker, Sonos speakers just work great! And that should mean they do not need to play these games with data collection. > They are terrified they are going to get squeezed eventually. Squeezed by what? I wish more manufacturers would just make a simple freaking product that works great for its intended purpose, and nothing else. That should be an advantage to Sonos against all the other companies that refuse to just do that.

dylan604 6y ago
But if a company can make money making a product && make money by storing some text in a database why wouldn't they? /devilsAdvocate
- pdonis 6y ago
  "Make money" could mean two things. If it means "make more short term profit", then yes, they can do that by selling people's data. But if it means "make long-term sustainable earnings", that's different; I'm not sure Sonos selling people's data does anything to help them vs. the competition in the long term. It might be that they don't care about the long term--that the owners of the company simply want to extract as much short term profit as possible and then get out. If that's true, IMO it's sad.

Nextgrid 6y ago

> keeping a company like Sonos (upscale audio hardware) alive & prosperous with the crazy megalithic competitive forces Make good hardware and sell it at a profit. Problem solved. Sonos still has an edge on the actual audio hardware (that none of the existing "smart speaker" competition can match, besides maybe the HomePod but the lack of Spotify support is a major dealbreaker for a lot of people). In any case, I don't see how data collection helps with any of this; selling consumer data alone isn't going to be enough to keep the company afloat, and introducing ads into the audio stream itself will be a major no-no (unless the speakers are given for free, but then the costs of that would outweigh the advertising profits). I don't think speakers are a thing that can be monetized with data, full stop - and that's okay. Most likely the whole idea behind the data collection & analytics is to justify the salaries of their marketing department and give the engineering department something to do (analytics show that X percent of customers loved this new feature, let's rebuild/expand it) while ultimately all that people want is a speaker that plays their Spotify and gets out of the way (and unlike other hardware, people aren't - and shouldn't be - used to replacing their speakers every year).

cortesoft 6y ago
> Make good hardware and sell it at a profit. It really isn't that simple, and I wish people would stop acting like making ANY profit is enough to keep a business around. First, making a profit isn't enough... you have to make more profit than the people investing money in the company could make elsewhere. If you make $1 for every $100 invested, and some other company can make $2 for every $100, why would anyone invest in the $1 maker? It isn't just about profit, it is about the opportunity cost of using capital on something that isn't as profitable as other capital uses. Second, let's say the profit margins are actually pretty good, and you make a nice return on this quality hardware you make. However, if the quality actually is really good, what do you do after everyone who needs your product buys it? You either have to build in obsolescence, which everyone rightly hates, or you have to switch to making another product. That switch is expensive, and cuts into your profit margin... assuming your new product is even successful. This is a lot of risk. What that risk means is that investors don't want to be left holding the bag when your product reaches market saturation and your pivot fails... which is going to make it harder to get investment. Really, Sonos is a great example of what happens when you follow your instructions to "make a good product and sell it at a profit"... they did that for many years, and made money.... but now most people who want a speaker like Sonos makes already have them, and their growth has stopped. They can still make money on each speaker sold, but they are selling fewer of them. So they are trying to pivot to make money some other way, and it sounds like it might not be going great. The only sustainable hardware business is to make and sell a huge amount of commodity hardware at small margins, and simply switch to the next thing once some OTHER company does the expensive research and experimentation to create the next thing people want to buy.

tomc1985 6y ago

Sennheiser seems to be doing just fine....