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I don't think having a sales person in charge was the problem. The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the

I don't think having a sales person in charge was the problem. The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company. The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue. The consumer wants a device that they buy once and it just works.

observationist 2y ago
Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business. A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase. If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.
- redserk 2y ago
  Not sure if I agree with an engineer inherently being better here. The ideal case is having leadership who uses the product, or at least is willing to walk in the shoes of an end-user. Plenty of engineers do not do this either.
  - sgarland 2y ago
    Anecdotally, having worked at multiple small-medium companies with a variety of leadership backgrounds, the worst have been sales background. Engineering backgrounds have ranged from OK to great.
- palata 2y ago
  > Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. I assume you are an engineer? I am too, not judging :-). Everybody tends to think that they are in a better position to know how the product should look like, I think it's a normal bias. Not that salespeople are better. I hate the direction Sonos chose. Just saying that engineers are not always the best at understanding what customers want and need (if you asked me, I would say that everybody needs Yubikeys, and yet people actively fight to keep their right to reuse the same weak password everywhere :-) ).
- GenerWork 2y ago
  >Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. This is one of the key competencies of UX professionals, specifically UX researchers.
  - usr1106 2y ago
    In all disciplines you find more not so brilliant people than truly brilliant people. I am a software engineer, but it happens that I cannot understand how our UX professionals have designed our product's UI. Or if I understand it I find it awkward. Now you could say that's because I am so much below average, that I am a hopeless case... But we get customer reports that they are more confused than I am. So having UX people is not silver bullet.
    - TulliusCicero 2y ago
      A subset of UX people want something that's beautiful or elegant or cutting edge more than they want something that actually makes sense for the user. Just like some engineers want something that's technically impressive more than they want what's good for the user.
- dkokelley 2y ago
  > Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. Why do you say that? My gut reaction is that the opposite is true. Salespeople must understand their customers' wants and needs in order to effectively sell! Engineers are generally a step or two removed from the customers. This may be an unpopular take on HN but I'd wager the people who spend time directly with the customers have a better chance at understanding what they want. Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!
  - atonse 2y ago
    I'd go as far as to say that the role doesn't matter, it's the attitude of the individual. I've worked with a few developers AND sales people that didn't give a hoot about what their customers thought. In the case of Sales, they only cared about making their targets. In the case of the devs that didn't care, they spent 99% of their time doing silly (in my opinion) arguments about frameworks, design patterns, and whitespace and formatting rules in CI. Not that things like design patterns are inherently silly. But if they don't result in a better customer experience (via more stable and maintainable software, for example), then it's a waste of time. I'm a developer by trade but have ALWAYS had an attitude of "it only matters if it's useful to the user" – and have butted heads sometimes with developers on which features to prioritize.
  - majormunky 2y ago
    > Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs! People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. Not many people call up to say how well something works. I would agree with you though on good Salespeople (ones that do try to understand what customers need and all that, not necessarily ones that sell the most) knowing what the customer wants/needs.
    - saghm 2y ago
      > People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. I used to see this all the time at an old job where my team worked on open source client libraries for using the main product that our company sold. A decent number people seemed to think that an increasing number of tickets being filed against one of the libraries was a sign that users weren't happy with it, but it always seemed obvious to me that you couldn't easily conclude that; you might have 99 happy users with no issues for every 1 unhappy user who filed a ticket, or you might have literally only unhappy users and nobody without issues. On the other hand, getting literally zero tickets might mean that you have plenty of happy users, or it might mean you have basically no users at all. I'd often talk to younger engineers who were interning on the team or recently joined full-time about how this dynamic informed how I approached my job; usually, we'd only hear from users who had issues, so the "goal" in some ways to was to make the software so good that you'd never hear from them. If you did hear from a user, that was a valuable opportunity where you might learn something you could do in the future to make things better the first time.
- jedberg 2y ago
  > Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. I think you have that backwards. Sales people absolutely need to understand what they customer wants and needs, or they won't buy it. Engineers just know what they want to build because it's what they want. But really, Product Managers are the ones who are in the best position to figure it out. They get input from sales, customer service, and engineering, and produce competitive research, and then prioritize from there. A good CEO is going to listen to their the PMs.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  > Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. There's no reason to believe an engineer would understand the customer needs more than a salesperson. I know a lot of engineers who would do literally anything to avoid dealing with a real customer. At the companies I've worked for, engineers don't even talk to customers if there isn't a specific, technical issue they need to be there for. Meanwhile, salespeople actually talk to customers, probably more than anyone except support.
- cjk 2y ago
  I think the solid understanding of the product and its users is the important part, not whether you’re an engineer or not. That understanding (or lack thereof) can and does transcend role.
- rodgerd 2y ago
  > Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. This is why programmer-driven open source projects are a paragon of usability and have taken over 90% of the mobile phone, desktop, and app market.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs As an engineer, I had no idea about: - what the utility companies wanted when I was working for a SaaS company that printed and processed bills - what the field service techs wanted when I was writing software for ruggedized windows ce devices - what the railroad car owners or repairmen wanted when I was working for a company creating a SaaS (https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB_ProceduresManual.pdf https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...) - I knew nothing about what the healthcare industry needed in the three SaaS companies I worked for including software for health care workers dealing with special needs kids - the various “enterprises” mostly in the edtech or state and local government space in consulting.
  - rezistik 2y ago
    In all of your examples you're working at a company, ideally the person running the company had that domain expertise.
    - ako 2y ago
      No, the person running the company has expertise running companies. Customer understanding lies with designers, analysts, product owners, product management, but also sales: what is the pain we’re addressing, how can ensure the customers really understands the consequences of not addressing the pain, how can we ensure the customer sees our product is the best to address their pain.
benreesman 2y ago
I haven’t owned Sonos gear in a long time, but certainly back in the day they had just amazing products. That SUB where it was so perfectly balanced? They did a demo (that you could easily reproduce at home) where you could have it driving “call the cops” noise disturbance bass without upsetting a nickel set lengthwise on top, just a great unit and not the only one. Awesome stuff. But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”. For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied. This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago. Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied. That reason is people like more money than less money. No one logs into their brokerage account and invests in Sonos because they have a great product that is growing (or shrinking) at the rate of the speaker market. People want to see their year end report at least equal the broad market returns. The directive for all business leaders is to hit those benchmark returns, not pump out a solid speaker for however many years. And if a private business owner operates their company in a way that lags the market’s returns, then they are basically doing charity work. They’re going to have to pay a lot of cash compared to their competitors who can use RSUs to incentivize employees.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon. Clearly everyone likes money. We could pay them for good things rather than the transient illusion of good things. Yes it would be imperfect. No it wouldn’t be worse than this mess. Bell Labs didn’t invent the transistor on this model, JFK didn’t send us to the moon on this model. This “privatize the commons of a century of effective public/private partnership” model is going rather shit in fact.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
> The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company The fundamental problem with 95% of companies, and 99% of publicly listed companies.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  That suggests it's perhaps about what's good for investors, not what's good for companies themselves.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  At that point it's really a fundamental problem with our society that allows and even incentivizes the growth of such companies.
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    Actually it's fine - they go bankrupt. Look at the list of companies that make it through time, it's very short. Being selfish is common in human nature.
- gadders 2y ago
  It's 100% of PE-owned companies.
mrandish 2y ago
> The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue. Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds
griomnib 2y ago
I have experienced this most acutely with the most recent round of macOS and iOS updates. Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion. I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS. Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.
- astrange 2y ago
  Apple doesn't have PMs.
  - griomnib 2y ago
    I’m sure they have some “magical” Cupertino world for infighting assholes putting their careers before users, whatever that may be.
  - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
    Doesn’t seem so. https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected-product-management-roles-for-apple-services https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected...
    - astrange 2y ago
      That is not in the OS. I also sort of suspect they're being hired as a prank because there is basically no power structure for them to have control over anything. Execs and designers have all the power. (Note: there are "EPMs" but it's a totally different thing.)
  - Czarcasm 2y ago
    My team at Apple had PMs.
nelox 2y ago
Agree. Just ask Steve Jobs.
givemeethekeys 2y ago
Bait and switch is the fundamental problem. Abuse of power.
atoav 2y ago
As a music fan one would think I'd be their target group. But I haven't even considered their product and classified it as "some smart crap that is an excuse to syphon data out and lock me in". So all stick, no carrot.
- Nursie 2y ago
  It never really was that at the beginning. It was a good, locally-controlled system which would build itself a wifi mesh (back when that was unheard of) be configured to pick up things like samba/cifs shares and play your library, with some really neat features like combining speakers into stereo pairs or surround systems, and then playing your music and any input devices arbitrarily across these zones you have set up. At some point they integrated spotify and other similar services, which risked what you talked about, but was fine. There are even third party controller frontends available on linux. But recently (mid 2024) they delivered an absolute stinker of a new app which routes everything via their cloud, fails to load half the time, barely responds, and looks suspiciously like that grab for control you imagine
alkonaut 2y ago
But Sonos doesn't sell any services/subscriptions, just products, correct? So even if they wanted to have recurring revenue how would they do it? They sell gadgets?
- mixermachine 2y ago
  ...so far, yes. But somebody has to pay all of that new network traffic and cpu cycles ;).
  - alkonaut 2y ago
    I'm sure it's one of the biggest questions asked by the Sonos C-suite: how do we get recurring revenue or make the moat wider. But that goes for every product company in the world.
- wiether 2y ago
  They sell "Sonos Radio HD", a subscription based radio service which is supposed to be an upgrade from their free offering. But as much as I dislike the "new" app, it doesn't push subscribing to this service, so I'm not sure they absolutely want device customers to become subscribers.
  - mfld 2y ago
    It would be a bad timing if they pushed the subscriptions already...
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    They don't push the subscription..yet I hate the slippery slope fallacy but this is how was gonna end

observationist 2y ago

Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. Give a good salesperson a handwavy outline of something to sell, and they will sell it. They don't need technical accuracy for success. Yes, this is bad for customers, and makes life harder, and results in ridiculous, counterproductive, infuriating situations for IT staff, engineers, and other people who have to deal with the technical realities of every day business. A salesperson can just mash psychological buttons in manager's brains, and they'll make the sale. The consumer, in enterprise level markets, is hardly ever the team or individual in charge of operating the technology. The consumer is the manager, or managerial team, looking to check boxes and shuffle numbers and spend $X on Y department, for which they get rewarded for a wide array of arbitrary outcomes, almost none of which have anything to do with the practical impact of the product in question on the people who end up most affected by the purchase. If an engineer with a solid understanding of the product being sold is in charge, he's in the best place to rein in the sales and marketing teams, and to direct development based on customer reality. This probably results in lower profits, overall, but a better product, and a better reputation in the long run.

redserk 2y ago
Not sure if I agree with an engineer inherently being better here. The ideal case is having leadership who uses the product, or at least is willing to walk in the shoes of an end-user. Plenty of engineers do not do this either.
- sgarland 2y ago
  Anecdotally, having worked at multiple small-medium companies with a variety of leadership backgrounds, the worst have been sales background. Engineering backgrounds have ranged from OK to great.
palata 2y ago
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. I assume you are an engineer? I am too, not judging :-). Everybody tends to think that they are in a better position to know how the product should look like, I think it's a normal bias. Not that salespeople are better. I hate the direction Sonos chose. Just saying that engineers are not always the best at understanding what customers want and need (if you asked me, I would say that everybody needs Yubikeys, and yet people actively fight to keep their right to reuse the same weak password everywhere :-) ).
GenerWork 2y ago
>Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. This is one of the key competencies of UX professionals, specifically UX researchers.
- usr1106 2y ago
  In all disciplines you find more not so brilliant people than truly brilliant people. I am a software engineer, but it happens that I cannot understand how our UX professionals have designed our product's UI. Or if I understand it I find it awkward. Now you could say that's because I am so much below average, that I am a hopeless case... But we get customer reports that they are more confused than I am. So having UX people is not silver bullet.
  - TulliusCicero 2y ago
    A subset of UX people want something that's beautiful or elegant or cutting edge more than they want something that actually makes sense for the user. Just like some engineers want something that's technically impressive more than they want what's good for the user.
dkokelley 2y ago
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. Why do you say that? My gut reaction is that the opposite is true. Salespeople must understand their customers' wants and needs in order to effectively sell! Engineers are generally a step or two removed from the customers. This may be an unpopular take on HN but I'd wager the people who spend time directly with the customers have a better chance at understanding what they want. Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs!
- atonse 2y ago
  I'd go as far as to say that the role doesn't matter, it's the attitude of the individual. I've worked with a few developers AND sales people that didn't give a hoot about what their customers thought. In the case of Sales, they only cared about making their targets. In the case of the devs that didn't care, they spent 99% of their time doing silly (in my opinion) arguments about frameworks, design patterns, and whitespace and formatting rules in CI. Not that things like design patterns are inherently silly. But if they don't result in a better customer experience (via more stable and maintainable software, for example), then it's a waste of time. I'm a developer by trade but have ALWAYS had an attitude of "it only matters if it's useful to the user" – and have butted heads sometimes with developers on which features to prioritize.
- majormunky 2y ago
  > Taken a step further, customer support probably has the best understanding of their markets' needs! People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. Not many people call up to say how well something works. I would agree with you though on good Salespeople (ones that do try to understand what customers need and all that, not necessarily ones that sell the most) knowing what the customer wants/needs.
  - saghm 2y ago
    > People working in customer support, from my experience, sort of see the anti-survivorship bias working in action. I used to see this all the time at an old job where my team worked on open source client libraries for using the main product that our company sold. A decent number people seemed to think that an increasing number of tickets being filed against one of the libraries was a sign that users weren't happy with it, but it always seemed obvious to me that you couldn't easily conclude that; you might have 99 happy users with no issues for every 1 unhappy user who filed a ticket, or you might have literally only unhappy users and nobody without issues. On the other hand, getting literally zero tickets might mean that you have plenty of happy users, or it might mean you have basically no users at all. I'd often talk to younger engineers who were interning on the team or recently joined full-time about how this dynamic informed how I approached my job; usually, we'd only hear from users who had issues, so the "goal" in some ways to was to make the software so good that you'd never hear from them. If you did hear from a user, that was a valuable opportunity where you might learn something you could do in the future to make things better the first time.
jedberg 2y ago
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. I think you have that backwards. Sales people absolutely need to understand what they customer wants and needs, or they won't buy it. Engineers just know what they want to build because it's what they want. But really, Product Managers are the ones who are in the best position to figure it out. They get input from sales, customer service, and engineering, and produce competitive research, and then prioritize from there. A good CEO is going to listen to their the PMs.
karaterobot 2y ago
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. Salespeople are there to sell their product, and fundamentally don't need to understand what the customer wants, or needs. There's no reason to believe an engineer would understand the customer needs more than a salesperson. I know a lot of engineers who would do literally anything to avoid dealing with a real customer. At the companies I've worked for, engineers don't even talk to customers if there isn't a specific, technical issue they need to be there for. Meanwhile, salespeople actually talk to customers, probably more than anyone except support.
cjk 2y ago
I think the solid understanding of the product and its users is the important part, not whether you’re an engineer or not. That understanding (or lack thereof) can and does transcend role.
rodgerd 2y ago
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs. This is why programmer-driven open source projects are a paragon of usability and have taken over 90% of the mobile phone, desktop, and app market.
scarface_74 2y ago
> Engineers are in a better position to understand what the customer wants and needs As an engineer, I had no idea about: - what the utility companies wanted when I was working for a SaaS company that printed and processed bills - what the field service techs wanted when I was writing software for ruggedized windows ce devices - what the railroad car owners or repairmen wanted when I was working for a company creating a SaaS (https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB_ProceduresManual.pdf https://public.railinc.com/sites/default/files/documents/CRB...) - I knew nothing about what the healthcare industry needed in the three SaaS companies I worked for including software for health care workers dealing with special needs kids - the various “enterprises” mostly in the edtech or state and local government space in consulting.
- rezistik 2y ago
  In all of your examples you're working at a company, ideally the person running the company had that domain expertise.
  - ako 2y ago
    No, the person running the company has expertise running companies. Customer understanding lies with designers, analysts, product owners, product management, but also sales: what is the pain we’re addressing, how can ensure the customers really understands the consequences of not addressing the pain, how can we ensure the customer sees our product is the best to address their pain.

benreesman 2y ago

I haven’t owned Sonos gear in a long time, but certainly back in the day they had just amazing products. That SUB where it was so perfectly balanced? They did a demo (that you could easily reproduce at home) where you could have it driving “call the cops” noise disturbance bass without upsetting a nickel set lengthwise on top, just a great unit and not the only one. Awesome stuff. But while superior products at a price point can capture a bunch of share, after that they grow at the rate of the market. Those markets have “matured”. For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied. This is where ideas like “growth” and ideas like “useful” diverge: raise your hand if you like Facebook or Google in 2025 more than 10-15 years ago. Sonos (and I’m aware of the structure) “grew” right out of a sustainably profitable business with happy customers.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
> For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied. That reason is people like more money than less money. No one logs into their brokerage account and invests in Sonos because they have a great product that is growing (or shrinking) at the rate of the speaker market. People want to see their year end report at least equal the broad market returns. The directive for all business leaders is to hit those benchmark returns, not pump out a solid speaker for however many years. And if a private business owner operates their company in a way that lags the market’s returns, then they are basically doing charity work. They’re going to have to pay a lot of cash compared to their competitors who can use RSUs to incentivize employees.
- benreesman 2y ago
  Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon. Clearly everyone likes money. We could pay them for good things rather than the transient illusion of good things. Yes it would be imperfect. No it wouldn’t be worse than this mess. Bell Labs didn’t invent the transistor on this model, JFK didn’t send us to the moon on this model. This “privatize the commons of a century of effective public/private partnership” model is going rather shit in fact.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

> The problem is the fundamental disconnect between what's good for users and what's good for the company The fundamental problem with 95% of companies, and 99% of publicly listed companies.

Earw0rm 2y ago
That suggests it's perhaps about what's good for investors, not what's good for companies themselves.
BrenBarn 2y ago
At that point it's really a fundamental problem with our society that allows and even incentivizes the growth of such companies.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Actually it's fine - they go bankrupt. Look at the list of companies that make it through time, it's very short. Being selfish is common in human nature.
gadders 2y ago
It's 100% of PE-owned companies.

mrandish 2y ago

> The company wants you to have to pay them money every month and control how you interact with the product, so that they can be a services company with recurring revenue. Yes! This pervasive trend has nerfed so much consumer tech. I simply won't buy any more hardware that relies on proprietary clouds

griomnib 2y ago

I have experienced this most acutely with the most recent round of macOS and iOS updates. Nothing Apple is shipping seems to be for me, the user. Rather it’s a grab bag of crap “AI” for Wall Street, ways to make it harder to run software of my choosing, and wholesale trashing of perfectly fine UX to cram in whatever useless feature some PM landed for their promotion. I could say a few hundred things much worse about the direction of windows 11, which is even more obnoxious than Apple, but then I’d have to relieve the horror of being forced to submit my email address to Microsoft to install the damn OS. Day by day I feel the devices I’ve spent a huge sum of money on no longer belong to me. I’m getting really fucking tired of it, and something has to give.

astrange 2y ago
Apple doesn't have PMs.
- griomnib 2y ago
  I’m sure they have some “magical” Cupertino world for infighting assholes putting their careers before users, whatever that may be.
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  Doesn’t seem so. https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected-product-management-roles-for-apple-services https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200318153/get-connected...
  - astrange 2y ago
    That is not in the OS. I also sort of suspect they're being hired as a prank because there is basically no power structure for them to have control over anything. Execs and designers have all the power. (Note: there are "EPMs" but it's a totally different thing.)
- Czarcasm 2y ago
  My team at Apple had PMs.

nelox 2y ago

Agree. Just ask Steve Jobs.

givemeethekeys 2y ago

Bait and switch is the fundamental problem. Abuse of power.

atoav 2y ago

As a music fan one would think I'd be their target group. But I haven't even considered their product and classified it as "some smart crap that is an excuse to syphon data out and lock me in". So all stick, no carrot.

Nursie 2y ago
It never really was that at the beginning. It was a good, locally-controlled system which would build itself a wifi mesh (back when that was unheard of) be configured to pick up things like samba/cifs shares and play your library, with some really neat features like combining speakers into stereo pairs or surround systems, and then playing your music and any input devices arbitrarily across these zones you have set up. At some point they integrated spotify and other similar services, which risked what you talked about, but was fine. There are even third party controller frontends available on linux. But recently (mid 2024) they delivered an absolute stinker of a new app which routes everything via their cloud, fails to load half the time, barely responds, and looks suspiciously like that grab for control you imagine

alkonaut 2y ago

But Sonos doesn't sell any services/subscriptions, just products, correct? So even if they wanted to have recurring revenue how would they do it? They sell gadgets?

mixermachine 2y ago
...so far, yes. But somebody has to pay all of that new network traffic and cpu cycles ;).
- alkonaut 2y ago
  I'm sure it's one of the biggest questions asked by the Sonos C-suite: how do we get recurring revenue or make the moat wider. But that goes for every product company in the world.
wiether 2y ago
They sell "Sonos Radio HD", a subscription based radio service which is supposed to be an upgrade from their free offering. But as much as I dislike the "new" app, it doesn't push subscribing to this service, so I'm not sure they absolutely want device customers to become subscribers.
- mfld 2y ago
  It would be a bad timing if they pushed the subscriptions already...
- Iulioh 2y ago
  They don't push the subscription..yet I hate the slippery slope fallacy but this is how was gonna end