I’m sure many people are aware of the announcement yesterday from Sonos that they’re ending support for older products, ostensibly because they’re underpowered and can’t be updated to stay current.
In my opinion, all Sonos had to do was introduce a new device to act as a home gateway. This device could be powerful enough to handle all the features for the old devices, and they could all be slaved off this new device. This would allow the old devices to be “updated” to a slave mode, and the gateway could be maintained with new software that brings features to them.
Basically right now Sonos appears to run each speaker separately and slaves them all from the cloud somehow. The smarter solution would be to require everyone who wants older gear to stay working to buy a Sonos “Server” product that the speakers slave off of and then the server connects to the cloud. This would allow Sonos to milk a little more money off those old products without making them fully obsolete. They probably could have even offered a subscription service of some sort to fund ongoing development of the “legacy” portion of the server.
Sonos has apparently decided it would be better for them to earn a whole bunch of negative customer sentiment and then somehow convince these discontented people to stick with Sonos and spend more money on new products. Maybe people are willing into buying more new things that will eventually also reach end of life in a similar fashion, but I think, in the future, this day will be remembered at the last gasp of Sonos before they failed.
Yes! And make it inexpensive (not something they are great at).
It would be even better if they also released a software bridge that users could run themselves (maybe on a Raspberry Pi, or other home server), giving users two options A simple solution for a small sum of money for non-technical users, and a free option for more technical users to run on their home server (be it a RasPi, NAS or something else).
In a perfect world it would even run on my FreeBSD server.
I’m a Sonos user and long time beta tester.
I’ve attached the original email I got yesterday and the President’s response from today.
Needless to say the response on the owner’s forum was pretty brutal. Sonos has pissed off a lot of people and have all of us wondering about putting more into their system.
Sonos is headquarterd in my town and has been good to locals, I got a free pair of Play 1’s for being a beta tester long ago and was able to purchase the rest of my Sonos devices at a very steep discount.
Currently the only product I have that will be legacy is the Connect that is connected to my Denon amp and Paradigm Reference Studio/100 v.2 loudspeakers.
I’m not a Sonos owner, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but it seems to me that maybe they finally realized they should have taken a more customer-centric position from the start:
Leo is obviously highly PIZZZED having dumped thousands into these “Bricked” devices. He is dumping on them every possible way. Rightfully so. When are we going to hear from Stacey Higginbotham, as this is right in her wheelhouse. Maybe she has, and I missed it.
Thank you so much. This has been a serious wake up call for all of us on the fringes of integrating IOT stuff into our lives. IE Door locks, Garage door openers, surveillance gear ETC. Convenience is on hold for me.
