Sonos Sues Google: It wanted to sue Amazon but could only risk suing one | Hacker News Reader

Sonos Sues Google: It wanted to sue Amazon but could only risk suing one

finance.yahoo.com

28 pointstotaldude8719 comments

I don't have any sympathy left for Sonos.

It used to be about a remote controllable midrange hifi that didn't stop playing when your phones battery died or your laptop turned off, a system "that just worked". Right now I have 5k in Sonos speakers littered around the house that I haven't bothered to setup after a bridge broke because I know that it's just gonna f* up again with the next forced update.

Their entire always online bulls*, their "recycling bricking", and their general consumer hostility pushed them from a company I wholeheartedly liked to "avoid like the plague" territory.

I feel like Tivo went down a very similar path. Create a beloved product and then murder it with anti-consumer software updates.

Why can't companies just make and sell things anymore?

It’s hard to make rational long term decisions if the CEO is trying to boost short-term profits for public markets.

Since when does Sonos stop playing when your phone battery dies or your laptop? Doesn't for me.

He said didn’t

I am displeased with Sonos due to their "recycling kill switch". Insert the stronger language of your choice. They shouldn't have a patent on anything they have done. Ask anyone who has a degree in signals for a solution to the problem of multi speaker sound. You will have a pile of solutions in less than 20 minutes.

"synchronizing mp3 playback" (p4sync,) DECEMBER 29, 2002 UPDATED DECEMBER 30, 2017 https://snarfed.org/synchronizing_mp3_playback

Unfortunately, USPTO only searches it's own database for published prior art. It's up to everyone else to find and show prior published art (and/or explain obviousness) in order to invalidate a patent being used non-defensively.

Shouldn't they be suing Apple (airpods)? Who was the first to come up with bluetooth speakers syncing with each other? Also, who are they going to sue with multi-device broadcast becomes a Bluetooth standard (as it's currently being proposed).

Can America et. al. please just ban software patents already like New Zealand did?

Apple Airport Express, which contains an audio out (which I hook to my stereo to synch playing music in multiple parts of the house) and does synchronized streaming, made it to the market one year (2004) before Sonos's first product did (2005). Apple later remove the WiFi extender and added a speaker and renamed the product appropriately, but it is and evolution of the same pre-Sonos technology and probably is why they aren't trying to sue Apple.

Am I the only one here that doesn't have any problem with my home SONOS system? My family constantly plays music in most rooms of the house using a Spotify premium account. It's been a godsend, and it truly makes me feel like we are living in the future. All the sueing and inter-corporate politics is a little annoying to hear about, but I still listen to the speakers daily without giving it all much thought.

I don't have a problem with mine at all. I've had Sonos speakers for about 4 years now. Two play 3's, playbar, Sub and a Play 1.

Works better than when I got it, everyone in the house knows how to use it to play music and watch movies etc. Allows me to play my Spotify playlists and them to play their Apple music playlists.

The stuff works fine and I update it all as soon as a new update comes out. I'd like to know if other people are having issues, just to know what to look out for. But I've had it for quite a while now and it blows people's minds when they see how it all works and how easily it works.

Let's not forget when Sonos made us create a user account. A lot of us never wanted any Sonos user account, ever, and we were held hostage. We should have been offered a full refund if we did not want the account.

Complaint is here: https://www.scribd.com/document/442035843/Sonos-v-Goo

I wish they would have sued Spotify.

Spotify frequently aggressively breaks Sonos for what I assume is anti-competitive reasons.

Not really anti-competitive reasons. More of a pissing contest between the two companies who want to use their own protocols.

Spotify just wants Sonos to implement their Connect protocol and so their native Sonos integration is pretty half-assed. But implementing connect makes Sonos a 'dumb' speaker so it's obviously unthinkable.

> Spotify frequently aggressively breaks Sonos for what I assume is anti-competitive reasons.

Any insight as to why they would do that? As far as I'm aware Spotify has no interest in selling hardware of their own, and Sonos isn't competing with them on the streaming front.

No, but they do have an interest in getting their software and protocol into these devices with Spotify Connect.

I'm personally really happy with this because the implementation is really slick. They're using their leverage on smart speaker makers to support them rather than the reverse because they can -- and the result from a user perspective is really nice since there's no weird compatibility issues. You either speak the connect protocol or you don't.

https://spotify-everywhere.com/

All such useless patents on concept and software functoonality encourage patent trolls.

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