Sonos: Working with big tech sucks | Hacker News Reader

Sonos: Working with big tech sucks

theverge.com

55 pointsTomte34 comments

> including synchronizing audio across groups of speakers, adjusting the group volume, and setting up devices on a local wireless network.

I'm sorry but patents like this shouldn't really be enforceable, its completely anti-competitive.

I guess we'll have to reserve judgment until we see Sonos' complaint, but if the main thrust of it is that Google, Apple, and Amazon should not be able to make internet connected speakers because Sonos got there first, then I'm not a buyer. Sonos speakers are extremely pricey for what they are. A world in which they are the only option is a worse one than one in which there is competition, even if that means Sonos shareholders make less money. (FWIW, the request for an injunction on Google selling its own speakers suggests to me that this is the main argument, so I'm already biased against Sonos' position.)

Of course, I am not a fan of Google or anyone attempting to force some kind of exclusivity arrangement. That doesn't seem like something that benefits the end-user. We'll have to see whether that is a correct representation of the conversations that they were having.

> because Sonos got there first

Devil's advocate: That's exactly what patents are for though. Someone had a really good idea, built it, and someone else came along and said "that's a really great idea, I'm going to do that too." We, as technologists, keep asserting that ideas have value, until it's an idea we really want.

> Google, Apple, and Amazon should not be able to make internet connected speakers

They absolutely can, they just have to pay for the right.

> Devil's advocate: That's exactly what patents are for though. Someone had a really good idea, built it, and someone else came along and said "that's a really great idea, I'm going to do that too." We, as technologists, keep asserting that ideas have value, until it's an idea we really want.

Ideas have very little value. What is valuable is the implementation of it. And that's what patents protect.

I'm sure that thousands, if not millions of people thought about connected speakers. Sonos build an enclosure and a PCB, specified the protocols to be used, designed the software that goes with it, etc... patenting the technical innovations they spend money on developing along the way. That's what Sonos brought to the table, not the idea of connected speakers.

If Google decided to redevelop things from scratch based on that idea, as they claimed, they owe nothing to Sonos. Sure, they have the advantage of knowing that it is a good idea, but Sonos got a head start, that's fair. What Sonos complains about is that Google didn't develop their solution from scratch and copied more than the general idea.

> If Google decided to redevelop things from scratch based on that idea, as they claimed, they owe nothing to Sonos.

That's not how patents work. If Google had never heard of Sonos and independently developed a connected speaker, and the result was too similar to what the patent covers, then Google would owe Sonos. Less than if the infringement were willful, but it's still infringement per the law.

> I'm sure that thousands, if not millions of people thought about connected speakers. Sonos build an enclosure and a PCB, specified the protocols to be used, designed the software that goes with it, etc... patenting the technical innovations they spend money on developing along the way. That's what Sonos brought to the table, not the idea of connected speakers.

That's not what Sonos patented, though. Take a look at their "method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system." [1] There's nothing about hardware, protocols, algorithms, etc. It's basically a patent on a UI that lets you make a group of players on a network, and if you change the volume for one player the rest of them also change.

[1] https://patentswarm.com/patents/US8588949B2

Ok. But prior art should blast this out of the water, at least IMO. In 2000 I had friends in college running Linux for streaming music to speakers. I was impressed at the time because this wasn’t someone in the CS department.

So if anything I feel like it could be argued that they didn’t invent anything new, only packaged it into a new form factor.

Sonos formed in 2002, first demos were 2004, according to the wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonos

Can I then file patents for 'internet connected X', for all X, and expect every tech company who figures out how to actually build the thing to pay me royalties? Sonos had a first movers advantage which they exploited with an over priced product. Now they're having trouble competing so they turn to the courts instead of making a better product. I have to say that taking Google to court seems like an all or nothing strat, given the resources their opponents bring to the table; a move that only makes sense when you run out of other options. I'd short Sonos.

As with many things, Richard Feynman did it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761433

True, but internet connected speakers isn't exactly a novel concept. Are we just going to give patents out to everyone to be the first person to internet-connect X for all values of X?

Why? The patent would be for specific implementations to achieve these features. They aren't trivial.

Let's not assume this. Patents should be written that way, but many of them are not.

These things strike me as quite trivial and I'm fairly confident we could probably find pre-Sonos prior art for all of them.

Same as how people were quite certain they could find prior art for one-click checkout?

Have you looked at the patents in question? Here they are: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. 1,2,4, and 5 are absurdly broad, obvious, almost certainly were preceded by basic networking functions, and should not have been granted in the first place. The third is possibly novel so I'll grant them that. This whole case is a great example of the ridiculousness of software patents in the modern USPTO system.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2/en

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9195258B2/en

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9219959B2/en

[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10209953B2/en

[5] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10439896B2/en

The oneclick patent didn't cover an "implementation" in the sense that we'd normally define it, it covered any UI with that same flow.

Here’s the actual complaint: https://www.scribd.com/document/442039322/Sonos-ITC-Complain...

I haven’t read through the whole thing, but I did browse through one of the allegedly infringed patents (“method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system”) and it’s every bit as broad as you’d expect: https://patentswarm.com/patents/US8588949B2

Didn't Squeezebox implement that feature years before Sonos was even a thing?

Not totally unrelated, but Sonos recently bought snips.ai, a startup working on assistant with a focus on privacy and local voice recognition (and they also use some Rust). The move is likely motivated by Sonos not wanting to rely on Google/Amazon

Man, The Verge's headlines are really exhausting.

What's with the random apostrophe in the title?

The title of the html page has a couple extra words. Maybe Verge tried to change the title to remove `Google lawsuit` and forgot the apostrophe.

>Sonos’ Google lawsuit says what every smaller tech company was thinking: working with big tech sucks - The Verge

It’s possessive: “Sonos’ lawsuit against Google.”

It’s possessive, but represents a grey zone in how apostrophes work in modern English.

A trailing apostrophe is for a possessive following a plural “s”. But “Sonos” is just a made up name, meant to evoke the Latin “sonus” I’d guess. Regardless, it’s a singular name, the fact that it has a trailing “s” doesn’t mean it’s plural.

So in this argument, a possessive should be spelled “Sonos’s”.

BUT! There’s a longstanding (but eroding) tradition that there’s a specific exception for classical or biblical names that end in an s. Is Sonos a classical or biblical name? I don’t think so, but I suppose people could decide it ought to be treated like one.

Finally, recent advice on this is to let pronunciation guide the presence of a final “s”. So if you pronounce Sonos’ as “soh-nohs” and not “soh-noh-ses”, the APA thinks Sonos’ is reasonable [0].

[0] https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2013/06/forming-possessiv...

And yet peole are claiming only the Chinese have IP issues...

Do people claim this? From my limited understanding, it seems like the IP environment is rife with problems in the US and abroad (e.g. copyright trolls).

That said, it can be simultaneously true that there are problems in these countries but that the environment is still significantly better for investment than in China (where - again, in my limited understanding - there's not simply very little recourse for IP, but government backed corpra is actively endorsing infringement)

So what, nobody at tech wants to be responsible for a Docker strategy decision.

The article still has no answer on why it is so difficult to actually get a Sonos to play nice with the two interfaces supplied by Amazon and Google. These are becoming industry standard functioning interfaces i.e. APIs that every consumer can hookup with IFTTT.

I really wish people (you) would read.

> The other thing that rings true in the NYT story is the detail that Google told Sonos it would pull Google Assistant support if Sonos enabled simultaneous wake words. That’s the feature which lets speakers listen for both “Alexa” and “Okay Google” at the same time. Google really comes off looking like a bully.

While true, this is also pretty much standard practice in multiple industries. Everyone wants to be the exclusive service available on a device, whether it's a speaker, TV, or car head unit. It's up to the device manufacturer to navigate this (usually they'll get a kickback for accepting an exclusivity agreement).

Please follow the HN civility guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

At the time I wrote my comment there was just 1 comment. Specifically about Sonos acquiring an AI speech startup which wasn't mentioned in the article. This was information enough for me discarding Sonos POV around what you call bullying.

I usually read the article first, the comments second and write something when I think I have something to add to the discussion.

I really wish you read the HN rules specifically mentioning not to comment about assumptions on reading!

> The article still has no answer on why it is so difficult to actually get a Sonos to play nice with the two interfaces supplied by Amazon and Google

This is answered in the article. That's what GhettoMaestro is talking about. Specifically - Google said that it would pull Assistant support if Sonos added support to simultaneously listen for Alexa. That's the answer as to why they don't support 2 competing interfaces. Not a technical decision - but looks more like a business decision from Google.

Even if you disregard bullying - this seems like a way for Google to assert exclusivity.

>APIs that every consumer can hookup with IFTTT

This only works if the API is open enough to use. I somehow don't think Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant agreements with third-parties would support that.

Sounds like healthy competition behavior to me. Sonos is always allowed to push 2 sku's one for Alexa and one for GA.

Holding users hostage and pressuring them to purchase expensive unnecessary additional hardware (wasting resources and pollution) is not healthy competition.

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