Google would rather ruin its products than pay Sonos, and that's unacceptable | Hacker News Reader

Google would rather ruin its products than pay Sonos, and that's unacceptable

androidpolice.com

27 pointsstefan_26 comments

I'm no Google friend, but what is really unacceptable here is the way Sonos cripples their products with unnecessary "features" that have the sole purpose of tying users to their closed proprietary hardware and software.

To give an idea, here's a speaker which became unusable to the point it required the entire amplifier board to be replaced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeIk-4ItQ70

But nobody’s buying Sonos gear to get a dumb speaker. If they’re dropping Sonos money on those products, they’re buying into an ecosystem with capabilities that are a function of tightly coupled software and hardware. A whole lot like Apple, now that I think about it.

If that’s not an interesting value proposition to a hypothetical consumer, then it makes no sense for him or her to buy Sonos. But to say that something that doesn’t affect people who haven’t bought into the ecosystem means that Sonos is the real bad guy here seems like a whataboutist argument.

Fuck Sonos. Their products are truly awful. I have a Sonos sound bar that is the single worst piece of audio equipment I've ever owned. Half the time it doesn't connect to the TV even though it's plugged in, and you have to download their stupid app, open it, connect via bluetooth, bla, bla, bla. It's a fucking speaker. I should be able to plug it into the TV and it should just work. I don't need your fucking app that for some godforsaken reason requires access to my location data, I don't need this connected to WiFi, I just want sound.

Chromecast, on the other hand, I find to be a very useful invention. So thank you, Sonos, for helping to ruin that product as well, and helping to make the world just a wee bit worse.

Man. 100%. FUCK Sonos.

100% agree. I bought 4 sonos speakers early on and they worked great. Sonos has subsequently intentionally bricked them by insisting the app has to upgrade to a version which doesn't speak to them.

Fascinating. I get that google doesn't want to feed the patent troll, but the article really makes it look they're cutting off their nose to spite their face here. Glad I don't own any of this hardware. Seems like typical google behavior--making popular stuff and abandoning it; failing to do the most basic customer communications. Just another reminder that we must extricate google from our lives...

First and foremost, stop using gmail. I've been happy with FastMail. It includes calendar, notes, and file storage too. I like the android app, can configure mail filters in app (can't do that with gmail).

NextCloud is great for replacing google photos, drive, and docs.

DuckDuckGo has really grown up, it's my primary search now and I like it better. I love the bangs feature: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

I even set up my own Asterisk server and SMS-XMPP bridge to replace Google Voice, I can't recommend that for most people, but I'm sure there are other commercial alternatives.

An easy one is to not use Chrome. I prefer Fennec on mobile and LibreWolf on desktop (they're Firefox without Mozilla telemetry). I use Ungoogled Chromium when I need to test against Chrome.

Sadly there is really no alternative to Android besides iPhone which isn't my thing. I don't log into google on my devices, I use F-Droid for most things and Aurora Store when I need to download apps from the play store.

> I even set up my own Asterisk server and SMS-XMPP bridge to replace Google Voice

Is there an easy-to-follow guide for lay people to do so? I don't even need the SMS-XMPP bridge, just the ability to run my own phone number, but everytime I look at Twilio or Asterisk it just seems really overwhelming with no newbie-friendly guide.

If you just need call forwarding to a few numbers, plenty of SIP providers offer that out of the box, no need for Asterisk. You can also typically register a SIP phone or softphone directly with the provider. I have used Asterisk for 15+ years for my e-commerce business, so it is familiar. Asterisk can be overwhelming at first, and it can be difficult to find current information (there's a lot of old info out there that no longer applies). You would want to use PJSIP these days, so if you can find a guide for setting that up you should be good. If you have basic experience setting up Linux servers then you should be able to provision a basic asterisk server instance in a couple hours. I forward my main personal number to several cell phones with cheap plans where I can't disable voicemail, so to make that work I configured it so that I press one to accept the call. It also recognizes when I call in from one of those numbers and gives a dialtone, so I use a prefixer app to route outgoing calls through my Asterisk server as well. None of that is necessary if you use a softphone, but I'm often in the mountains where data is spotty. I enjoy the challenge of setting things up and learning new things, but I don't see this as the right route for everyone. I think you should be able to find commercial offerings similar to GV these days, so I would start by looking around for that. If anyone wants to start a business with me to offer a good GV alternative, I might be into that.

I like Mailbox.org for E-Mail and Organic Maps for navigation. For calendar/contacts sync I'm mostly happy with Ete Sync.

... but I do still fall back to Google Maps and search every now and then.

Most of the complaints seem to be related to controlling volume on grouped devices. How did Sonos get a patent like that? We've had lights on dimmer switches controlling groups of devices forever.

Is it one of those "simple existing idea with technology" patents?

> "simple existing idea with technology"

Probably not as those get knocked out on invalidity. Why not read the patent's claims and find out?

I mean, is there any chance google employees actually went to patent office and took sonos patents for their use?

I would argue sonos ruins things with patents for blatantly obvious features and broken grants

Since "journalists" don't bother linking to primary sources:

From [1]

> The Commission has determined that the appropriate remedy is:

> (i) a limited exclusion order prohibiting the importation of certain audio players and controllers, components thereof, and products containing the same that infringe one or more of

> claims 17, 21, 24, and 26 of the ’258 patent; (System and method for synchronizing operations among a plurality of independently clocked digital data processing devices) [2]

> claims 7, 14, and 22-24 of the ’953 patent; (Playback device) [3]

> claim 10 of the ’959 patent; (Multi-channel pairing in a media system) [4]

> claims 1, 2, and 5 of the ’949 patent; (Method and apparatus for adjusting volume levels in a multi-zone system) [5]

> and claims 1, 5, 6, and 12 of the ’896 patent; (Playback device connection) [6]

> and (ii) a cease and desist order against Google.

[1] https://www.usitc.gov/system/files/secretary/fed_reg_notices...

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

[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10209953B2

[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US9219959B2

[5] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8588949B2

[6] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10439896B2

When Chromecast first lost the ability to adjust volume from my smartphone, I was very confused. Took me at least a week or two to find out that it was removed intentionally and wasn't a weird bug. That bothered me.

It shouldn't even be legal for a product to get worse like this. At the very least you should now have the right to return the device because it fails to perform a function you bought it for.

Patents should be abolished.

My immediate naive reaction is that a world where everything is perpetually protected as a trade secret might be a worse one than we have now. Though certainly our current system has plenty of faults.

How do trade secrets in any way relate to patents, especially in this case? Any feature or design of a consumer product is by definition not a trade secret because it's known to the public.

A world where everything is "protected" as a trade secret would be preferable since trade secrets can be lawfully reverse engineered. They are only useful for things that you can meaningfully keep secret which is a tiny subset of ideas that are currently protected by patents, especially in egregious cases of patent trolling.

This supposes that figuring out how something is done is a bottleneck today. It isn't. It also supposes that figuring out how stuff is done is a bigger hurdle than the problems patents present to innovators. It isn't.

For patents to make sense we also have to ignore how they are used. Patents are used as mine fields around incumbents to keep challengers out. They are also used by parasitic companies who don't actually make anything as a legal form of extortion.

Yes, it is indeed naive to ignore reality and buy into the fantasy that patents contribute to society or in any way level the playing field. They do neither.

The problem we currently seem to be having is companies patenting things you can't possibly protect as a trade secret. Having one volume control for multiple devices is entirely obvious as soon as you run into the problem it solves.

China is hard at work on making this dream a reality, along with all forms of intellectual property!

This is what emerging economies do. The US did it to England. China is doing it to the US.

Believing that this is somehow about nations is misguided. It is about incumbents and political power. As soon as businesses reach the size and power where they have direct influence over politics, they will seek to stifle innovation to curb competition. The result is ever tightening IPR laws and a landscape that tilts in favor of those with money to wield the laws as a weapon. (Meaning that a patent isn't worth more than the war chest for litigation, so if you are a small fish owning patents: I'm sorry, but it doesn't really matter).

It has nothing to do with nations. It is far more general than that.

What a stupid world...

In the near future, just like Adobe telling users they need to pay a subscription to use Pantone colors, Google will say "It looks like you're trying to change volume. Please subscribe to the $2/month license fee to Sonos to do so."...

(July 2022)

Date definitely needed. I've heard all about this Google vs Sonos last year, and having this posted today I thought there was a new update.

For what it's worth, there is some volume control functionality brought back now. Not sure about speaker groups (I only have a single Nest mini) but I can now control volume without being in the casting app.

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