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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It’s a company that makes speakers. Unbelievable that it can have such value to be able to be listed on NASDAQ.

My Google Home costs $30 second hand, don’t sound as good, but I’ve not spent a single cent on it after setting it up. What is SONOS doing?

Not exactly sure what you mean - is there some reason companies that sell speakers shouldn't be able to be publically traded?

Yes. It will further abstract the owners’ responsibility to the users, and the product will get shittier faster.

That's a general rant against publically traded companies. I'm specifically asking about the original posters take that a company that makes speakers specifically shouldn't be publicly traded. Like it sounded like they thought a speaker company couldn't be big enough to be on NASDAQ or something?

The market has matured, but as of a year ago, there isn't another solution that I could drop in that could replace my SONOS system. SONOS is so far ahead and had to establish themselves by solving for so many fringe use cases that they are generally the only ones who have things like the connect:amps to bridge wired outdoor speakers and architectural in-ceiling/in-garden speakers within the same ecosystem

I'm sure that at some point, Samsung or Google or Sony or some upstart will catch up, but it will be a long time before someone eliminates SONOS from contention despite this multi-year setback

HEOS-capable gear from Marantz and Denon cover a lot of the applications you referenced. I decided I would never buy another Sonos product after the S2 rollout, and I now have a mix of eleven Denon and Marantz receivers driving both built-in, freestanding, and outdoor speakers of my choice all over my house.

So basically the only USP of Sonos is mindshare.

They had a fairly unique and high-quality product in the early days.

It just did’t evolve very far or very fast, or even adapt pricing to better fit a rapidly changing market.

They switched away from a focus on multi-room hi-fi (or at least mid-fi) audio and users with their own hoard of digital audio to focus more on streaming services and chase the trend of little monophonic speakers. The higher-end devices remained good but became ever more niche.

Then they broke everything, particularly customer trust, with the app update.

This probably costs a fortune. Certainly there is a market.

HEOS is amazing for the size of the dev team, which I think is a couple folks somewhere in a large garage in Minnesota[0]. The amount of things they never touch is amazing. I appreciate the stability - my HEOS 1 speaker is still working, streaming tunein and tidal without issues - but when it comes to the app, it's borderline stagnation at this point.

[0] I have no idea what it is actually

Heh, this thread reminded me that I own Sonos speakers that I haven't used in several years because at some point they updated and I needed to install an app or make an account or something to use them and never did.

So while it's maybe neat that they solved fringe use cases, it's unfortunate that they failed at the basic use case of "just easily play audio from my phone"

Look into Roon.

I think you're underselling the technical complexity of doing what Sonos did. It was a pretty impressive feat for them to do what they did over WiFi. The reason your Google Home can do it is because, while it's a pretty decent technical challenge, it's not insurmountable, and Google decided that the price tag Sonos put on themselves was more expensive then Google dedicating a reasonable quantity of their highly talented engineering staff to recreate the technology.

I think that's the kicker. It was revolutionary when it came out, and it's a solid technical solution, but Sonos was novel over a decade ago.

Every novel invention becomes commodity over time. The issue is that, instead of trying to invent something new, they’re adding gimmicks and present it as growth.

True, but as the comment a few above mentions, “we demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.” Why even grow at all once you’ve achieved a great networked speaker? If the product is mature, everything after is gimmicks especially weighed against user satisfaction, the ultimate goal.

You can always short SONO. It'll probably muddle along for 5+ more years until someone buys it up for the brand name. There just isn't the market for their speakers that there used to be.

I did this with an amplifier and a couple cheap AudioCast devices as inputs. I can go to the app and pick which zones play together.

> 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.

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.

>Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon.

Every publicly listed business already does this, in the form of stock grants and options with various targets to hit at various intervals. See bottom of page 51 for an example:

https://investor.apple.com/sec-filings/sec-filings-details/d...

It’s where all those rage bait headlines of extreme executive compensation come from, from maturing equity granted before the stock appreciated a good amount over the course of a few years.

There is absolutely no basis for the sweeping, extraordinary claim that “every publicly listed business” is managed and incentivized around sustainable long-term value.

I hate to be aggressive but it’s really pretty godawful that people let absurd, corrosive claims like this fly. There is a creeping normalcy to weird Art Laffer talking points and weird Milton Friedman Freak Offs with no evidence. Things suck for the typical person since Dick Cheney and Art Laffer started “cutting taxes”.

You’re wrong in a way that demands a complete ignorance of everything from news to history to human empathy.

This mindset needs fucking therapy and where therapy fails the legal system for a fucking change.

> Well, we could at least examine the idea of paying executives over a longer time horizon.

This is not

> There is absolutely no basis for the sweeping, extraordinary claim that “every publicly listed business” is managed and incentivized around sustainable long-term value.

There has been plenty of research into figuring out how executive compensation can be tied to longer term performance, but “sustainable long term value” is such a nebulous term, I have no idea what it could mean other than a fantasy where people are able to magically measure everything they want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_compensation

I only meant to highlight the fact that it is standard practice at publicly listed businesses to hire consultants whose job it is to figure out how to align executives and reward them for achieving long term goals.

Maybe you think the current timetables are not long term enough, or the measures are not correct, but it’s not as if cash is being handed out Willy nilly.

NVIDIA is posting profit margins up there with the Dutch East India Company (check it) on the back of the “agents” that are about to obsolete not just programmers specifically but white collar workers generally.

We’re handing out trillions in cap for press releases.

What on God’s green earth the fuck are you talking about?

Willy nilly? Will Wonka with a chocolate factory is closer to earth.

And NVidia is pretty much a monopoly in its field like the VoC was, only not legally bound. But the AI boom is pretty much a tulip mania at this point so I would hedge my bets.

> For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.

The reason is tax law and it applies to all companies not just tech. Removing the double-taxation of dividends would fix so much of our economy.

If you run a stable, no-growth but profitable company, and each year return the profits to the owners (shareholders) in the form of a dividend, that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.

If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.

We could avoid a lot of the boom-bust cycles, enshittification of products and other economic problems if we just structured tax law to encourage stable, profitable companies issuing boring predictable dividends instead of our current system that requires infinite growth.

Or tax sale of shares the same so there is no loophole and you can either spend it on something useful or lower taxes for everyone instead of just for shareholders.

So is this the difference between capital gains and income tax?

>that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.

Why is that bad? The first case is income to the corporation and they pay income tax on it. The second is income to the shareholder and they pay income tax on it. How is it different from the corporation's employees paying income tax on money received from the corporation?

>If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.

That's true as long as the shareholders never sell their shares. Once they do, it's a taxable event like the dividend.

> How is it different from the corporation's employees paying income tax on money received from the corporation

The money paid to employees is only taxed once.

We (pretty much everywhere) tax companies on their profits, but individuals on their income. It seems unfair, it leads to some weird but accepted inequalities (like the cost of renting a house vs buying), but no alternative seems to work.

This is nonsense because companies can and do replace dividends with share buybacks.

While sometimes criticized as "executives juicing the stock price because that's what their incentives are tied to", in fact investors recognise that buybacks are economically equivalent to dividends, but tax-advantaged (for exactly the reasons you gave, they don't create a taxable event for the shareholders).

One problem with buybacks is it's socially difficult for companies to replace dividends with buybacks - by convention, dividends are usually issued on a regular schedule and buybacks are ad-hoc, so "cutting dividends" is seen as a sign of a company that no longer has reliable profits. But that really is just convention and it would only take a few companies switching to normalize this.

Amen.

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