I praised such detail when I commented on the nice feel of the power cord. I question the management decision to spend a lot of money on that, when they could have better engineered the core product. It is a sign of a company not using its resources wisely.
This is a company I have known since inception since my team at Microsoft worked with them to implement our audio formats in their products. We used to hold them up as a great example of how to do computer audio right when talking to just about any small and large audio company. It is under that light that I critique where they have landed where they missed the most important innovation in streaming content to a speaker at home.
When I look at this amplifier and its software, little of that excitement is there anymore that existed when I looked at their first generation product with that very nice, flashy controller.
When I lived in silicon valley, the moment we saw a company started to construct fancy buildings instead of putting the money towards product development, we would joke that their stock would tank and in almost every case it did! Same here. When I look at attention put in a power cord instead of internal design, features and usability of software, I worry about the company.
Looks are part of the Sonos brand and one of the reasons I Iike them. It makes sense for them to spend money on it.
So is how their buildings look.
I certainly don’t agree with everything thing they do but think they are on the right track now. Supporting the top three with Alexa, Siri, and soon Google assistant sounds really smart and attractive to consumers.
They should have added voice control years before Amazon did with Echo. Any focus group testing would have shown the difficulty of trying to find and play music with a smartphone.
This is no different on all the mobile phone companies that missed the boat on smartphones and app stores, letting Apple eat their lunch with iPhone. Where is Nokia now?
You seriously think Sonos should have spend the money to create their own voice control? Very costly to create and support. What about all the devices and various software actions the others support. Sonos would have to do that too to be relevant so they would spend a ton of money that doesn’t help sell their devices. It also would not have stopped Apple, Amazon, and Google coming out with their own voice control.