Over the years, Sonos has weathered competition from better known rivals like Apple and Bose to find a devoted audience among audio enthusiasts. But lately its wireless speaker has lost ground to an unexpected competitor, Amazon’s Echo.
Now it faces another challenge: a change in the corner office. After 14 years leading the company he helped found, John MacFarlane has resigned as chief executive of Sonos and has been replaced by one of his deputies, Patrick Spence.
I don’t understand the competition. To me, Sonos and Echo serve different purposes—Sonos is a wonderful wireless speaker system and Echo is more of an assistant.
This is an Amazon marketing puff piece. The Echo is in no way a threat to Sonos. The Echo doesn’t do multi-room. The bigger threat is the Google Chromecast audio because you can attach them to active speakers and amplified systems with AUX inputs and zone them just like a Sonos.
The bigger problem with Sonos is their product lineup is aging. While there is more competition (Bose, DTS Play-Fi, Denon Heos, Yamaha MusicCast, Chromecast Audio, Bluesound and more) Sonos has the most mature offerings and best integration.
The Echo isn’t even in the same league. Bringing them up is a head scratcher.
Wonder how much of this is just having lead Sonos for 14 years and being ready for something different.
PS: Here it is… ”
Mr. MacFarlane said he had planned to resign as chief executive earlier, citing his wife’s bout with breast cancer and his aging parents as factors. “
Synchronized multi-room playback is a very tiny hook for Sonos to hang their whole hat on. Remember that the iPhone 1.0 wasn’t the best at any individual thing – Blackberry had a better keyboard, iPods could store a lot more music, computers had a better web browser, etc – but it did so many things “good enough” that when Apple put them all together into a single device that you kept in your pocket, they had a winner. In much the same way, the Amazon Echo (I’ve been using one since the initial pre-release) certainly isn’t the best wireless speaker, nor does it have niche features like synchronized multi-room playback. But it’s good enough for most people, very easy to set up, and when combined with a streaming music service and voice control – plus all the voice assistant stuff – much like the iPhone 1.0 it also becomes a “magical” device to have in one’s home.
It reduces friction around music in a way only the best converged devices do. I can’t count the number of times I’ve decided, while my hands were busy prepping dinner, to listen to some music via a simple “Alexa, play Zero 7 on Pandora” voice command. Skip a track, change stations, set a kitchen timer, adjust the volume, oh hey what about that new podcast I just heard about? All hands free. I just signed up for the Amazon Prime Music service (Echo-only plan right now) over the holidays, and now when a friend is over and music is discussed in any way, hearing the artist or song or album in question is just a few spoken words away.
The only thing I can compare the Amazon Echo to, in terms of reducing music/audio friction and increasing joy in a really game-changing way, would be Napster.
Let me put it this way. When I get into the car with my iPhone, I often accidentally start out with “Alexa” instead of “Hey Siri”…
Hooked an Amazon Echo Dot to my Play:5 and I can now play music just by asking. For £3.99 per month here in the UK I have unlimited music and it’s a rare occasion for me to use the Sonos app to play music.
Most people cant tell good fidelity from bad.
Seems like the Chromecast Audio would be a bigger competitor than Echo. But for me the Dot is adequate audio for where I need it.