Sonos CEO John MacFarlene Steps Down From the Company He Helped Found (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After nearly a decade and a half as the chief executive officer of the hardware company he cofounded, John MacFarlane has announced his resignation as the head of Sonos. The move had reportedly been planned for some time, with the executive citing a number of personal reasons. That decision was delayed, however, due in part to increased and unexpected competition by Amazon's line of Echo speakers, which cut into Sonos' bottom line. "The pivot that Sonos started at this time last year to best address these changes is complete, now it's about acceleration and leading," MacFarlane wrote in an open letter published on the Sonos site. "I can look ahead and see the role of Sonos, with the right experiences, partners, and focus, with a healthy future. In short, the future of the home music experience, and the opportunity for Sonos has never been better." The role of CEO will be filled by Patrick Spence, who is currently serving as the company's President, after four years as COO and stints at RIM (BlackBerry) and IBM Canada. MacFarlane will be staying on at the Santa Barbara-based streaming hardware company in a consulting role, but will also be resigning his job on its board of directors, telling The New York Times, "I don't want to be that founder who's always second-guessing."

Comments

He can't be found

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like his app can't find the speaker it was just connected to 10 seconds ago.

Zero shits are given

[Anonymous Coward]

Overpriced average sounding crap. Life moves on.

Re:Zero shits are given

[Anonymous Coward]

Overpriced average sounding crap.

You don't buy Sonos for the sound quality. You buy it for the seamless networking and whole-house streaming options.

Re:Zero shits are given

[alex67500]

Hang on, yes you do. The PlayBar is one of the finest sounding devices for home, even if it is overpriced.

How about focus on setting a static IP?

[vinn]

I'm so sick of businesses buying Sonos and expecting them to magically work. Oh, yeah, awesome in your house when you don't have multicasting turned off and aren't worried about crossing VLAN's. Maybe John can spend his time figuring out how to just put an option for a static IP on the damn things.

Re:How about focus on setting a static IP?

[Octorian]

And when I complain about such things, the usual reaction I get from people is something like... Haha! Why the heck are you even doing VLANs at home? I don't have any problems. Your use case doesn't matter, why should anyone waste time on it?

Seriously, I'm sick and tired of people saying such things. I do have multiple VLANs on my network, and you know what? For everything *except* SONOS, it actually works just fine. All I needed to do was run a few services on my router to make sure things connected (e.g. an mDNS daemon).

Re:How about focus on setting a static IP?

[aaarrrgggh]

Yes, they could save a whole lot of pain for end users by doing this, but I just wish they formally embraced a REST API... so many things that it could do that go beyond simple use-cases...

FWIW though, IGMP-Proxy can be your friend if you let it...

Re:How about focus on setting a static IP?

[vinn]

Yeah, I had to do something like that last year. Campus environment, the wifi was off a Ubiquiti controller two firewalls upstream, and the wired network was a mess because of PCI compliance. It took nearly two days to make a single Sonos system work because a whole network edge had to be rearchitected with a slow man in a boat ferrying packets across the river Styx. The next time I had to do it, I just slammed in a rogue wifi router.

Re:How about focus on setting a static IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a business can't you just set a static DHCP lease for the device?

Re:How about focus on setting a static IP?

[auzy]

That's your issue?

Our biggest issue is that everyone wires up all the units, and when they cause network loops because they don't have STP enabled, they call us for help.

And, their soundbar's are generations behind the competition at the moment (hell, everyone from Sony to Yamaha has Atmos ones these days).

I'm going to be so happy when MusicCast takes over. And it comes free built into their receivers, so less fudging around.

I Love my sonos, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, you want to be a leader? How about coming out with a well thought out product every decade or so?

Oh, great a $700 soundbar. That should appeal to people that want premium home theaters, except, oh wait, it's 3-channels! Want the full 5.1? That's $1800 that I can get from Vizio for $200 with equal quality sound. Sorry dudes, but for $1800 I want me some Atmos/DTS:X action. The Sub sounds OK, but $700 for "OK" is a bit steep.

Oh yeah, have you seen their absurd marketing? They are having parties in some art gallery in New York with listening parties and cooking? Yeah, that's not pretentious as hell.

Look Sonos, I love ya, but pick a freaking lane and swim in it. You have a fantastic product, but you can't seem to figure out what to do with it. You want to be a premium "lifestyle" product? Great, then focus on that. You want to compete with Amazon, then you need to be all over their API (and Apples and Googles, And Microsoft's and ...) You want to be trendy stores where the pitchfork crowd comes to listen? Just...dont.

Re:I Love my sonos, but...

[Mr_Silver]

Ok, you want to be a leader? How about coming out with a well thought out product every decade or so?

I love Sonos too, but their current line up is several years old. Have speaker and wireless technologies not moved on at all?

Not to mention the state of the app. Despite the open letter from their CEO over a year ago accepting that they might have missed the boat on streaming technologies and need to catch up there is still no AirPlay support. No Chromecast audio either. No bluetooth. If you're going to pay twice as much as the competition, then it would be nice if you could actually use your speakers with the main technologies out there.

But that's okay, because they've been concentrating on the local music capability right? For example, acknowledging that 4 people in the house might have completely different music tastes and do not want to merge their music library into one big pool? Nope, nothing has changed.

In the last couple of years they've launched their TruePlay app, added Apple Music and allowed Spotify users to control the music from the (superior) Spotify app. That doesn't seem to be very much to me.

Re: I Love my sonos, but...

[adolf]

Speakers haven't changed much in decades, and 802.11g/n is fine for stereo audio.

Audio gear doesn't age nearly as fast as computers, or even cars.

Adapt existing Speakers

[CrashNBrn]

Why not just get a Google Audio Puck ($35) or a BlueTooth transceiver ($25) ... for your existing speakers.

Re:Adapt existing Speakers

[Anonymous Coward]

That product competes with cheap BT speakers.

If you think that product remotely compares or competes with Sonos, then you are clueless about what Sonos is and does.

Sonos is for streaming either internet radio, a streaming service, or your local lossy or lossless music across multiple zones and rooms.

Re:Adapt existing Speakers

[Anonymous Coward]

You just described Chromecast Audio.

Re:Adapt existing Speakers

[b0bby]

I spent many years trying out various incarnations of streaming to my speakers (admittedly gave up before Chromecasts arrived) and Sonos is, for me, the answer.

- BlueTooth is just a pain for me, too many glitches; Sonos makes its own connection to the streaming source so its independent of your device
- The fact that I can start a stream on my Android phone in one or several areas of the house, then my wife can use her iPhone to change the volumes or add an remove zones, is really great
- It's easy to use, and pretty much always just works.

There are some downsides - can't play from just any app you want without using a line in, and setting up a system is expensive. I'm generally a tightwad, so it took me some time to bite the bullet. Now, it's our most used system and I can't see not having it. If you like to listen to music, and want a whole house system, you really need to check it out.

Who, what?

[Gravis Zero]

What does Sonos do and why should I give a shit about this John MacFarlane fellow? A little context goes a long ways, Slashdot editors.

Re:Who, what?

[Chris Mattern]

I dunno, but I really liked his work on Family Guy and The Amazing Spiderman. He's really versatile!

Re:Who, what?

[coofercat]

Comments about your geek card aside... ;-)

Sonos is a brand of network attached music players. Most of their products are essentially 'wifi speakers', which not only connect to your local wifi (or wired lan), but also communicate with each other when necessary to create stereo pairs or groups which all play the same thing exactly in-sync. They claim to be able to play just about all the audio on the planet, although Amazon Music seems to be a constant problem, as does SoundCloud. That said though, they really do play an awful lot of stuff extremely well.

There are some (reasonable) criticisms of the product line though. They're considered to be expensive (and more expensive than most competing products), and whilst their audio quality is generally considered to be pretty good, it could be better. Products like the 'Amp' (which has no speakers, it needs some wired speakers to be added) is only 50W, whereas pretty much any amp you could even consider being decent quality is more like 200W upwards. Also, the Amp costs more than two "Sonos 1" devices (which are, more or less, single speakers + network attachment), so it's expensive, and not as good as it really should be, given Sonos pitches itself as being somewhat 'premium'.

Technically, Sonos is pretty interesting. To work around people's crappy home wifi, Sonos has it's own mesh network which means that a Sonos device can be out of reliable range of your Wifi, but still play music just fine. The magic sauce that makes it all work is proprietary, and so you can't hack together a Sonos-compatible device on a Raspberry Pi or something. There are some 'hacks' you can do though, like turning off all wireless in devices you've wired to the lan. It's not really documented or talked about, but if you fill a rack with a load of sonos it'll probably crash your wifi (even if wired) until you turn off wifi on the devices. Devices have dual ethernet ports in a sort of hub arrangement, so you can daisychain them together if you need to.

As for John MacFarlane - honestly, I have no idea who he is. From the summary, I'd guess he's a somewhat visionary tech-savvy business guy who started a company from very little and made it into a multinational that at lot of people have heard of (granted, that doesn't appear to be you). I'm guessing his moving on suggests that Sonos's business will change in the coming months, and as is so often the case, that may not be a good thing for those of us with an existing investment.

Re:Who, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

do you live under a rock?
how do you not know what sonos is?
ever hear of a company called apple or do we need to explain that to you?
if i mention sourceforge do we have to explain that as well?
this is news for nerds, if you don't know what sonos is your not a nerd, go back to FB dickhead....
they aren't obscure, they sell them at bestbuy, target and in nerd circles for over a decade.

Awesome Sauce!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sonos stuff is awesome. Good work to that guy.