Sonos back peddles on ‘legacy’ product updates having received countless complaints from its customer base on plans to stop updating its older products from May this year. In a blog posting, the CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence, apologised to customers and offered what amounts to a split upgrading process where legacy kit will continue to receive updates to allow them to coexist and function with other products but will not receive newer features. No details of how the company is to achieve this were given and more details are promised ‘in the coming weeks’.
Spence outlined the path forward for Sonos customers saying, “First, rest assured that come May, when we end new software updates for our legacy products, they will continue to work as they do today. We are not bricking them, we are not forcing them into obsolescence, and we are not taking anything away. Many of you have invested heavily in your Sonos systems, and ///we intend to honor that investment for as long as possible. While legacy Sonos products won’t get new software features, we pledge to keep them updated with bug fixes and security patches for as long as possible. If we run into something core to the experience that can’t be addressed, we’ll work to offer an alternative solution and let you know about any changes you’ll see in your experience.”
He continued, “Secondly, we heard you on the issue of legacy products and modern products not being able to coexist in your home. We are working on a way to split your system so that modern products work together and get the latest features, while legacy products work together and remain in their current state. We’re finalising details on this plan and will share more in the coming weeks.”
As more and more audio products are either ‘smart’ i.e. computer based or reliant on ‘cloud services’ such as streaming, it can only be a matter of time before they become like PCs which effectively have a finite life. Recent examples include Microsoft withdrawing support for Windows XP and Windows 7 and its defunct eBooks service where readers found that they had only purchased a licence to read an ebook and so it disappeared from their reader when the service stopped. Similarly, if your streaming service decides to stop tomorrow your offline library will become unplayable.
