Sonos’ Quest to Unite the Smart Home With Sweet, Sweet Music

In August, Sonos announced it was working on Alexa integration. It would let millions of Sonos owners control their music with their voice and do all of the pizza-ordering, game-playing, life-improving things Amazon's voice assistant can do. The move provided a clear indication of where, after 15 years, Sonos sees its future. And yet seven months later, Alexa has 10,000 skills, and Sonos ain't one of them.

Such an integration could easily exist by now, says Antoine Leblond, vice president of software. If his team had plugged into Amazon's software, you'd already be able to say, "Alexa, let me talk to Sonos," and crank it up. No problem. But you couldn't choose the song you want to hear, or play it in three rooms simultaneously. And the way you talk to it, especially the part where you must request permission to speak to Sonos, doesn't feel right to Leblond. He wants a simpler interaction, so they're still at it. "We are more than willing to take the time it takes to ship the right experience in the end," he says. "In the long term, that pays off so much more than rushing to get something out there."

Of course, obsessively perfecting the experience made Sonos a hit in the first place. The company started down the coast from Silicon Valley in Santa Barbara, California, with the goal of creating an internet-connected sound system so people could play music throughout their home. Nothing more. That was in 2002, and although the founding foursome had an inkling of the streaming music revolution to come, the market only understood iPods and mp3 files. Remember when you had a hell of a time playing mp3s on your stereo? Sonos made it easy, and that made Sonos popular. But the company didn't truly take off until after the iPhone made it clear you'd one day stream everything. Today, Sonos supports dozens of streaming services, and streaming accounts, and nearly everyone with a Sonos uses it for streaming.

But now the company finds itself in a position familiar to many startups. It has, by any measure, accomplished what it set out to do. People love their Sonos, and its products sell well. But streaming music is easy now; you can do it with a $15 Google dongle. Meanwhile, gadgets like Amazon's Echo are taking over people's living rooms. No, they don't look or sound as nice as anything from Sonos, but they do the job, they're a snap to use, and people love using them to play music. Just as smartphones crushed the digital camera market with a vicious combination of acceptable image quality and exceptional convenience, products like Echoe and Google Home threaten to do the same to Sonos.

Last March, then-CEO John MacFarlane decided Sonos must recalibrate. "As we look to the future," he wrote in a blog post that also announced layoffs, "there are two big areas that we’re leaning into: paid streaming services, and voice control." In one, Sonos was ahead. In the other, it was way behind.

Patrick Spence, Sonos's new CEO and a former Blackberry executive who knows a thing or two about what happens when your company doesn't evolve with the times, makes clear that he isn't interested in competing with Amazon and Google. "We are focused on the home sound system and filling people's homes with music," he says. "We're not focused on figuring out how to be the world's largest retailer, or focused on trying to be the voice-search option for people." Such thinking explains why Sonos spent four years building Playbase, the $700 soundbase launching today.

You could view the Playbase as a perfect complement to the existing Sonos lineup, another beautiful speaker in the set. That's what Sonos wants. No one at Sonos ever tires of saying Sonos is, first and foremost, a music company. But you could also see the Playbase as the company's most radical move yet, a bold gambit to win coveted space in people's living rooms and set itself up as the interface of interfaces, the tool through which all other gadgets and protocols communicate. To make sure that no matter what you use, you can use Sonos. Sonos likely won't say that, for fear of alienating its partners---many of whom have similar ideas. But that's the only way for Sonos to make itself undisruptable, invincible to the Echoes of the future.

How is Sonos future-proofing itself? By opening up. The company once controlled its entire system, building new services into its app one by one. Now it must learn to be part of a broader, constantly changing, and occasionally volatile ecosystem in which apps and services come and go and users demand everything, everywhere, easily. It's building an open platform that any speaker, smart home gadget, or voice service can quickly integrate. It's letting other apps control Sonos. Because the biggest thing Sonos did right 15 years ago was understanding that people will always do the easiest thing. And being the easiest thing is getting much harder.

As Sonos developed Playbase, Giles Martin lugged prototypes to studios and offices all over Hollywood. He is Sonos' sound experience leader (he doesn't know what that means either), which means he makes sure everything Sonos builds sounds right. Not good, not interesting, but right. "It shouldn't have a Sonos character, or my character, or anyone else's character, imprinted on someone else's music," Martin says. "How dare we be that arrogant!"

Sonos designed the Playbase to sit underneath your TV, so Martin went looking for film people to evaluate it. He tracked down Chris Jenkins, who won the 2016 sound mixing Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road, through a connection with Ron Howard and played that movie through a Playbase. He did the same for Jon Taylor, who won the previous year's sound mixing Oscar for The Revenant. Each of them listened critically, parsing subtleties only they could discern and helping Martin hear his product through someone else's ears.

At first glance the Playbase seems odd, because Sonos already offers the Playbar soundbar. But a soundbar works best if you've mounted your TV to the wall, and Sonos found that 70 percent of people don't do that. Other companies make products for those people, but they aren't terribly good. Sonos creative director Dana Krieger thinks the companies making them "think that people who don't mount their TV don't care." Krieger sees a huge market for a great product that sits under your TV.

At just over two inches tall, and capable of supporting up to 75 pounds, the Playbase fits under nearly any TV. Sonos designed it to look like a single slab, something Moses might have carried down from the mountaintop. But look closely and you see 43,000 tiny holes of various sizes, through which sound and heat emanate. If you want to hear a long story about industrial design and even longer discussions about designers and sound engineers debating just how small a drill bit you can make, ask anyone at Sonos about those holes.

Using Sonos's clever Trueplay tech---an audio test that scans the acoustics of your room---you can set up a Playbase almost anywhere and have it sounding just right within minutes. It connects to the rest of your Sonos system, of course, providing wireless surround sound from a bunch of Play:1s or just floor-melting bass with the Sub. On one hand, this is just another Sonos product. But it is a product that puts Sonos front and center in your living room. And if Sonos hopes to unify the connected home, front and center is the only place to be.

When Spence talks about voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, he's still talking about music. "We all approach these in different ways," he says. "Amazon is approaching it like, 'We want to make Alexa easy so people will order more things.' Google looks at it and says, 'We want to make sure people can search the internet.' We look at it and say, 'Hey, this is a great way to get your music playing.'" Spence repeatedly mentions "time to music" as a key benchmark for Sonos: How long does it take to go from deciding you want to listen to something and having those silky jams filling the room? Voice assistants shrink the gap.

Rather than build its own voice assistant or pick a one to work with, Sonos wants to work with all of them. That's how the company has always operated. It didn't build a music service, because the 80 that it supports wouldn't be on the platform. Music services love Sonos because it provides millions of users and no competition. Spence thinks he can get Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and others to do the same thing for precisely the same reason.

Music remains the killer app, but Sonos considers sound an essential part of the smart home, "whether it’s the smoke detector or your smart washing machine that wants to be able to tell you it’s done with the wash," Leblond says. At first, Sonos merely wants to be part of those systems, so you can control your music from wherever you control the toaster. But in the long run, he wonders aloud, "do you really want every one of these things to have a speaker in it? Or what if Sonos was the speaker for your connected home?"

A few years ago, such thinking was anathema to Sonos. Back then the company lived peacefully in its own beautiful world; all your music, controlled through one Sonos app and playable on Sonos speakers. The app wasn't great, but at least everything was in one place. "Five years ago we thought it was a value proposition to say 'there's only one app, it does everything,'" says head of product marketing Michael Papish. Now Sonos can't afford to think that way. "Now it's simple to say, oh, you use Spotify all day long? Use Spotify at home. That's the way a normal person would expect the thing to work."

Everyone at Sonos remains adamant that the home is a unique space for tech. It's more social, less tethered to a single person, device, or account. That's why Sonos works with Spotify and Apple Music, and why it's committed to working with Google, Amazon, Apple, and everyone else. The whole point is that you shouldn't have to learn how to use it. It should just work, no matter how you try to use it. Internally, Sonos talks a lot about "continuity of control," making sure that a user won't get lost or break something if they ask Alexa to play a song and then immediately opens the Sonos app to change the song. "We also want to make it so it's seamless," Papish says. "Whether you're using Alexa, or our app, or a third-party device, they should just all sort of work together."' Even the way you speak to the services should be obvious and easy.

Isn't that the dream? A smart home that's actually smart, where you don't have to learn complicated hand-jives or memorize command soliloquies, where you can use Alexa and your partner can use Siri and everything works just fine? Maybe Sonos really does just care about making it easier to listen to music. Or maybe it's just being coy, trying to hide its true ambitions for fear of alienating its many equally ambitious partners. But here's what's obvious: If Sonos can speed up a traditionally cautious company, and truly make good on its promise to be more open and usable, it could turn a lovely wireless speaker underneath your TV the universal translator the smart home desperately needs. And unlike the Echo, sound damn good in the process.