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Two months have been charged for smart speakers – Amazon published this week a group including updated versions of its existing Echo hardware and a new Studio with its premium. Sonos also introduced its first Bluetooth-enabled portable speaker, Sonos Move, and launched its collaboration collection with Ikea in August. Meanwhile, Apple has not said anything about the HomePod during its last big product event – an omission that makes it all the more obvious the smart choice for Apple to acquire someone who knows what he does in this category: Sonos.
Highly aligned
Externally, it is difficult to find two societies that seem more aligned philosophically than Sonos. and Apple in terms of product design and business model. Both are clearly focused on providing high-end hardware (at a generally higher price) and both are using services to increase and enhance the appeal of their hardware, even if Apple is changing this combination a bit. growing service business.
His bone, like Apple, clearly has a strong focus and a significant investment in industrial design, and is working hard to give its products a truly distinctive look that stands out from the crowd and is immediately recognizable once you know what to look for. Even the company's preference for a mostly black and white palette is quite different from Apple, at least from Apple, which has led to the rebirth of multicolored palettes for some of its most popular devices, including the iPhone. .
Then, from a technical point of view, Apple and Sonos seem to want to work together – and the results of their collaboration have been great for consumers who use both ecosystems. AirPlay 2 support is actually standard on all modern Sonos devices, and Sonos is already the default choice for those looking to make multiform audio based on AirPlay 2, thanks to the wide range of options. available in different formats and at different prices. . Sonos and Apple also offer an Apple Music integration for the Sonos controller application. You can now use voice control via Alexa to also play Apple Music.
Competitive movements
The main problem for which Sonos, a company owned by Apple, has not made sense so far, at least from Sonos' point of view, is that the loudspeaker manufacturer has taken advantage of the benefits of a flat platform that works well with all major streaming and virtualization service providers. assistants. The latest Sonos contributors offer both Amazon Alexa and Google For example, wizard support and Sonos software are connected to virtually all major audio and audio streaming services available.
What has changed, especially following the many announcements from Amazon this week, is that competitors like Amazon seem to increasingly want to own the activities that currently belong to the Sonos domain. Amazon's Echo Studio is a new premium speaker that competes directly with Sonos in a totally new way, and the company regularly releases more sonic versions of its other more affordable Echos. It also features new feature-rich, multi-feature audio features, including wireless surround surround support for home theater – all in the Sonos wheelhouse.
Right now, Sonos and Amazon seem to be comfortably in "money" territory, but more and more, it does not appear that Amazon is content to let them their high-end market segment with respect to category of speakers. Amazon will probably do everything in its power to optimize the use of Alexa, on its own devices and those of third parties, but also seems to want to strengthen and expand its own range of proprietary devices, with speakers at your fingertips.
Other competitors, including Google and Apple, do not seem to have been as successful with their competing products from Sonos, but the speaker manufacturer also faces challenges from all sides on the part of the defenders from the hi-fi and audio industry, as well as seems to go against new device manufacturers with audio ambitions and obvious cost advantages like Anker.
Missing ingredients / work to be done
Of course, there are big challenges and potential red flags that prevent Apple from buying Sonos, or whose resulting union works well for consumers. Sonos works very well because it is independent of the service, for example, and its success with recent products seems to be integration with the smart home assistants that people actually seem to want to use, namely Alexa and Google Assistant.
Under the ownership of Apple, it is quite possible that Apple Music enjoys at least a preferential treatment, if not the only streaming service offered. It is likely that Siri would replace Alexa and Assistant as the only virtual voice service available, and it would be almost unthinkable that Apple would continue to support competing services if it made that purchase.
That said, there is probably already a significant overlap between Apple and Sonos customers, and to the extent that there is some flexibility in the service (similarly for competitors streaming to iOS devices, including Spotify). so being locked in Siri probably would not bite so much. And that would serve to give Siri the foot home that the HomePod failed to provide. Apple would also be better incentivized to work on improving Siri's performance as a general home assistant, which would ultimately be beneficial for customers of the Apple ecosystem.
Another intelligent adjacency
Apple's large acquisitions are few and intermediate, but the ones it realizes are usually adjacent to its core business. An acquisition of Sonos sets a strong precedent for the purchase of Beats by Apple in 2014, but is not motivated by the desire to provide the underlying product and relational base for the launch of a streaming service.
However, Sonos is a reversal of the historical Apple model, which involves using excellent services to sell hardware. The Sonos ecosystem is a great, easy-to-use, high-quality way to get the most out of Apple's streaming music and video services (and the all new subscription to games), which are all more important than ever for society. his monolithic iPhone business.
I'm not the first to think that an Apple-Sonos deal makes sense: J.P. Morgan's analyst, Samik Chatterjee, suggested it earlier this year, in fact. From my point of view, however, the moment has never been more favorable for this acquisition and the motivations have never been stronger for both parties.
Disclosure: In 2015-2016, I briefly worked for Apple in its communications department, but the analysis above is entirely based on publicly available information and I do not hold any titles in either company.
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