Sonos was previously the king of a pretty uncontested market. They made premium WiFi speaker systems that were a little more efficient than Bluetooth speakers, and they made their equipment compatible with as many things as possible. So far that's been a pretty successful strategy, but with the rise of other “smart” speakers like Alexa, Google Home, and whatever else we see in 2017, that space is about to get much more crowded.
Sonos has a solution, though; just integrate everybody into their system. So instead of having to compete with other speakers, Sonos can stand on its own and still integrate into whatever ecosystem you might have, whether that's Google, Amazon, or something else entirely. Sounds kinda like the NVIDIA Spot to me, which isn't a bad thing.
The difference being that Sonos is aiming to please just one company. Of course, trying to bring everybody under one roof seems like a pretty tall order, and we've yet to see Microsoft or Apple really enter the space, unless you consider the Xbox One/Kinect Microsoft's version of a smart assistant speaker gizmo. But whenever Apple makes a Siri speaker, you can bet you'll see some head butting if Sonos tries to support it on the same platform as Google Assistant.
Tough to say how this will go for Sonos, but hopefully they hang on without getting scooped up by another company. They were early innovators in the speaker market and it'd be nice to keep them around while the technology evolves.
source: The Verge
