Sonos said what every smaller tech company was thinking: working with big tech sucks As often happens at CES, the biggest news of CES didn't happen at CES and yet was nevertheless custom designed for maximum impact at CES: Sonos has sued Google for allegedly stealing smart speaker tech. The New York Times story that broke the news contains many eye-popping details if you've followed the saga of getting the Google Assistant working on Sonos speakers. It was a process that took seemingly forever, and despite asking many, many times why it took so long, nobody could give a satisfactory answer for why. I asked Google for comment on the Sonos suit and got the same one as before, however this time with a new line, emphasized below: Over the years, we have had numerous ongoing conversations with Sonos about both companies' IP rights and we are disappointed that Sonos brought these lawsuits instead of continuing negotiations in good faith. Google's technology was developed independently by Google — it was not copied from Sonos. We dispute these claims and will defend them vigorously. That new line is Google explicitly saying it didn't copy Sonos' technology, but it doesn't address Sonos' claims that it told Google it was infringing Sonos' patents four times since 2016. And not copying something on purpose doesn't mean you haven't infringed the patents, especially if the patent owner keeps telling you there's a problem. Nilay Patel has pointed out that Sonos has already won a case against Denon with at least two of these patents. So I wouldn't expect either Google or Sonos to stand down quickly on this lawsuit. I am very far from qualified to talk about the merits of the lawsuit itself, but I think the reason the news hit so hard is that it tonally feels right. Likely because it could affect the proceedings, Sonos executives weren't directly quoted in the NYT outside of a prepared statement from CEO Patrick Spence. They seem to have spoken bluntly with Jack Nicas and Daisuke Wakabayashi about what's been going on, however. This paragraph in particular rings true to me: Like many companies under the thumb of Big Tech, Sonos groused privately for years. But over the past several months, Patrick Spence, Sonos's chief executive, decided he couldn't take it anymore. This (in addition to some off-the-record comments from another company's executive from that were relayed to me) is why I am quite confident that a lot of people are thanking Sonos for forcefully saying (forcefully suing?) what they've all been thinking for a long time. This all relates to the theme I wrote about earlier this week: that CES is seen to not matter because only smaller companies bother trying to make a splash here anymore. Over the course of years, more and more types of gadgets have become vassals of an ecosystem run by a bigger company. This trend has only accelerated with the rise of digital assistants. Where before the gadgets that were beholden to big platforms tended to be phone accessories, everything is now supposed to work with Alexa, the Google Assistant, and Siri. So CES is, in some ways, a convention where tens of thousands of people from thousands of companies meet to show off how they intend to survive in a world ruled by the big tech companies. No wonder it's less relevant than ever. Will this open a floodgate of other companies coming out and saying publicly what they've felt privately, that they're increasingly spending their time thinking about Amazon and Google instead of their customers? In some places, smaller tech companies already are. They're just speaking in places with stronger regulatory protections to curb Big Tech, places like the European Union. Spotify's lawsuit against Apple's App Store "tax" comes to mind. Here in the US, the step before going public is likely all of those people talking to each other about it, probably over drinks in Las Vegas. Sonos perfectly timed its announcement so that it would be the talk of the show, one hour before the doors opened. Usually at CES, the awkward thing you say when you don't know what to say is "How is the show for you? Seen anything good?" Yesterday, it was "Did you see the news about Sonos? Whoa." The other thing that rings true in the NYT story is the detail that Google told Sonos it would pull Google Assistant support if Sonos enabled simultaneous wake words. That's the feature which lets speakers listen for both "Alexa" and "Okay Google" at the same time. Google really comes off looking like a bully. Amazon doesn't come out of this story cleanly, either. Apparently Amazon also threatened to pull support at one point, and according to the NYT, the only reason Sonos didn't also sue Amazon was that it can't afford to take both companies on at once. It all could put a radically different spin on Amazon's motivations for forming an alliance to get companies to make their assistants to interoperate. An alliance Google hasn't joined, by the way, and neither have Apple or Samsung. In an interview with Chris Welch of The Verge last night, Amazon hardware boss Dave Limp said that "we would never ask any company for exclusivity." But he dodged a bit when asked if Echoes hurt Sonos' chances in the market, saying: As long as they and others continue to differentiate, customers will find them. It's not about at any given time, a price point or a set of features. It's about how do you define your brand and what your brand stands for and how it's differentiated. And I'm very optimistic that Sonos can navigate that path. Chris' full interview with Dave Limp will be up on The Verge later this morning, keep an eye out for it. Four years ago I wrote a piece warning that the move to digital assistants would mean that a lot more of what we see "online" (if that term even applies to talking to a smart speaker) would be determined by backroom deals. It turns out I wasn't pessimistic enough: those same deals are also determining what kind of gadgets get made and what they're allowed to do in the first place. It's no wonder so many of the people here at CES feel like they need a drink. | 
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