How have they blown it?
I have tried a few systems and none work as well as theirs. I’m not interested in voice activated anything, which may make me an outlier.
This article (and a post yesterday that said similar) have me making some system tweaks and the Pihole is part way their. I think I’ll just block the speakers at the firewall to keep things simple.
You can only sell so many speakers to your customers. They're not disposable commodities that need annual refreshes. I'm not buying any more Sonos equipment. I was done five years ago.
Sonos is trying to deprecate their older models and introduce planned obsolescence. They had a program to brick your old equipment in exchange for rebates on newer models. That was totally wasteful and wanton, and the Internet called them out on it.
They have so many competitors now, including the tech giants which control streaming. Google is in a feud with them and could cut off access.
this kind of negative press does filter out into consumer choices over time. and as @fivre pointed out, they're getting squeezed out by better-capitalized monopolists, losing market- and mind-share to the likes of apple, amazon and google. sonos doesn't have the capital to compete, and lost their first-mover advantage by stagnating rather than leading the market.
(i also block everything but streaming connections for my sonos at the router.)
This article (and a post yesterday that said similar) have me making some system tweaks and the Pihole is part way their. I think I’ll just block the speakers at the firewall to keep things simple.