Newsletter 
Sonos gained a new CEO earlier this month, who sent out a memo to the team at Sonos about the future. In this letter he mentioned the fact that he wants Sonos to both partner with and compete with the big brands like Amazon, Google and in the future, Apple. Judging by the context, it sounds like Sonos wants to partner with Amazon and Google for their assistants, Alexa and Google Assistant. As it stands right now, Sonos’ speakers work with a few music streaming services, but largely connect over WiFi to stream music. With the addition of Alexa and/or Google Assistant would actually be a big deal.
The new CEO, Patrick Spence, has been with Sonos for about four years now, after spending a decent amount of time at BlackBerry. Sonos founder, John MacFarlane stepped down earlier this month and handed over the reigns to Patrick Spence. Likely in an effort to bring in new ideas so that in this new space of speakers with AI assistants built in, Sonos won’t be left in the past. And that appears to be Spence’s main point in his memo to his team at Sonos.
There’s a lot that Sonos has to gain by partnering with Amazon, Google and Apple. Right now, Alexa and Google Assistant are becoming big talking points when it comes to speakers, but not only that, also when it comes to the smart home. As they are technically acting as hubs for these smart homes, and allowing customers to interact with their home via their voice. Telling Alexa or Google Assistant to turn on or off their lights without having to open the app on their smartphone to adjust the lights. Sonos is aiming to play well with everyone that’s out there, they already work well with Spotify and a number of other music streaming services, so that will likely continue under Spence’s leadership. Sonos is known for having speakers that are both easy to use but also have incredible audio quality. They have speakers as well as soundbars available for users to connect to their TV’s and improve the sound from their entertainment system.