Six Colors
Six Colors

by Jason Snell & Dan Moren

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Sonos: Google stole our technology

Jack Nicas and Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times report on Sonos suing Google, alleging that Google (and Amazon!) ripped off its patented technology to launch its own smart speakers:

Google released a small device that could turn an old speaker into a wireless one, much like Sonos’s original product. A year after that, Google released its own wireless speaker, the Google Home. The device, marketed around Google’s talking virtual assistant, quickly began outselling Sonos’s offerings… Sonos bought the Google devices and used a technique called packet sniffing that monitored how the speakers were communicating. They discovered that Google’s devices used Sonos’s approach for solving a variety of technological challenges. Sonos executives said they found Amazon’s Echo speakers had also copied Sonos technology.

I suppose I appreciate Google’s gall in allegedly ripping off Sonos’s tech in order to sell products in Sonos’s category at artificially low prices to prop up other parts of Google’s ecosystem. That’s quite the double play.

As Ian Betteridge put it:

—Linked by Jason Snell

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