Google participated in industrial espionage while having talks with Sonos, then implemented what they've learned in their products. That's patents working as designed.

Back in 2013, while Google was considering how it could make its music streaming service work on Sonos' speakers, the latter company gave the search giant an inside look at its technology. At the time, it didn't seem like a big deal. Google wasn't making speakers, and it wasn't in the smart home business at all. It would be another year before it bought Nest as a way to get into the hardware business. Sonos says that as a result of that inside look, Google "blatantly and knowingly" copied its technology and included it in its own products.

When the patent case was originally filed Sonos claimed in their press releases that Google even used the same protocol to talk to their speakers that Sonos does. Insinuating that Google stole the protocol. That was actually part of the lawsuit they filed though. The reason why is because the protocols in question are standard UPnP protocols used by most network media devices.

What part of 'changing the volume on all speakers at once' is 'industrial espionage'?

A court hasn't seen any of this yet. It was an ITC commission which takes claims of these types at face value with the assumption that disputes can hit the court system.

If that were the case, we'd be talking about something more substantive than the UI for grouping speakers together.

In my experience, Sonos hardware is great but their software is woefully bad: slow, buggy junk. But then, the same is true of Apple's stuff: HomePod hardware is very impressive, but Siri and Apple Music are crap.

To be fair to Sonos if I want to use their app (that has terrible user experience) I think it would work 99% of the time. I didn't buy Sonos for their music software - I bought it to use Spotify over my speaker system. I don't use Sonos for music (and never will) I use Spotify (Not Spotify embedded in Sonos app) and its a constant cluster of a time to get it working on more than one speaker. Core functionality to their arguably largest user base.

Is Apple Music really crap? Their UI isn't the slickest but their service, audio quality, and music catalog is top notch. And unlike their Swedish counterparts, they aren't trying to push crappy podcasts on me to up their revenue

It's the UI latency that annoys me. I just opened it on my phone and had to wait 8 seconds before the "Listen Now" screen appeared. Same wait when I click on the "Browse".

Plus lots of irritating UI deficiencies, especially on the Mac version.

Well because of this I’ll never buy another Sonos product, and recommend everyone I know to something else. I wonder if lost revenue from people like me will make up for any gains here.

Conversely, I’d rather buy (and intend to) from Sonos versus Google considering Google’s product track record (killing everything in short order).

Using patents to defend yourself from a Big Tech company is the unfortunate reality.

They weren't defending, they were attacking.

Sonos didn't develop anything new or novel in this case - they patented something which arguably should not be patentable, which is the ability to adjust the volumes on all speakers at once.

It's rational for companies to patent everything under the sun as a defensive moat, so they don't get themselves trolled, but this is trolling on their part.

If Sonos sat on this patent, that would be fine, but they're trying to troll other companies, it doesn't matter that it's Google and we hate them, it's dumb.

If Google had copied some core special tech that was the result of Sonos R&D that would be a different story.

Just a heads up, Sonos was going to brick working devices to convince people to upgrade but public uproar convinced them not to.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/5/21166777/sonos-ending-recy...

Yep! I'm aware. Conversely, the AI that runs Google has never halted the shutdown of a product due to public uproar (to my knowledge). It’s nice to know which orgs will flex under public pressure towards consumer utility.

Sonos was going to brick working devices for people who were in the recycling program not quite the same as brick to convince people to upgrade. Not say its much better but not quite as ugly as your suggestion.

Fair enough - I don't really offer a great solution here.

I don't believe there is one. Optimize for yourself.