Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Cloud Music Adoption Required Incremental Hardware Stepping Stones Like the iPod

John MacFarlane · Sonos: John MacFarlane · Feb 19, 2024 · at 16:05

John MacFarlane, co-founder and former CEO of Sonos, discusses consumer skepticism toward early cloud audio in the early 2000s.

0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.9s
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“For example, you look now at the cloud services. They were out the same time we really got started, and it was a wonderful thing, but people could not get their heads around getting their music out of the cloud. It was, it took a lot of incremental change, like the iPod and the iPhone, to get people to, you know start having that expectation.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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