The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Steve Jobs Pounded MacFarlane's Chest, Threatening to Sue Sonos Out of Existence
“He walked right up to me and pounded on my chest and said they were gonna sue us out of existence for having a scroll ring on our remote.”
Startups Only Compete Against a Tech Giant's Specific Division
“You're not really competing against the whole company. You're competing against the section that's making a competitive product.”
Legacy Hardware Incumbents Assigned B and C Teams to Home Audio
“So the traditional audio market that you're mentioning, we didn't really view them at all in the same way. Mindset is us. While they did fill the home with music, they just, you know, it was usually the B or C team TVs were much more popular, home theater rece…”
TiVo Failed by Refusing to Choose Between a Product or Service Model
“TiVo was a great company, but never decided, was it a product? Was it a service? Which is it? Is it both? And as the idea becomes mainstream, you've really got to do that and dive deeply. And the companies that survive do that well, and the companies that don'…”
Cloud Music Adoption Required Incremental Hardware Stepping Stones Like the iPod
“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, lik…”
MacFarlane Left the Sonos Board to Avoid Micromanaging His Successor
“I didn't want to be in a position where I was second guessing what Patrick was doing. I mean, when I left, I didn't stay on the board because who wants to have the founder of the board sitting on the board of the company that you're running.”
Releasing the 2004 Sonos Prototype Would Have Killed the Company
“In retrospect, it wouldn't have made any difference, and we would have killed the company had we released The quality of product it was at that time.”
Sonos Initially Relied on Ripped MP3s Before Streaming Platforms Emerged
“It took time until the services like Rhapsody or Pandora, you know, could really express all that was available. And that was really when it opened up for Sonos, but initially it was your ripped music collection.”
Failing to Deliver Wireless Audio Radically Shrinks the Consumer Addressable Market
“If you didn't deliver an experience wirelessly, you just weren't, you shrunk the market tremendously”
Sonos Anticipated Apple, Amazon, and Google Would Enter the Audio Market
“What we were worried about is that Apple, Amazon, and Google would ultimately get into this space, and they understood software clearly they had a global footprint, They could do an amazing job, so we knew down the road we would compete, be competing with them…”
Sonos Would Have Shut Down Without Early Mesh Wi-Fi Success
“And that, that was a big effort which had we not been successful, we probably would have stopped doing it in the early days.”
MacFarlane: Purchased iTunes tracks could not play on Sonos due to DRM
“Well, that's where it got a little complicated because iTunes had that digital rights management. So if you bought an iTunes track, you couldn't play that. But if you used iTunes to play your ripped music, you could.”
The First Song Played on Sonos Was the Beastie Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn"
“That's all true. It just fit. These were the first units that were fully assembled. We had a room that had the Quality Assurance team in it, and they were really trying to beat it up, and I thought that was the appropriate song, because they had a lot of work …”