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by fragmede 169 days ago
Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force everyone to buy new speakers, driving sales. But if the community is able to get open source firmware to run spotifyd on them, there is a non-zero (not everyone, but it's non-zero) amount of people that will just not buy new speakers from them.
4 comments
bell-cot 168 days ago
> Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force...

Maybe?

People stuck with Bose bricks might show a preference for non-Bose replacements.

People who thought Bose speakers would stay useful longer might prefer Bose, or be willing to pay for a more expensive Bose speaker model.

(Yes, I agree that some PHB's at Bose were almost certainly imagining that their customers would be forced to re-purchase Bose speakers. I'm questioning the validity of their initial assumptions.)

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x0x0 168 days ago
From talking to friends and family, so n=10-ish, non-computer people have not realized that sticking computers in things means they die on computer lifetimes, not appliance lifetimes. No more switches that last for the life of the house; no more speakers that your kids can do modest maintenance to and keep using.
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BizarroLand 168 days ago
And, if I, a non-Bose customer, hear that Bose open sourced a previous version of their speaker, which gives me some confidence that a present purchase might be somewhat future-proofed, then I am more likely to buy a new Bose product vs a competitor who does not provide sources.
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ted_dunning 168 days ago
If they can make this OS story go viral, then they stand to have a lot of customers defect from their competitors even people who would never really care about open source.

Could easily be net positive.

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kelnos 168 days ago
It's not negative, though, or at least they don't think so. The fact that they are doing this OSS release means that they believe any loss of new sales would be dwarfed by a loss of goodwill if they'd bricked the old devices.

Certainly goodwill is harder to quantify.

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banannaise 168 days ago
This is why I said "direct". This is an indirect financial incentive, and there are other indirect financial incentives at play here (as others have noted).
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