Phantoms delivered this afternoon

[GuillaumeB]

The point of my reference to Sonos was that on release it worked. It's true that it's been updated since, but the Sonos user experience today is really not much different from how it was when I first used it 10 years ago. In all that time I think Sonos have only messed up once: the 2nd generation touchscreen controllers were very unreliable. Otherwise it's been consistently excellent. 

Is it really the case that designing robust music server software is much more difficult today than it was back then?

I think it's almost as important to look at the founders of the company and their background. John McFarlane (CEO) and the other 3 co-founders had made a ton of money from the sale of Software.com at the height of the dot com boom in 2000. Their background was in selling messaging systems to telcos, so I think it's fair to say their background was in software. As others have mentioned they also had a very clear vision of what they wanted to do and the money to achieve it too. Being near Silicon Valley also probably helped in getting access to the best programming minds around.

What Sonos have achieved is pretty amazing really. They are looking as though they will hit 1 billion USD in sales soon.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/201...ming-music

Guillaume