SONOS Wang Hanhua: The prospect of smart home is far better than e-commerce

Wang Hanhua, the former president of Amazon China, joined the US intelligent audio brand SONOS, which surprised many people.

Wang Hanhua recently officially attended the company's new product launch conference as the president of SONOS China. “Why choose to join the smart home industry?” In response to questions from Tencent Technology, Wang Hanhua said that the e-commerce industry is becoming a traditional industry, and smart home will bring the next technological revolution and carry more imagination.

“One of the main reasons when I left Amazon was that I felt that when everyone was talking about e-commerce, it became a traditional industry, not a sunrise industry. There is a saying in China that Shengji is bound to decline.”

Wang Hanhua explained that when he was at the most prosperous time of Motorola, he left to be excellent, and now smart home is becoming the next step in the development of science and technology.

Regarding why he joined SONOS, Wang Hanhua gave his own reason: the company, like Amazon, is a company that focuses on the customer experience and adheres to the long-term development philosophy.

Audio imagination space: will become the standard for TV hardware

More people will regard Internet TV or smart home system solutions as the center of future smart homes. So, where is the imaginary boundary of the future development of smart audio products? What is the positioning of the sound system in the whole smart home?

When answering questions from Tencent Technology, Wang Hanhua gave his own thoughts. "Audio and TV will definitely become a center of smart home. Under the multi-screen strategy, the development trend of TV hardware is large and thin. Although the visual experience is optimized, it damages the sound quality of the speaker. So from this point of view In the future, smart homes will turn smart audio into standard when there is a TV."

There is another imaginary space for the sound. Wang Hanhua believes that audio not only represents music playback, but anything that sounds at home can be related to sound, such as voice control and doorbell, and sound control is also an important aspect of smart home.

Software determines the core competitiveness of smart homes

SONOS currently has more than 200 patents related to smart speakers. Wang Hanhua believes that smart home products must do the three basic things of sensors, WiFi-based wireless connectivity and big data computing power to create a good customer experience.

However, Wang Hanhua also said that the software determines the core competitiveness of the smart home in the future. It is highly likely that the competitors will copy on the hardware. The hardware leader is not persistent, and the software is fundamentally persistent. The founder of SONOS has created a software company called Software.com, whose company's genes are software.

Currently, SONOS mainly provides music services through cooperation with music channel providers. Wang Hanhua summarized the online music industry as a four-party participant, including content, channels, equipment, and consumers. Among them, channels and equipment are mutually dependent. Now SONOS has integrated five major music service channels, such as domestic shrimp and QQ music.

There are three types of cooperation. The first one is regular cooperation. The music channel provider opens the API interface. After the consumer uses the SONOS app, they can use the functions of the music website, such as QQ, Shrimp, Dormy, and Netease. The second is that the channel provider opens all the library of songs to SONOS. Users can search all the tracks of the cooperative website through the SONOS client; the third is more in-depth cooperation, such as through QQ. QPlay, users can directly play music to SONOS without leaving the QQ client.

Wang Hanhua's goal for SONOS is to make an Apple in a smart stereo, like the iPhone, to become the best technology product that many people can think of. But in the mass market, the SONOS brand is still far from popular. ?