Sonos' IPO Filing Shows Risks of Relying on Amazon and Apple

There are smart speakers, which connect wirelessly to other devices, and then there's the new era of smart speakers, designed to offer services through voice-controlled virtual assistants. Sonos, for a long time, was all about the former, having been a pioneer of high-quality, WiFi-connected speaker systems. Now it's entered the next era with products like Sonos One and Sonos Beam, which work with Amazon's Alexa and other virtual assistants. But Sonos' partners are also rivals, and Sonos' reliance on companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple makes it vulnerable, as it revealed in filing for an initial public offering Friday. To cite one example: Amazon can disable Alexa on Sonos devices any time, with "limited notice," according to the filing.