The answer to your thread question is almost certainly yes. Squeezebox as a product family was moved a few years ago to Ultimate Ears (UE), the "cool" audio arm of Logitech acquired through acquisition. About a year after UE took over Squeezebox they announce the "Smart Radio", the same hardware as Squeezebox Radio but with a different firmware that amongst other things explicitly severed compatibility with any previous Squeezebox. This was a clear move by UE to distance themselves from the "too complicated" Squeezebox and move to a more mainstream user interface.
This product has been a failure. They alienated the core consumer by providing a non-backwards compatible device, so they were relying on a more-or-less completely new set of consumers to purchase the Smart Radio. Those consumers did not show up. Earlier this year they freed up the Smart Radio hardware to allow the installation of Squeezebox firmware. There were at least a few threads on the forum of people thinking Logitech might be re-embracing Squeezebox. I chose to interpret it as something different: since no one was buying the Smart Radio, they were trying to speed along the flushing out of all stock of this device. Then they could wash their hands of it for good and push all of their effort into Bluetooth speakers, which I have to guess they are both selling a lot of and making great profit margin on. It doesn't hurt that the software engineering effort is an order of magnitude less. An aside, I'm watching an NFL game the other day and a big section of the game is "brought to you by Sonos". Ad space on an NFL broadcast is very expensive, so it's crystal clear there's a market niche for what Squeezebox was (and what Sonos continues to be), it's just that Logitech has never been a company built to deliver such a thing. Logitech's core business has been and always will be accessories, and good streaming audio systems are more than that. I'll keep rocking my squeezeboxes until they die of old age, but they are dead to Logitech, including the failed Smart Radio. In fact, I think they've all been dead to Logitech for quite some time, it just wasn't public information. Squeezebox is dead. Long live Squeezebox! cheers, #!/ben Former Logitech Developer: Squeezeplay/SqueezeOS/SqueezeboxController/SqueezeCenter Community Developer: Nokia770Skin (r.i.p.) http://www.last.fm/user/bklaas/ 'KHAAAN!' (http://khaaan.com/)...'BUNNIES!' (http://bettychuenglishangora.com/) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bklaas's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=58 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=100616 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list Radio@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
