Archive for February 24, 2025

Sonos Offers 25% Discounts For Existing Owners…. Is This Desperation?

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 24, 2025 by itnerd

The last year or so has been challenging for premium audio gear Sonos. And that’s putting it lightly. You can read my write up about their issues from last year to get a sense of how bad things are. Or you can read this write up from The Verge to get an additional persecutive. Despite their troubles, news has come out via email and their very troubled app that existing owners can get up to 25% discounts on new Sonos gear from February 23 to March 2. You do have to get it via the app or at their website. I should also note that it seems to exclude certain products such as the Arc, Arc Ultra, and select speaker sets.

Now why would Sonos do this? My guess is that their issues have caused not only new sales to fall, but I have read in places like Reddit for example that owners of their gear are abandoning Sonos for the completion. Bluesound and Audio Pro for example. Thus this might be an attempt by Sonos to stop the bleeding. I’ll be watching this with interest to see how it is received by owners of Sonos gear, and if they take advantage of of this.

Leave a comment »

Salesforce and Google team up to expand agentic AI forces

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 24, 2025 by itnerd

 Today, Salesforce and Google announced a new expanded partnership, integrating Google’s Gemini with Agentforce, Salesforce’s agentic platform.

With a $2 trillion market opportunity, autonomous agents continue to be released at a rapid rate and businesses need an agentic strategy to keep up. In fact, 63% of Canadian SMB leaders say keeping pace with changing technology is challenging.

This partnership fills the gap customers are experiencing by providing choice, flexibility, and tailored AI solutions to meet specific needs, rather than being locked into a single model provider. 

Key integrations

  • Speed and Scale – Agentforce agents will be able to reference up-to-the-minute trusted data and credible citations through Gemini’s multi-modal capabilities – such as real-time insights from Google Search to handle more complex tasks. 
  • Improved customer support – Salesforce Service Cloud integrates with Google Customer Engagement Suite, bringing enhanced AI-enabled contact centre capabilities.
  •  This includes Real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs and personalized agent recommendations.
  • Salesforce’s Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360 Apps will run on Google Cloud infrastructure, with access to new regions and simplified procurement through the Google Cloud Marketplace.

You can find full announcement details here to learn more about this partnership. 

Leave a comment »

Apple Is Spending $500 Billion In The US Over The Next Four Years… Why?

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 24, 2025 by itnerd

Early this morning a press release crossed the wires saying that Apple is going to spend $500 billion in the US. Here’s the TL:DR:

Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing, and will support a wide range of initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country.

And:

As part of this package of U.S. investments, Apple and partners will open a new advanced manufacturing facility in Houston to produce servers that support Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that helps users write, express themselves, and get things done. Apple will also double its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund, create an academy in Michigan to train the next generation of U.S. manufacturers, and grow its research and development investments in the U.S. to support cutting-edge fields like silicon engineering.

A couple of random thoughts on this.

First, I don’t see anything related to making Apple products in the US. That’s interesting because Donald Trump has threatened to slap a 10% import tariff on Chinese made goods. Which you would think is a problem if you’re Apple seeing as a lot of your tech is made in China. Thus on this front it appears to be business as usual for Apple. By that I mean that Apple is slowly transition its supply chain out of China to places like India for example where iPhones are now being made. Besides, even if Apple wanted to make products in the US, it’s likely way more expensive to do so due to the cost of labor, assuming they can find the requisite labor, and the the need to build the infrastructure to support that.

Second, I wonder how much of this is to take the attention of Trump away from Apple? Trump has a ridiculously short attention span. So Tim Cook must be gambling on the fact that if he puts a big dollar amount out there with a huge… Or the way Trump says it, “YUGE” number of jobs, Trump will say job done and look at the next shiny object and leave Apple alone. At least for the next four years. And it’s clear that this is only meant to be in place for as long as Trump is around. And it also assumes that he’s not going to something like end democracy in the US to stay in power. But I’m not going down that rabbit hole today.

Here’s the bottom line. Tim Cook might have pulled off a move that will allow Apple to continue to be Apple with little to no interference from Trump. That assumes that Trump doesn’t realize, or more likely someone tells him that that he’s being played like a violin. I say that because Cook did something similar the last time Trump was in power. And that worked. Thus I suspect that this move by Apple will work as well.

Leave a comment »