How Bose Competes With AirPods, With CEO Lila Snyder

11/30/22, 10:47 AM How Bose competes with AirPods, with CEO Lila Snyder - The Verge
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DECODER
How Bose competes with

AirPods — and why it’s in more
cars than ever, with CEO Lila
Snyder
Has sound quality taken a back seat to convenience?
By NILAY PATEL / @reckless
Nov 30, 2022, 12:00 AM GMT+8
6 Comments / 6 New
https://www.theverge.com/23482627/bose-ceo-lila-snyder-interview-headphones-noise-control-apple-airpods-bluetooth-cars 1/37
Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge
B
ose is one of the most recognizable audio brands in the
world: it was famous for the Wave radio in the ’80s, it
invented noise cancellation, you can see its logo on NFL
sidelines every Sunday, and of course, there are the popular
consumer products like the QuietComfort headphones that
reviewers like Chris Welch here at The Verge rate as some of the
best in the game. Bose is in tons of cars as well: audio systems in
GM, Honda, Hyundai, Porsche, and more are developed and tuned
by Bose.
Bose was founded in 1964 by Amar Bose, who donated a majority of the shares of
the company to MIT, where he was a professor. That means that, to this day, Bose
is a private company with no pressure to go public. However, Bose still has to
compete against Big Tech in talent, products, and compatibility.
So today, I’m talking to Bose CEO Lila Snyder about Bose’s dependence on
platform vendors like Apple and Google, how she thinks about standards like
Bluetooth, and where she thinks she can compete and win against AirPods and
other products that get preferential treatment on phones.
Decoder with Nilay Patel

How Bose compete …
Has sound quality taken a back
seat to convenience?
00:00:00
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Lila Snyder is the CEO of Bose. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks so much for having me.
I’m really excited to talk to you. Bose is a fascinating company. It’s a

household name that has been around for a long time, and it’s the speaker
brand I aspired to own as a teen. It has this really long, interesting history. It’s
also privately held, so we don’t get a chance to look under the hood of a
company like Bose very often. How would you describe Bose today?
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other
problems. Subscribe here!
In many ways, Bose is the same, yet very different from how it has been in the
past. Bose was founded almost 60 years ago by Dr. Bose, professor at MIT, and
the core of it was innovation. It was meant to be a company that could focus on
research and innovation and bring technology that has real impact on customers
to the market. The great thing is that part of the company is still alive and well
today. That’s really at the core of who we are as a culture and as a company. So in
that way, it’s quite the same.
Obviously the first products were speakers, consumer audio, and that is still
pretty much what we do today, but everything else has changed around it. The
market, the competitive set, and the technology we’re using are all obviously very
different and much more advanced today versus where we started, but there’s a
lot that’s the same, which is pretty exciting.
So that first piece is Dr. Bose, the inventor of the famous Wave radio. It was
the Bose product that sort of defined the ‘80s and ‘90s. He invented that, there
was a patent, and he built an entire product portfolio around that.
Things have dramatically changed since then. I don’t think you still sell Wave
radios at the rate you used to. Is the basis of the company still, “We’re going to
invent some core technology and expand that into a series of product lines,”
or is it different?
Yeah, it’s pretty much the same. We’re really focused on what we call our three
technology franchises, and they will probably not surprise you.
The first one is noise cancellation, which Bose invented over 20 years ago. Those
headsets that we all loved when we got on planes in the late ‘90s, early 2000s,
and that we still love. We think there’s a ton more about noise cancellation that is
yet to be invented.
The second one is lifelike immersive audio, like the artist intended it. It’s the kind
of audio that makes you feel like you’re hearing what the artist wanted you to
hear and you feel immersed in it. It’s mood-changing, altering, and magical.
The third franchise is a little bit different and nuanced, and it is actually made
possible by new technology like AI. It’s something we call “hearing what you
want.” Noise cancellation was this amazing thing that started by just taking away
as much of the noise as you possibly could. “Hearing what you want” is a more
nuanced view that says, “In some situations there are noises I want to hear and
others that I don’t.”
How do we use AI to pick out which sounds you

want to hear and which ones you don’t, and then
automatically make those adjustments for you?
How do we use technology, and AI in particular, to pick out which sounds you
want to hear and which ones you don’t, and how do we automatically make those
adjustments for you?
We focus on those three technology franchises, from research core, early

research, all the way through development and into products. It’s really those
three technologies that differentiate Bose today. Yes, we’re still thinking about
how we take those technologies and push them through to different products
and experiences for our customers.
Those are the three franchises: noise cancellation, immersive audio, and
hearing what you want. I want to push immersive audio on because there’s a
lot going on in that space recently. It’s hard to make that sale historically, but
I’m curious about it. And related to “hearing what you want,” the FDA has just
released some rules about hearing aids. There is a lot of hearing
augmentation happening in the world. So I do want to talk about those three,
but I want to start with what I think of as the Decoder questions. You’re a
relatively new CEO there. It’s been about two years now, maybe a little bit
more. How did you end up as CEO of Bose?
I feel very lucky actually. It’s such an amazing brand. If I think about when I first
got the call and started the process to come to Bose, I anchored on three things
that are hard to find in a company.
One was the innovation culture that I’ve already talked about. It’s difficult to
create that, and having almost 60 years of history of bringing really
groundbreaking innovation to the market is pretty amazing. I love that; it’s just
such a great brand. You mentioned your first experience with the brand. My first
experience was a Wave radio that I saved money to buy when I had a tiny
apartment in graduate school. It was a magical moment, being able to bring that
into my home. We all have our first Bose moment, which is pretty exciting. The
brand has a ton of power. I think it resonates in a unique way with consumers.
What I learned through even the first couple of conversations is that the culture
and the talent at Bose are so special that it’s a place you want to be. It has an
intellectual culture, a smart culture, and a passionate culture. Those three things
drew me to Bose.
I think my experience that got me here is really all about digital and software
transformation and how digital technologies are transforming business. If you
draw a thread through everything I’ve done in my career, that is probably the red
thread you would draw. I think that is fundamentally the experience I’m bringing
to Bose that’s really important.
There’s a big idea embedded in the phrase “digital transformation,” which I

think people use a lot. Whenever I hear it, it just means, “We’re going to
replace a bunch of stuff with computers. We’re going to go from a bunch of
mechanical engineers modeling out Wave radio baffles to a computer doing
some AI stuff that tells you what you want to hear.”
In the broadest sense, that is what digital transformation means. Is that what
you think it means? That’s what I think it means, but what is your view? Do
you see it as, Bose is getting computerized and what it makes now is
computers? Is that the process you’re in charge of managing?
I tend to think of it from the customer first, and then back. How do we use
technology to create better experiences for customers? Those experiences could
be the audio experiences, like the noise canceling. You can’t get those
experiences without hardware.
“We’re just as much a hardware company as we

always have been, but it’s using software to build
the magic around that.”

We’re just as much a hardware company as we always have been, but it’s using
software to build the magic around that, that really creates new, better, and
differentiated experiences.
Similarly, how do we use technology to make the customer experience better at

every touchpoint? How do we make it better when you interact with your
headphones, your car audio, or the speakers in your home, but also when you
interact with us, when you reach out to customer service, when you shop on
Bose.com or interact with Bose in any way? So I tend to think about how
technology makes the consumer experience better, and then we work
backwards.
You work backwards, so, fundamentally, what you ship now is computers?
In a way. If you think about the earbuds I’m wearing or any product that you use
today, the majority of the experience in a headphone today is being created by
software. That’s been true for a while. A digital signal processor (DSP) is not a
new concept in terms of the way that we create audio products. We have been
layering software into our products for a very long time. What’s happening now
is that with more compute capability, the sophistication of that software, at the
edge, in my ear, is getting more and more sophisticated and allowing us to do
things that create better experiences.
A great example of that is our QuietComfort Earbuds II, which I happen to be

wearing today. They have a technology called CustomTune technology. The cool
thing about CustomTune is that noise cancellation, since its invention, has been
an optimization to the average. You’re optimizing the noise cancellation for the
average consumer, and it works pretty well for everyone. What we realized is that
the most important thing about sound happens to be geometry — the shape of
the room that you’re in, and in the case of an earbud, the shape of your ear canal.
What CustomTune does and what enables it is the ability to compute at the edge.
It allows us to play a tone, map your ear canal, and then do a whole lot of math
very quickly to customize the noise cancellation and the audio performance to
the unique geometry of your ear. That is something that you could have
imagined a decade ago, but you couldn’t have done because you need the
compute power to enable you to do that.
This is a classic Decoder question I ask whenever this sort of idea comes up.
Once you start shipping computers, you kind of inherit a bunch of computer
problems. You get a lot of capability, as you’re describing. You have the
compute, you have a chip small enough and low-power enough to do
something like CustomTune in-ear in real time. That’s mind-blowing if you
remember computers long ago. Right now, it might be what everyone expects,
but I agree that it’s mind-blowing.
That means you have to issue software updates. It means you have to think
about malware potentially. It means you have to have a lot of software
engineers. Almost every hardware company CEO that I’ve talked to that has
started shipping software eventually says, “Oh, we actually have more
software engineers than hardware engineers.” What’s the split at Bose?
I don’t know the exact split, but we definitely have a lot of software engineers. I
would say there are two things that create the magical experiences. One is the
software that we’ve been talking about. Our software engineering team has been
growing, and yes, our cybersecurity team is growing. We think about all of those
things, of course.
The other thing that is really important is the holistic systems engineering of
how you position the hardware components to enable the best experience. So
there’s still a lot of hardware magic that has to happen to bring that whole
system together. For sure, if you look at the trajectory, the mix of our engineers
has shifted over time like everyone else’s, and we have a lot of software engineers
at Bose.
Actually, let’s go even one step further. Here’s a classic Decoder question. How
are you structured? How does Bose work?
It’s a great question. It has changed a little bit actually, but probably not
surprisingly, since I joined Bose.
Oh, don’t worry. That was the follow-up question. What did you change?
I’ll do both at once just for efficiency’s sake. At the highest level, we are
functionally organized at Bose. I think what’s important is why we have chosen
to do it that way and how we make sure we maintain a maniacal focus on the
customer.
If you have a functional organization, there is always the risk that you somehow
lose sight of the customer and then swing back to a more divisional structure.
That is the typical academic view of things. So at Bose we have adopted a
functional organization, and I think the final stage of that, which we went
through about a year ago, was with our engineering team. Historically, we had
engineering that was more broken up across our different business units. So
think about our consumer business versus our automotive business, or even our
headphones business and our in-home sound bar and speaker business. We
brought all of that together.
The reason we did that is because the technology franchises that I described
earlier — the noise removal, the lifelike audio, hearing what you want — are
consistent across every product line that we produce at Bose. Those are the three
core elements of each. What we found was that we needed to bring more of that
together to get more and faster innovation spreading across the company. We
have been really excited about the results of that so far, and that has been an
exciting transition for us.
It’s also starting to unlock what we internally call our “better together” strategy.
As we continue to create these little computers that we’re putting into the world,
how do we make them better together? Think about your in-home soundbar or
headphones as you get into your car. How do we make those two things that Bose
makes work better together so that we can create a better experience for you?
That’s almost impossible to do if you’re working in a more product-oriented or
siloed manner. Bringing all of our research and development and engineering
talent into one organization is just creating a mushroom effect on the ideas and
the possibilities that we can create at those intersections, which is really exciting.
That’s one big change that we’ve made and probably the final push into a truly
functional organization.
The other is probably from a product standpoint. Dr. Bose was such a
renaissance founder, as many founders are. He really was the chief engineer, the
chief product officer, and the chief marketing officer. He played all of those
roles, and over time, as he moved away from the company and leadership
changed, it really became an engineering-led culture, not surprisingly.
In the world we live in today, having strong product leadership is so critical to

make sure you’re getting the experiences that drive the technical work right. You
kind of have this push-pull between a product organization that is creating the
vision for what the consumer needs and a very strong research and engineering
culture that is bringing forth great new technology, almost that those product
leaders can shop from. It’s pretty exciting. One of the changes we’ve made is to
really strengthen our product organizations with a chief product officer over all
of our consumer audio products. We also have someone who leads the
automotive team, so moving to a functional structure but still keeping that close
alignment with the customer.
Bose was started well before Silicon Valley product management had defined
itself. Now Silicon Valley product management is like a cliché. It’s how every
company wants to run because Google happens to be a huge rich company. I
don’t mean to denigrate it. I think there is great value in having product
managers, designers, and engineers all working together, but that way of
working has become basically dominant since the big companies have
become dominant.
It’s not the only way of working. Is that the way that you’ve adopted? Are you
saying, “Okay, we’re going to do product managers and chief product officers
and we’re going to have an engineering organization that works with them in
cross-functional teams”? That can’t be how Bose started, because this way of
working is maybe 25 years old at most.
Yeah, it is. We are definitely moving in that direction. I think what I like is that we
have this really great push and pull between product and engineering. I think for
some organizations, you sort of create a hierarchy and you say one of those
organizations tells the other one what to do. Ours is much more of a partnership,
which I think really works well for us. If you’re too product-led and you’re too
focused on driving, you don’t look far enough into the future. The great thing
about researchers is that they’re not thinking about tomorrow or next year.
They’re thinking pretty far in the future.
You get this dynamic where we are creating a cross-functional team that has
product representation, design, marketing, research, and development. It’s the
diversity of thought that those different disciplines bring together, which is what
we believe is really pushing our thinking on the kinds of products and
experiences that we can deliver to customers. It’s not one or the other. It’s the
diversity of that group and the diversity of the thinking that you bring together,
which is where we create real disruptive new innovation.
Is that the change you have made as CEO? “We’re going to move to a
functional structure. We’re going to build cross-functional product teams.”
It’s a piece of it, for sure.
What are the other changes you’ve made?
I think that we’re thinking about marketing very differently at Bose. The first hire
I made when I joined Bose was Jim Mollica, who is our chief marketing officer.
He’s actually the first chief marketing officer that Bose has ever had, which I find
to be a remarkable statistic given how powerful the Bose brand is. The Bose
brand was built through remarkable products and decades of high-quality audio
experiences that consumers were having, either in their car or in their home, or
increasingly, on the go with headphones and wearables. So marketing has
changed a lot. That felt like a place where we needed to invest to bring our
marketing capability to a different level.
If you look at what we’re doing today, we are doubling down on this idea that
Bose is all about sound. We talk internally about the power of sound and how
transformative that can be for someone. If you think about the memories you
have, they almost all have music or movies attached to them. There is something
visceral about sound that connects you to a memory, like a family occasion, a
date night, a dinner, or the birth of your children. The connection that sound has
to our emotions is pretty powerful.
We’ve been creating that emotional connection for people for decades. In the
past, we have tended to market more around technology, innovation, and the
specifications of the product. Not the specific specifications, but why technically
it’s superior. I think what you see from us now is more of a shift to this emotional
connection to the brand around sound and the power of sound, which we think
really resonates with our customers. We’re excited about that transformation.
We think we’re getting a better understanding of who the Bose customer is, why
they love Bose, and how we draw in new customers to Bose who want to have
that same experience over time.
I’m someone who reads a lot of advertising for audio equipment. It’s one of
my favorite things. There is a cycle. Everyone markets high-fidelity sound,
and then that’s taken for granted. Then what’s being marketed is, “Do you
remember your first date and what song was playing?” Then another format
comes out and everyone markets high-fidelity sound again. I want to talk
about that dynamic and the different contexts of it.
But I do want to get through these Decoder questions. So you’ve made some
decisions, you made some changes, you’re changing how you market the
products, you’re changing the structure. This is the Decoder question. How do
you make decisions? You’ve had a number of different roles, you’ve been a
consultant, now you’re a CEO. What’s your framework for making decisions?
It’s a really good question. It’s a hard one to answer. I think there was a moment
in management history where the answer was, “Let’s just make a chart of who
the decider is, and then that’s the way we’ll make great decisions. We’ll just be
clear on who the decider is.” Obviously that’s important in some instances.
What I like to focus on is maybe three things. One is getting the right people in
the room. Great decisions are made when the right voices are part of the
discussion that leads to the decision. Making decisions in isolation without all
the right information is dangerous. I think the first part of how I make decisions
and how I want the organization to make decisions is to get everybody who has a
voice in the room so you hear the diversity of perspectives to inform the
decision. That’s one. Get the right people in the room.
The second is something that at Bose we’re calling informed debate. Challenge
each other, use facts, call out when you don’t agree, disagree in the room. Lots of
companies have ways of talking about that, “disagree and commit,” and we’ve
heard them all. This idea of being willing to have the messy debate is really
important. Because you can get all the right people in the room, and then if the
most senior or perceived powerful person in the room starts off and states what
we’re going to do, no one else actually gets a chance to voice what matters. So
this idea of informed debate is really important.
Then the third is something that we talk about, which is purposeful speed. You
can’t draw that out over months. Those things I just described can be done in 30
minutes or three months. We happen to participate in a market that moves pretty
quickly. For us, making those decisions with purposeful speed is critically
important. That is maybe a very different way of thinking about decision-
making, but that’s certainly the way I operate my senior team and the way that
we’re changing the culture at Bose a little bit in terms of how we make decisions.
Put that into practice for me. You show up two years ago as the new CEO. You
take a look at things and say, “Okay, I have to restructure the company. We’ve
gotten too siloed. There are too many different product divisions, and
probably some redundancy of effort. I’m going to a functional organization.”
How did you make that decision?
The same way I just described. I brought a whole bunch of thoughts. I brought a
whole bunch of people into the room. I listened a lot. My leadership team worked
through it to get to the decision. The group worked through it. I used the board in
the same way. I think your board is an important part of informing really big
changes, so certainly involve them in it. Then it’s a question of how you sequence
the things that you want to change. You can’t change everything at once. What’s
the right sequence?
So two more of these Decoder questions, and then I really do have a million
questions about specific speakers, which is really all I want to talk about.
Decoder is just a long lead-up to me making product requests. Let’s be honest.
Okay, great. As long as you love the products. I love the products, so we can talk
about them all day.
Oh yeah, no, we’re going to get down into the weeds of why the buttons do
what they do. Don’t worry about it.
You mentioned you have a board, but Bose is privately held. It’s not a public
company. How does that work? It is one of the few companies that has not
been pushed to go public. How does that part of it work?
Yeah. It’s definitely a unique structure and one of the things that, when joining
Bose, takes a minute to really understand how it works. It’s both very different
and in some ways not that different. As you might know, Dr. Bose gifted shares of
the company to MIT, our largest shareholder. Their shares are non-voting, so
they don’t participate in the operations of the company, selecting the board, or
anything like that. Therefore, the company is governed in a pretty different way
because of that.
At the same time, we have a board. The board functions pretty similarly to a
public company board or a different private company board. On a day-to-day
basis, it doesn’t feel different. When you really step back and think about it, it’s
quite different than what’s typical, but on a day-to-day basis and in terms of
interaction with the board, it’s pretty standard.
Is there any push to go public?
No. It’s actually part of the gift. Dr. Bose’s intent was to create a structure where
Bose would remain private. The reason was because he wanted the company to
continue to innovate and focus on research that could make people’s lives better.
He wasn’t specific that it had to be audio experiences, but he was very specific
about research and innovation being the purpose of the company.
That’s really important. That grounds us. It’s really special actually, to have a
purpose that’s so unique, inspiring, and different. I think he recognized that if
Bose got swallowed up and became a public company, or got swallowed up by a
bigger public company, that purpose would get eroded over time. He wanted to
protect that. So the structure is set up so that we will remain private, and that’s
pretty cool.
You mentioned also that Bose has a lot of long-range research and
development work. It’s a strength of the company. You have engineers
working on projects that might not come to light for several years. Any public
company in the current economic climate would be shutting that down. You
can actually see the big tech companies are cutting costs and doing layoffs. A
lot of it is the metaverse, or Amazon made some cuts in their hardware and
devices group, because that stuff isn’t going to pay off for a while and they
need to focus on the present. Are you under that same pressure? Do you feel
that same pressure to say, “Okay, this stuff isn’t coming true for 10 more
years, we have to be focused on what will be successful right now”?
Yes and no. The beauty of our structure and being private is that we can play a
longer game. We don’t have shareholders externally and investors that are
looking at quarterly results in the same way. It gives us the freedom to look out a
few years and say, “Look, we’re willing to sacrifice performance a little bit this
year because we think this investment is critical to the future of the company.”
That’s a really great luxury.
I think theoretically that is what all companies want to be able to do. They want
to be able to make purposeful investments now for the future and not have to
shortcut those when the economy swings. That’s a real luxury and I don’t take
that lightly. It’s important. Because it is such the core of our mission and
purpose, we really think hard about the investments we’re making and making
sure that we see them through. I think that’s how we’re different.
At the same time, we have to be a viable company, so we have to make tough

choices. We have to do the things that make sense because there is no long-term
if you don’t take care of the short-term. We still have to manage results quarter
by quarter, year by year, but we can have a little bit more of a balanced view and a
more informed conversation about what’s right for Bose amongst ourselves,
versus with a lot of other voices outside weighing in on that.
I imagine that long view is pretty enticing to folks when you go out to hire
engineering talent. The flip side is that if you go work for one of the big tech
companies or even a startup, there’s often an equity-based payday at the end
of that rainbow. How do you compete with that? Do you have dividends? Do
you have equity? How does that work?
I won’t go into detail on it, but we have created a comp structure that shadows
that a bit. It’s never going to have the extreme upside of picking the right tech
company at the right moment where the options go crazy, but it provides plenty
of upside opportunities for our employees as we’re successful. So I think it
works.
The other thing I would say is that you come to work for Bose because you are
passionate about what we do. That doesn’t say money isn’t important, and we
certainly pay fairly, but our value proposition doesn’t start with how much
money you’re going to make when you come to Bose. Our value proposition
starts with you loving music, being passionate about consumer products, loving
automotive and music and wanting to put those two passions together, whatever
it might be. We attract talent who love the mission and the purpose of what we
do here. Yes, for many of them it’s the ability to look a little bit longer, but it’s that
passion first. We attract a little bit of a different vibe when you think about
employees that want to come to work at Bose.
That’s great. You’re not doing Elon stuff? You’re not like, “You have to go
hardcore every day or you’re out”?
No. No, we’re not.
I feel like I have to ask that question to every CEO from here out, just to be
clear that not every CEO is like that.
Let’s talk about the stuff you do. I promise we’re going to talk about products.
You mentioned the three buckets. There’s noise canceling, there’s immersive
audio, and there’s hearing what you want. Then inside of that there’s
headphones, cars, and all these things. Let’s start with headphones. That’s
what I think of Bose as right now. It is the noise-canceling headphones
company. I owned a pair of QuietComfort IIs. Our own Chris Welch, who
reviews headphones, says, “The Earbuds II are the best noise-canceling in-ear
buds.”
Thank you.
This is where you’re at. Is that the business? Is that what makes the most
money right now?
We’re much more balanced than that. It’s interesting. I think it depends on your
entry point. One of the most interesting things that’s happened to me since I
joined Bose is that wherever I go in the world, if I say that I work at Bose, the first
thing that happens is I get a story about the first product someone had or the
product they love the most. It’s awesome. The most fun part of my job is just
hearing our customers talk about how exciting the products are.
I came in with my own view, and what I have learned through all of those
thousands of conversations is that your view of what Bose is depends on your
entry point. For a lot of customers, Bose is a car audio company because their
daily experience with Bose is in their car, where they have this amazing
experience on their commute to work, maybe less often than they’ve commuted
in the past.
So the entry point into Bose matters a lot. We certainly are in the headphones
space, but we are really in three big spaces directly. We are in the home, with the
home theater and home music experience; we are in the car, which is a very
important and big part of our business as well; and then we are on the go, with
headphones.
“The whole industry changed. Apple, then

Samsung, then everyone else removed the
headphone jack.”
Your headphone line right now, like all headphone companies, had to survive
the “no more headphone jack” shock of 2016 when the whole industry
changed. Apple, then Samsung, then everyone else removed the headphone
jack. Your interconnect changed. Now you are wholly dependent on

Bluetooth. The big companies all have proprietary riffs on Bluetooth where
they get to preference their own products. Apple has the H2 chip. They have a
chip, they have a stack, they have a whole UI that’s built in the operating
system. Samsung has the same thing for the Galaxy Buds. Google has the same
thing with Pixel Buds. How do you compete in that kind of marketplace?
I think we start with who our customers are. For us, our customer is the music
lover. These wireless headphones do a lot of jobs. They’re communication
devices, they’re listening devices, they do a lot of different things. Different
consumers care about different features depending on their primary use case.
We are very focused on the music lover and the entertainment lover. So for us,
we lean in really heavily to the features that matter to those specific customers,
and recognize that our competitors may have other advantages because they’re
leaning into different consumer sets.
We really focus on that noise cancellation, which creates what I think of as a

clean palette. Amazing noise cancellation just creates this stage that you can
build immersive lifelike audio on top of. That’s really where we want to be
differentiated and we want to be the best. We focus there and recognize our
competitors will focus on different things that may or may not be important to
that particular customer.
What they’re focused on, pretty specifically, is making their products more
convenient in a way that you cannot compete with. That is fundamental. I’ll
just pick on Apple because I think everyone has a familiarity with Apple.
AirPods are extraordinarily convenient. They pair with an iPhone, they pair
with a Mac, they pair with your iPad. They’re pre-paired and that is all synced
in the cloud. That is not technology you have access to. That is not a system-
level capability you have access to. Does that seem like a blocker? I’m picking
at Apple, but the other big companies are starting to do this stuff too, Google
and Samsung in particular.
We are device agnostic, so you can use a Bose pair of headphones with any
device. We have really strong relationships with our partners. Qualcomm is one
that we talk about a lot. We are working within the parameters of where we can
design and engineer, and creating the best possible experience there. We are
recognizing that there may be things we can’t access in those ecosystems, but we
also think we’re creating a pretty great experience on Bluetooth, even if it doesn’t
have exactly the same feature set as our competitors do.
Bluetooth also has other limits. It has data rate limits, bandwidth limits, and
there’s a hard limit on the audio quality that you can pass over standard
Bluetooth unless the device makers implement different kinds of codecs.
Qualcomm might want to do things, but Samsung, Sony, and whoever else
might have wildly different ideas about what they want to do on their actual
devices. Are those conversations you participate in? “Hey, in order to compete
and send lossless audio to a set of Bose headphones that is targeted to the
music lover, you need to change Bluetooth.” What’s your relationship there
like?
It’s a complex and big ecosystem, as you know. We participate exactly as you
would expect. There’s a piece about understanding and there’s a piece about
influencing and we try to do all of those things. We are trying to make sure we’re
creating the best experiences for our customer and we’re going to all the
partners necessary to advocate for what we need to make those experiences
possible.
Are you on the board of the Bluetooth SIG, the special interest group? Do you
have engineers involved there? How does that work and what does that
investment look like?
Yes, we do. We pick our spots. We invest in the places where we think we’re not as
big as all of our competitors, so we pick our spots. We invest and focus on the
industry groups and the spaces where we think it’ll have the biggest impact on
our vision of where our products are going.
Do you perceive a hard limit on what you’re able to do with headphones,

particularly because of the reality of mobile devices?
No. I think we are imagining where we can innovate. There may be hard limits on
some things, but those will change too. This ecosystem evolves quickly, so we are
continuing to look at the places where we can innovate and differentiate and
move in those directions and make sure we’re creating our place in the rest of
the ecosystem.
The reason I asked so directly is because there are lots of headphone
companies that were effectively wiped out when the physical interconnected,
the headphone jack, went away. They just became commodity Bluetooth
headphone suppliers. They were buying the pieces off the shelf and all they
were left with was branding. That might have been all they had before, but
now the products are more expensive and people can perceive flakier
commodity Bluetooth radios failing at a higher rate. So there’s just a part here
where the self-preferencing of the mobile device makers represents an
existential threat to the business for you.
For some headphone makers, simply removing the physical open

interconnect was an existential risk and they’re dead now. Obviously Bose has
much more investment in technology. You are probably building better
Bluetooth hardware than the other headphone makers. You have a brand. But
at the end of some road, there is another existential moment if the platform
vendors self-preference too much. Is that something you’re on the lookout
for?
Look, risks exist everywhere. It’s interesting. You can’t live without the Bluetooth
connectivity, but it’s not what makes the device special. Our ability is to continue
to innovate and drive new, better, and differentiated experiences. We’re focusing
on those areas because we think customers really care about those. We’re
looking out for all those threats that you described and it’s why it’s really
important that we are not a single thing. We’re not just about headphones, we’re
not just about the car. We have a diverse portfolio which allows us to weather
through some of those threats as they arise.
Do your headphones mostly connect to mobile devices?
Phones, for sure. I mean, if you just think about your own usage and what you see
on the street, an earbud is predominantly a phone-connected device. The
conversation we’re having is that more work is happening over phones and more
entertainment is being consumed on laptops and tablets. There’s connectivity to
all of those devices that are happening pretty regularly, actually. So yes, the
phone is the dominant, but it’s certainly not the only one.
Do you ever go to Apple or Google, and say, “Look, our headphones sound
great, and they are targeted at music lovers. We could support lossless audio
tomorrow if you implement this codec, whatever it is. Can you do it for us?” Is
that a conversation that’s happening? It seems like they’re very resistant to it,
because that is something that they could enable for their own products and
not everybody else.
We have conversations with everyone in the ecosystem about what we could do

together to make the experience better.
Do you think those conversations are fruitful?
In some cases, yes, but not all.
Give an example of where it’s fruitful.
I think we’re doing a lot with Qualcomm now. I won’t talk about the specifics, but
we’re partnering in a deeper way with Qualcomm. They have a focus on sound
with their Snapdragon platform, and we think that brings a lot of possibilities.
We work with them at the engineer-to-engineer level very early in the process to
talk about the vision of what we want to bring to the market. They certainly are
creating a lot for everyone to use, but we talk to them early enough to help make
sure the unique experiences we want to be able to deliver, we will be able to
deliver through their silicon. That is a good example of a partnership which is
really strong, and one that we think allows us to innovate in new and different
ways.
Is that open interconnect with the Qualcomm stuff or is that going to be

proprietary to Bose?
Yes. Could be either.
Do you have a point of view on it, or did you just sign a partnership and we
have to see what happens?
I think it’s going to evolve. I know you wanted to get back to hearing, so maybe
this will be a good segue to that. If you think about our strategy in general, we are
looking at new and different ways to partner at Bose. It’s probably one of the
things that historically there has been less of than you might have imagined, and
we’re looking to do more partnerships going forward.
I think the hearing space is an instructive one to talk about, because Bose was
involved early on in the over-the-counter regulation conversations, trying to
influence in the US those regulations getting put in place. The company believes
strongly that access and affordability were issues in hearing loss and that it was
important to create a new environment where consumers, people, could have
more access and more affordability in the hearing aid market.
We have been investing in hearing aid technology for quite some years. It’s one
of those long-term research projects that started well before I got here, and one
of the things that we realized was that being a full-scale health company
probably didn’t make sense for Bose. Instead, we still want to participate in the
hearing aid space because we think our technology is unique and differentiated,
but we are going to do that with partners. You saw our partnership with Lexie
Hearing to bring a hearing aid to market with them, powered by Bose. Their B1
and B2 hearing aids are both powered by Bose, but Lexie has the expertise that
Bose doesn’t necessarily have around commercializing a medical or health
device.
FDA regulations, and being in the space of insurance, payers, and providers, is
not a space that Bose has lived in. Rather than building all of that capability
internally, we are going to feed our technology into their products to allow great
technology to get in the hands of customers, but in a more effective way. I think
that’s a great example of thinking about partnerships differently, and how we
can use them at Bose to drive technology in those franchise areas that I talked
about into different use cases that we may not have done on our own.
The hearing aid category is really fascinating. The bill passed in August to
enable over-the-counter hearing aids to be sold to regular people. It has
always seemed like a pair of headphones in transparency mode is basically a
hearing aid anyway. The industry has talked a lot about augmented reality and
wearables, and all of that seems to be converging in different ways.
But like you said, hearing aids themselves are still a health product. The FDA
and insurance carriers are involved. There is a long road between you having
the idea and getting to an actual customer. You’re saying that instead of
figuring that out for yourself, you are going to partner with another company
that already has the expertise?
That’s right. The important thing is that hearing augmentation is a continuum. If

you have moderate hearing loss, a consumer device is not going to solve your
problem. You’re going to need a hearing aid. The difference between a
headphone and hearing aid is pretty dramatic, and it’s largely around power
consumption and battery length. The hearing aid is not optional. If you need a
hearing aid, it actually needs to work for 12 to 15 hours so that you can charge it
while you’re sleeping. You can’t charge it in the middle of your day. You need it to
last through the day.
The ability to get great audio at low power consumption is a problem that hasn’t
yet been solved exactly. Hearing aids have always had a slightly different
capability set because of that need of low power consumption and all-day use. I
think if you have mild hearing loss and are earlier in that journey, there are a lot
of things consumer products can do that can help you as you make the transition
to eventually needing a hearing aid.
If you think about the “hear what you want” concept that we talked about before,
that’s a great place for an earbud, for example. You’re in a noisy cafe or
restaurant with family and friends and it’s loud. Even if you’re not someone who
needs a hearing aid — I certainly fall into this category — at a loud restaurant or
bar, I could use the person I’m talking to being a little bit augmented and
everything else being turned down a couple of notches in terms of volume.
Those are early hearing needs — I wouldn’t call them issues — on this spectrum
of needing a little bit of help. It’s like the reading glasses equivalent. I don’t need
it all the time, but occasionally I might put those reading glasses on. This is a
similar concept. You can imagine those things coming into more of a consumer
device.
The issue that I think no one has solved yet is social cues. If I’m wearing a pair of
headphones, even if I could create what I just described using AI, this experience
where I hear your voice across the table but not the rest of the restaurant, I’m
still sending a social cue that says, “I have on a pair of headphones. I don’t want
to talk to you.”
We have spent 20 years teaching the world that when I have banded headphones
or earbuds in, “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to you on the plane.
I don’t want to talk to you on the subway. I don’t want to talk to you on the street.”
I certainly would feel rude wearing them in a restaurant when I’m sitting across
the table from you. So over time, we have to solve that social cue. As the person
wearing the headphones, I probably don’t want to tell you I have a little bit of a
hearing challenge, which would then make the social cue okay, but probably
makes me feel uncomfortable. There’s still a lot of learning to do around the
social cues and the stigma aspect that hasn’t yet been solved.
The biggest issue that keeps people from getting

a little bit of help with their hearing is the stigma
of it. We have to do more work on technology to
figure out how to help people solve that.
In all of our research, that is actually the biggest issue that keeps people from
getting a little bit of help with their hearing — the stigma of it. The over-the-
counter regulations don’t immediately solve that. We have to do more work on
technology to figure out how to help people solve that.
That’s fascinating because that doesn’t seem like an engineering problem.

That seems like a cultural problem or a product marketing problem.
It’s a bit of a design problem.
A design problem. That’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. How are
you organized around solving that problem?
One of the advantages of bringing our research and development teams together,
as we talked about before, is that you are sort of mashing together the people
who are really researching hearing health technology and the kind of technology
that we think can drive that forward. They are now sitting together virtually or
physically with the folks that are creating earbuds, and they’re having different
conversations about how we bring those technologies together, which is
fascinating.
One of the things I’m excited about, when you think about hearing health and
some of the stigma issues that we talked about, is some of the open-ear
technology that we’ve been working on at Bose, and how open-ear technology
may start to solve some of these challenges about social cues and the ability to
bring hearing health into more of a consumer device. By open-ear audio, I mean
the audio experience created by the Bose Frames as an example.
Those are the sunglasses?
The audio sunglasses, yeah.
We were looking at your website before the show and the sunglasses are in the
nav bar. I know that everyone is excited about sunglasses with speakers in
them, but they’re in the nav. Is that just to signal this is important to you? Are
you selling a lot of them? What’s going on there?
I would think about open-ear audio as in the experimentation stage.
Sure.
We’ve had Frames, and we had the Sport Open Earbuds. There was an earlier
product that we had, which you kind of wore around your neck and it created an
open-ear experience. What we found is that there are very passionate fans of
these products. There are people for whom these are really important. I think of
it as a technology that is still evolving, and we are kind of figuring out the
benefits of that open-ear technology and how we help create form factors that
make sense for consumers. That is something that we’re actively researching and
looking at.
There’s something about transparency. Not just transparency mode where I have
something stuffed in my ear and I’m able to hear, but actually having
transparency and the ability to have an audio experience. There’s something
magical there and we’re continuing to experiment. People who love Frames will
tell you that that is the experience. They love the audio sunglasses. But there are
a lot of other ideas there that we’re exploring.
I don’t want to sound rude, but usually when I hear a CEO say, “Some people
love them and there’s something there,” that translates to, “We haven’t sold a
whole lot of them.” Have you sold a whole lot of them?
We have, but it’s early. I think the Frames are a great exploration, people love
them, and we’re continuing to look for what might be a better solution down the
road.
When I think about computers, which I obviously think about a lot, one of the
things that happens with computers, especially mobile ones, is that you have
to care for them. A cell phone is a remarkably needy object in our lives. You
have to pay a service fee to give it connectivity, the battery is always dying, you
can’t drop it. One of the reasons most wearables fail is the cost is very high.
You have to have it on your body all the time, the batteries are small, and it’s
still a computer. Then the value that they give back to you is usually very low.
They do one thing.
Sunglasses with speakers, they kind of do one thing. They play music at you
when there is music, but otherwise you’re just wearing some sunglasses and
hopefully they are cool enough for you to wear all the time. Do you think that
value equation has to change dramatically?
If you think about what earbuds do today versus what they did five, seven, 10
years ago, even when they were wired, the jobs that they’re doing are increasing.
Part of that is all the dimensions that you said, with longer battery life, higher
compute, and the ability to do more jobs. The value changes over time as you’re
able to create more value in them. So if you think about the Frames, today they
play music, but down the road, they could do other things as well. It’s how those
things evolve to create value.
Earbuds do so many more jobs today versus what

they did five, seven, 10 years ago.

Ultimately, that is always what we’re doing in a consumer business. You have to
create products that have enough value for the consumer that they want to pay
for what it costs to make them and make a little bit of money on the back end of
that. We’re always thinking about that customer value equation, and wrestling
with the minute details. This one thing that we’re adding, is that cost worth it to
the customer? If it’s not, we shouldn’t put it in. It’s not creating value. We think
about that question in the macro, but also in the micro decisions that we’re
making as we’re bringing products to market.
The other side of this, especially for consumer products, is that as you layer
more and more software into a product, you layer more and more recurring
costs. You have to keep the software updated, you have to run some cloud
servers for whatever back-end thing is happening, you have to update the app
for iOS 25 or whatever is going to come out to make sure that the
functionality in the user interface is still there.
Are you thinking about recurring revenue, like subscription headphones?

Most companies have solved that cost problem by saying, “We’re actually
going to pass the cost on to you. We’ll deliver more features to you over time,
but now you have to pay $5 or $25 a month or whatever.” Headphones for the
most part have not started doing that. But as you add more software and more
capability — particularly more AI capability — you are going to have to run a
bunch of servers and pay for people to use the products. How do you solve
that problem?
It’s a great question, and it’s one that is here today. We are already doing a lot of
the things that you just described — over-the-air updates, backward
compatibility, new iOS, all of that stuff. That has been the change that has been
ongoing over the last several years. It’s certainly something that we talk about
and we think about.
You have to have the customer value to create that ongoing model. What is that
going to be? We certainly have a lot of ideas, and we’re thinking about it and
testing it. You see it now starting to happen in automotive. It’s interesting there
as well. Are there features and functionality that maybe not everybody wants or
needs, but is highly valuable to some? Can we deliver that in an over-the-air
capability that could lead to a subscription model? We’re for sure thinking about
that.
I think you’re making a specific reference to BMW, which is rolling out some
capabilities of subscription. I would describe it, frankly, as an uproar over the
idea that you would pay $18 a month for heated seats. You can definitely go
too far. What’s too far for you?
I don’t think we know yet. We haven’t done those experiments yet. You have to
put something out there like BMW is doing and see what resonates. I think that
this is a test-and-learn situation. Sometimes the things that you imagine are
going to create value, and that customers are really going to want to pay extra
for, don’t turn out to be the things. Other things that you never would have
thought about might be . Ultimately, this will end up being a test-and-learn
situation for most companies, including us, to understand what consumers get
real value out of and how we think about bringing that to market. There is a long
road in front of us to figure this out, and I think it’s going to take a little bit of
evolution to get there.
This is a good time to talk about cars. You mentioned that cars are a big place
for Bose plays. It might be where people have the most experience with Bose
in some ways. You’re in GM cars, and you’re in Honda cars. I always think of
these deals as brand licensing deals. Automakers need a fancy brand inside
the car, so someone will sell them a logo and that’s it. Is that what you’re
doing? Or do you do more?
That is absolutely not what we’re doing. You will never see a Bose logo in a car
that is not a sound system that we didn’t create. It’s funny. Twice a year our
research team in automotive does a really big show-and-tell of the research that’s
happening. I was down there this morning, and it’s just amazing what our teams
are creating. Every Bose sound system in a car is uniquely designed for that car.
The great thing about automotive is you have a known set of dimensions and
fixed passengers. Living rooms are complicated because they’re all different
sizes, people sit in different places, and you can never really predict that. The
great thing about a car is we know the dimensions of that particular vehicle and
we know exactly where people are going to sit.
There’s a ton of research and work that our team does to create these amazing
sound experiences based on that geometry of the car, based on how many
speakers that the team has decided to put in the car, and the tuning of that car to
have this perfect system coming off of the assembly line. We are doing a ton of
work. We’re a tier-one supplier, so we’re working directly with our automotive
partners to design, develop, and then launch those products into market. It is a
very deep partnership with a lot of innovation inside of it.
As I look across the auto industry, these deals are everywhere. I have a Ford
with a Bang & Olufsen system. A friend has a Mercedes with a Burmester
system. Jeep has McIntosh system. Harman Kardon has a huge business here.
They’re everywhere. How do you go and make the sale? What does that pitch
look like?
It’s probably important to mention that Dr. Bose and Bose also invented this
category. Forty years ago in a Cadillac was the first time there was a premium
audio system in a car. You can probably remember back to the time where you
went to the car audio store, bought all the components, and then retrofitted a
nice audio system into your car.
Oh, I was that teenager completely.
I got the sense, yeah.
I just got burned on my own show. I have to recover now.
I love those people. You are our people. That’s awesome. That changed 40 years
ago, right? Cadillac and Dr. Bose got together and said, “Okay, why are we making
consumers do this in the aftermarket? Why don’t we just create something that’s
designed for this really special car?” That sort of launched this market. When we
go talk to our OEM partners, we compete on technology, and we compete on how
it sounds and the innovation. There are so many new and different things that
you can do now with technology in the car. It’s really changing rapidly. Think
about bringing Dolby Atmos experiences into cars and how that’s happening.
We’re also taking noise cancellation into the car. There’s another aspect now,
which is not just the audio system. Particularly with electric vehicles becoming
more and more prevalent, suddenly without an internal combustion engine, all
the other sounds in the car come to life. You realize just how loud the tires on the
road are, just how loud the wind noise is, or how loud the HVAC system in the car
is. We have taken our noise cancellation expertise and brought it to the car. We
are talking about implementing road noise control systems with cars, the ability
to take out that annoying road noise sound, and so many other things in this area
of active sound management. How do we take away the offensive sounds in the
car?
A quiet cabin is a more luxurious cabin. For our purposes, a quiet cabin allows
you to really experience that lifelike audio. We see them as the yin and yang
together. Just like we would say in a headphone, you need that great noise
cancellation to create the palette for the audio. We talk about technology and we
demonstrate things that are near in and far out. We get a lot of great feedback
from our OEM partners, and that allows us to focus on the right innovation that
we then drive forward.
What grows that business and on what cadence? Is it that every five years
Volkswagen Group is going to reopen the audio contract so there’s a bunch of
RFPs, and you go out and do it? Or is it layering more and more technology
into the car so the revenue per vehicle is going up?
It’s probably both. Automakers are always thinking about how to create better
and different value propositions. Just like any B2B business, we’re constantly
talking to folks in the market about what we’re doing, what they’re looking for,
who their customer is, and finding these great opportunities to partner. We think
there is a lot of opportunity in this space and we’re certainly out there going
after it. As I said, we also see new applications of our technology in the car that
create opportunities for new revenue streams, like active sound management
that I described before. So it’s a bit of both.
The single most common cliché on Decoder might be when car CEOs come on
the show and tell me that cars are computers now. We even did a clip show
about it. You’ve now described a lot of the capabilities Bose has because
compute is more powerful and cheaper, it is more battery efficient, and you
can move it closer to the user. As that’s happening in a car, they’re
consolidating the compute in the car. That’s the big trend. They have gone
from 95 different supplier-provided computers to maybe one or two, and
they’re all picking different platforms. Do you have to make your technology
work on all of their platforms? Have you thought about growing into being a
platform provider like that? What’s the future there?
That evolution is alive and well, as you know. It’s happening. We’re seeing an
incredible transformation in the automotive space, and we’re certainly right in
the middle of all of that. We are very clear on what we do, and we’re very clear on
how that’s been delivered in the past. Every OEM is moving at a different pace to
this new world of up integration, where the compute is more centralized, as you
have described. The pacing of it is different. The challenge for us is just making
sure that we are building for the future and can support them along the way. It
does mean we need to be flexible and we need to be able to adjust. We’re building
our software on our own platforms, and being able to port those platforms into a
variety of scenarios that are sure to evolve with our OEM partners is part of
what we’re focused on doing.
To bring that to life for the listener, I’ll pick on my own garage. I have a Ford
that runs QNX, which is horrible. They have threatened to go to Android, but
who knows when it’s going to happen, so it’s running QNX by Blackberry. We
have a Jeep that’s running not Google’s Android, but a forked version of
Android with Amazon integrations on top of it. Those are radically different
platforms with radically different chip sets. You’re not in either of those cars,
but if you wanted to go get that business and say, “We’re going to run active
sound cancellation in these cars,” do you have to port them to those
platforms? Or do you put a different box in the car entirely?
Yes. In some cases, we’re porting into those systems, and you have to do that
differently. In some cases, they’re not that consolidated yet. It could be our own
amplifier, it could be a competitive compute box, or it could be something that
you just described. Every flavor you could imagine exists right now. I think we
know, just based on how other markets have evolved over time, that this will
consolidate down the road. Between here and there, being agile and nimble and
able to work across different platforms is the key to success, and that’s what
we’re focused on.
Do you find that complexity reduces your ability to innovate?
I think it forces you to innovate how you build, to make it as easy as possible to
connect in. The way that we architect our solutions, the more that we can create
that is common, the connection porting into those systems becomes a pipe, but
not a complete rebuild. That’s the key. It’s an architecture solution, and a forward
thinking about how you build that architecture where the magic is.
I have to ask you once again about platform vendors. I feel like I keep asking
you about this. Google is really aggressive in the auto space. More and more
people are moving to Android Auto or forking Android, like in the case of
Stellantis. Do you see that as the thing you need to spend the most energy on,
or are you saying there’s going to be a thousand different platforms and
you’re going to be everywhere?
I think we’re looking across all the possibilities. Remember, it’s a whole stack. It’s
not just the Android piece at the top. There’s the chip set and the stack that sits
underneath that. We’re looking at that entire ecosystem. We are in active
conversations across those that we think are going to matter the most. Like
everyone else, we are going to have to place a few bets and be as agile as possible
in the transition.
I want to end by asking about spatial audio, which you have brought up in the
context of the car and Atmos in the car. It’s also the big thing in the home, and
people are trying to make it a thing on headphones. We just had Steve Boom
from Amazon on the show. He’s very excited that Amazon supports spatial
audio — Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality Audio. There are lots of formats,
and the music industry is excited about it because they get to re-up a bunch of
deals. Do you think it sounds good?
I think that what I hear in our R&D lab sounds amazing. We are committed to
bringing a product to the market when we think it is a Bose-worthy experience. I
think that there is a ton of potential for spatial audio, particularly when you
think about headphones. We’re already seeing it in home theater and home
audio, of course. I think it’s a little bit different there. When you think about the
headphones space and the ability to have it on the go with you, we see a ton of
potential. We also think the experience has to be of a level where the consumer
appreciates why it’s special, and we’re building toward that.
The reason I ask is because almost at the very beginning of the show, you
talked about changing the marketing of Bose and going away from tech specs
to experiences. Spatial audio is one of those tech specs that rolls out. We’re all
going to market the tech spec, and we’re going to talk about channels of audio,
height channels, and all the stuff that we’re going to do with spatial. Then it’s
going to become a commodity and people are going to either notice it or not
notice it.
We’re going to go back to, “Do you remember when you had your first kiss?
This song was playing.” That is the dynamic in the industry. It always has been.
Do you think spatial is enough of a thing to market to people? Do you think
people care enough? The other stuff like lossless has not been that.
It’s interesting, actually. I think in some ways the industry latches onto these
words, and consumers don’t actually necessarily know what the words mean, but
you have to have it. I’m going to use Atmos at the moment as an example of that.
No one right now wants to buy a soundbar that doesn’t support Dolby Atmos,
which, I get it. I totally understand. But if you actually think about the content
that you’re consuming, I think right now it’s under 5 percent of the content. I
could be off by a percentage point or two, but under 5 percent of the content that
is actually getting delivered to consumers is Atmos content.
It’s a combination. We haven’t made all the content in Atmos yet, but it’s moreso
about the configuration. You have to have the right TV and the right cabling and
the right setup in order for the Atmos content to actually reach your ears.
“Sometimes we get enamored with an idea like

Dolby Atmos, where everyone has to have it, even
though they’re not quite sure what it is or what
they’re getting.”
Sometimes we get enamored with an idea like Dolby Atmos, where everyone has
to have it, even though they’re not quite sure what it is or what they’re getting.
For us at Bose, we thought about that problem a lot and we said, “Look, we’ve
created something we call TrueSpace, which allows you on the 95 percent or so
of content that’s not coming through as Atmos to your ears. We’ve created an
algorithm that allows you to have that spatial audio and Atmos experience, even
if the content isn’t Atmos.” What we don’t want is consumers to buy a Bose
soundbar that is made for Dolby Atmos, and then sit in their house and think, “I
don’t hear it. I don’t get it.” So then they think, “Okay, well this isn’t a very good
soundbar.” The reality is that the content is not. So we’re creating an Atmos
experience even if the content isn’t that.
I think it’s a good example of where consumers latch onto a tech spec or tech
speak, and they may or may not actually know what that means or what it is. I
think spatial audio is similar. I think it’s a term that the industry uses, but average
consumers don’t quite understand what that means. I actually think a lot of
companies that use the term mean different things. Part of our challenge is
going to be as we bring those products to market, how do we talk about them in a
way that we’re talking about what the experience actually is, not what the
buzzword is?
There’s a little bit of a brewing format war here between Atmos, Sony 360
Reality Audio, and whatever else. Do you participate in those format wars, or
do you just say you’re going to support everything?
I think we need to support the content that our consumers want to listen to.
We’re thinking about the experience that the customer wants and making sure
that we’re able to create that.
Well, just for the record, I think spatial audio is very silly. I think it’s great for
movies, but I’ve never really understood what’s going on with music in spatial
audio. But I’m curious if you think that is going to have an effect on the music
industry the way that the people who are very excited about it do?
It’s interesting. I think there are some consumers that may never take to it. It just
may not sound right to them. They may not like it. But others are going to love it.
It’s one of those things that may be a little bit polarizing. We probably don’t know
yet, because it’s going to get interesting when the creators start creating music in
a spatialized format. Whenever you take something that was recorded in one way
and then change its format, that’s great. But you really get the shift in the
experience when the creators themselves are creating the content, the music, in
that format.
You certainly see that with movies. Movies that are created with Atmos are a
different experience than those that are rendered that way in backward
compatibility. I think the jury is still out, but we’re excited about the experiences.
It will always hinge on whether the content created is exciting enough to get
someone who’s a skeptic like you to give it a try.
See, I could do another whole hour on movies and in the home and your
soundbar line. I think that means this is a good place to wrap up.
I’m happy to come back.
Lila, thanks so much. What’s next for Bose?
I think that we’re in a really exciting place. We talk about sound and great sound
being at risk. We used to sit in a controlled environment like our home or our car
to listen to music or watch movies. Now we’re taking in content of all different
formats, some recorded on your phone in a quick video and some very
professionally created, and we’re consuming that content in all sorts of harsh
environments. We’re going to continue to innovate in these spaces around taking
out the noises you don’t want to hear; creating great, immersive, lifelike audio
experiences; and playing with AI and helping you manage your environment
with hearing the things that you want. There’s a lot of exciting potential in that
space, and I think there’s going to be a lot of cool stuff coming from Bose.
That’s awesome. Well, we will have to have you back for a full hour on Atmos
in the home. My Vergecast listeners will know how excited I am about that.
This was great. Thank you so much, Lila.
Great. Thank you so much.
Decoder with Nilay Patel / A podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other
problems.
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How Bose Competes With AirPods, With CEO Lila Snyder

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11/30/22, 10:47 AM How Bose competes with AirPods, with CEO Lila Snyder - The Verge

How Bose competes with

Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Decoder with Nilay Patel

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Lila Snyder is the CEO of Bose. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks so much for having me.

I’m really excited to talk to you. Bose is a fascinating company. It’s a

How do we use AI to pick out which sounds you

We focus on those three technology franchises, from research core, early

There’s a big idea embedded in the phrase “digital transformation,” which I

“We’re just as much a hardware company as we

the magic around that.”

Similarly, how do we use technology to make the customer experience better at

A great example of that is our QuietComfort Earbuds II, which I happen to be

In the world we live in today, having strong product leadership is so critical to

It’s a piece of it, for sure.

What are the other changes you’ve made?

Is there any push to go public?

At the same time, we have to be a viable company, so we have to make tough

No. No, we’re not.

“The whole industry changed. Apple, then

jack. Your interconnect changed. Now you are wholly dependent on

We really focus on that noise cancellation, which creates what I think of as a

Do you perceive a hard limit on what you’re able to do with headphones,

For some headphone makers, simply removing the physical open

Do your headphones mostly connect to mobile devices?

We have conversations with everyone in the ecosystem about what we could do

Do you think those conversations are fruitful?

In some cases, yes, but not all.

Give an example of where it’s fruitful.

Is that open interconnect with the Qualcomm stuff or is that going to be

Yes. Could be either.

That’s right. The important thing is that hearing augmentation is a continuum. If

The biggest issue that keeps people from getting

That’s fascinating because that doesn’t seem like an engineering problem.

It’s a bit of a design problem.

Those are the sunglasses?

The audio sunglasses, yeah.

I would think about open-ear audio as in the experimentation stage.

Earbuds do so many more jobs today versus what

they did five, seven, 10 years ago.

Are you thinking about recurring revenue, like subscription headphones?

Oh, I was that teenager completely.

I got the sense, yeah.

I just got burned on my own show. I have to recover now.

“Sometimes we get enamored with an idea like

I’m happy to come back.

Lila, thanks so much. What’s next for Bose?

Great. Thank you so much.

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