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, 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.
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. 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?
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. 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.”
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. 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?
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.
DecoderPod I hope you keep to just product evaluation and reviews. Please stay out of other stuff.
DecoderPod Just bought the Bose quiet comfort earbuds II and love them
DecoderPod Contender for worlds worst headline