Bose – Visual impairment.

The AR field continues to narrow.

• Bose’s journey outside of its core audio business has come to an end with the closure of its Augmented Reality (AR) business in another sign that AR remains extremely difficult to get right and requires huge amounts of cash and commitment.
• Two and a half years ago, Bose launched its AR strategy which was to be based on audio rather than fiendishly difficult visuals and followed this up with Bose Frames which launched in January 2019.
• All round, the Bose Frames were well received but the devices were never really seen as a new device category but instead as an interesting take on its other audio products for a specific use case.
• This use case centred around when the user needed to be aware of the world around him in addition to listening to audio.
• Consequently, Frames had very little to with AR which combined with weaker sales than expected given that it was seen as a niche product, has resulted in the closure of the business line.
• Bose was already struggling as in January in announced the closure of almost all of its global retail presence and that was before the pandemic hit.
• Given that Bose is predominantly seen as a travel product which no one is doing right now, I suspect that demand for its products has come under great pressure in the last few months.
• Consequently, Bose will need to be conserving as much cash as possible and a speculative investment that hasn’t quite worked despite producing a good product is simply not affordable at this time.
• With the sale of North to Google and numerous high-profile shutdowns, there is really only Microsoft (most advanced), Apple, Google and Magic Leap left in the AR game.
• In China, there is nReal, which has a pretty good product but how far it will progress outside of China remains to be seen.
• Magic Leap appears to be hanging on by the skin of its teeth but has just appointed new management who will be very keen to bring it back to life.
• This also indicates that Bose is in a greatly weakened position meaning that anyone keen to get a proper foothold in the noise cancellation space might be able to acquire the company at a reasonable price.
• Bose is still arguably the best at noise cancellation although it is now much more widely offered and the difference between Bose and challengers (read Sony) is getting less and less with time.
• Bose is certainly in no position to compete in the AR field and I suspect it will be a long time before there is a product that users will adopt in big volumes.
• There is more bloodletting to come.