I'm one of those. After the frustration I dealt with trying and failing to get a Play:1 working with S2, I swore to never again buy a Sonos product.
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Sonos Execs Launched Ill-Received App Despite Employee Protests
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I'm one of those. After the frustration I dealt with trying and failing to get a Play:1 working with S2, I swore to never again buy a Sonos product.
What amazes me (or perhaps it shouldn't) is the CEO still has his job. $200 million loss, having to fire employees and the CEO is "sorry". 
I thought the whole point of the S1/S2 cutoff was to deal with the technical debt - and yet here we are just a few years later with the same debacle. Probably even worse. Is this going to be an every few years thing with them? If we should just use our Sonos systems with Airplay and not use the app, why do we need Sonos in the first place? A $25 Echo Dot can give me an AirPlay endpoint into my stereo system.
The CEO has no idea what his customers want. He is not an effective leader. Why he continues to clock in every day at Sonos is unconscionable and shows the company is a ship taking on water.
While their products work they are nothing special. Their Pre and Amp products are crap given the price, but they do very well riding on name recognition.
You have outlined why these products are not great. High quality stereo equipment will last several lifetimes. Anything that depends on a backend or streaming is destined to be made obsolete.
If the senior leaders responsible for these decisions aren’t replaced by the Board - and fast - the reputation of Sonos will forever be marred by this incident.
There will always be distrust in future products, knowing ‘shareholder value’ takes precedence over the quality of the product.
Can the c-suite dolts, hire back the devs and engineers, and launch a polished app when it’s done.
There will always be distrust in future products, knowing ‘shareholder value’ takes precedence over the quality of the product.
Can the c-suite dolts, hire back the devs and engineers, and launch a polished app when it’s done.
Sonos should not be in business. Period. And the market will vote with their wallets. Their software has always been awful. I remember having to set up Sonos speakers by having to plug them into the WIFI router -- seriously????? In the meantime Apple speakers set up instantly, wirelessly, and with infinitely better sound. Sonos has become a joke! I bought Sonos speakers and ditched them within months. The sound sux, the software sux. And that was before this latest debacle.
I'm all for hating on execs, but come on. Former employees were the source of this, of course they would exaggerate things, they are biased. Furthermore, it's easy to say "I told you so" when you are right, but how many times have companies shifted for the better, at the reluctance of employees?
So yeah, if those employees knew Sonos was about to fail, they could have become millionaires by shorting the stock once they got laid off. OR they resign, then short the stock.
So yeah, if those employees knew Sonos was about to fail, they could have become millionaires by shorting the stock once they got laid off. OR they resign, then short the stock.
No, the S1/S2 cutoff was to deal with running into limitations of the older speakers, which (because of when they were released) has vastly smaller quantities of RAM and storage, and less capable processors. They wanted to add features (like Dolby Atmos) and couldn't support them across the whole range (not just that the old speakers couldn't handle Atmos - that is to be expected - but adding all the new stuff to the firmware bundle exceeded the capacities of the older hardware). They handled that atrociously on the first pass, but then cleaned up their act eventually. You'd think they would have learned from that.
The current debacle comes from hubris and greed at the board / management level. They needed to fix their technical debt with a new software stack, they had a new set of headphones coming out, and they wanted to be able to say, "our new headphones are running on our new app and everything is dandy", and they plowed ahead and released a broken, incomplete, unfinished app. I'm guessing someone got a big "shipped on time" bonus for that.
They could have, instead, swallowed their pride and released the new app as a separate "Sonos Headphone" app, inflicted only on headphone purchasers and kept it that way, working furiously on the new app until it was stable and feature complete, and then rolled the new app out to everyone else. But they chose to "meet" their deadline with complete crap, and inflict it on everyone (tens of thousands of very loyal customers who have purchased many thousands of dollars of Sonos equipment each, and who previously were like an unpaid fleet of Sonos ambassadors, cheerfully recommending Sonos systems to friends / acquaintances), and then they spent weeks/months denying that there was any problem. And now a metric ton of goodwill has gone down the drain, all so that they could check a "shipped on time" box to make the shareholders happy. Hope they're super happy now.
If I understand correctly, the current Sonos CEO was Blackberry's last
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The track record of complete incompetence and of running a company into the ground.
Simple solution.
FIRE THE CEO.
The community told you what the issues were. Did you do market research or was this a CEO dream project that derailed stability and basic MVP working features? My Arc/Sub combo doesn't even have reliable audio controls. Think about that for a second... I can't reliably turn off 'Loud mode' nor can I even control how much I want to turn up or down the volume of a SPEAKER. The basic functions of a speaker are VOLUME UP, VOLUME DOWN. /smh
FIRE THE CEO.
The community told you what the issues were. Did you do market research or was this a CEO dream project that derailed stability and basic MVP working features? My Arc/Sub combo doesn't even have reliable audio controls. Think about that for a second... I can't reliably turn off 'Loud mode' nor can I even control how much I want to turn up or down the volume of a SPEAKER. The basic functions of a speaker are VOLUME UP, VOLUME DOWN. /smh
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When executives fail to listen to the experts (the employees), then the company is destined to fail. It happens all the time. You would think businesses would learn. I seriously want to create a class on how to destroy a business and teach it to company executives. Companies all seem to make the same mistakes and don’t learn from other companies failures.
I’m a Sonos fanboy and this mess really hurts. Reading the story, their lawyer is STILL lying. Someone knew about the issues, they just chose to not listen. CEO needs to be gone and a house cleaning after of everyone that let this happen. They just kept kicking the can.
This is what progressives mean when it’s said that companies are focused on investors and stock prices resulting in both increase to CEO and stockholders wealth to the detriment of the workers and actual customers of the company.
It’s an often
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This - keep (and/or rehire) the engineers, clear out the executives who make these stupid decisions.
Luckily my system has been pretty reliable only needing the occasional reboot. But I have to say, if and when it stops working I’m done with Sonos and wireless equipment.
Hardwired will always be superior for audio equipment and I’m going to build out a custom L Acoustics install system in my permanent residence.
Quality hardwired speakers last a lifetime (and then some) and you can plug whatever you like into them and they just work, period.
Yes, I realize amps/receivers also run software but it’s limited to the amp itself, and doesn’t cripple your entire system should the software go caput.
Oh, and you can’t plug a mixer and pair of CDJs into a Sonos system, so there’s that lol.
Hardwired will always be superior for audio equipment and I’m going to build out a custom L Acoustics install system in my permanent residence.
Quality hardwired speakers last a lifetime (and then some) and you can plug whatever you like into them and they just work, period.
Yes, I realize amps/receivers also run software but it’s limited to the amp itself, and doesn’t cripple your entire system should the software go caput.
Oh, and you can’t plug a mixer and pair of CDJs into a Sonos system, so there’s that lol.
how to wreck an industry stalwart in one easy go...
bet those investors not so happy now either.
their products seem to be on sale quite regularly now. once that was a rare thing here.
perhaps customers dont want to buy something they think the app wont support properly?
bet those investors not so happy now either.
their products seem to be on sale quite regularly now. once that was a rare thing here.
perhaps customers dont want to buy something they think the app wont support properly?
Half the jobs on my resume put me in similar debacles the Sonos employees got caught up in. This kind of story would’ve triggered me in the past, but it’s become such the norm for higher ups to focus on short term profits and growth at any cost that now I don’t even blink an eye. The lesson never seems to be learned.
I use 2 homepods connected to an appletv. I am/was interested in a sonos setup with a sub but that was more expensive. I find it weird that there is no option with Sonos or any of these wireless setups to do a true L/C/R. I think I prefer having the homepods as a discrete L/R with separation as opposed to a sound bar virtualizing LR.
Pretty stupid you can’t at least run a true discrete 5.1 when you (sonos) literally sell the hardware to do that.
I have a bunch of Sonos equipment I'm not using right now since I moved (2 of the 5's, 2 of the 3's, and a gen 2 sub) and I'm moving again soon. All I have connected is a home theatre setup with an arc, gen 3 sub, and 2 era 300 surrounds, it sounds good with atmos content. I only used the app once to setup and trueplay so I haven't used it for music like I used to. I also had a connect that doesn't work with s2 and I never replaced it with a port... I used it for my turntable and sacd player which I mostly quit using since lossless and hires streaming came out. I bought an Ace and I really like those headphones better than the AirPods max which I gave to my nephew. Hopefully they recover from all this! I can always go back to discrete speakers/receiver/hometheatre and reconnect my hi-fi stereo setup but Sonos was decent for just working until all this mess.
As a long-time employee in the software design and development sector, I feel their pain. Management rarely considers anything the employees say, and then it blows up in their faces, and then we’re stuck holding the bag working long nights to fix it. Typical scenario:
Me: “Follow the SOP (standard operating procedure) I created.”
Upper Management: “There’s no time for that! We need it quickly!”
Nobody follows the SOP for the project at all.
UM: “Why isn’t this done?”
Me: “We didn’t follow the SOP so there are a lot of bugs.”
UM: “Launch it anyway!”
Me: “LOL k.”
UM: “Client is upset with all the bugs, what went wrong? We need to do a postmortem.”
Postmortem:
UM: “So what went wrong?”
Me: “We didn’t follow the SOP.”
UM: “Why not?”
Me: “Follow the SOP (standard operating procedure) I created.”
Upper Management: “There’s no time for that! We need it quickly!”
Nobody follows the SOP for the project at all.
UM: “Why isn’t this done?”
Me: “We didn’t follow the SOP so there are a lot of bugs.”
UM: “Launch it anyway!”
Me: “LOL k.”
UM: “Client is upset with all the bugs, what went wrong? We need to do a postmortem.”
Postmortem:
UM: “So what went wrong?”
Me: “We didn’t follow the SOP.”
UM: “Why not?”
Patrick Spence worked for Blackberry until 2012. When he left Blackberry, it was at its absolute peak in revenue and install base. He also worked in the sales and marketing function, not the engineering or design function, and so not responsible for its product decisions that led to the companies death (years after his departure).
And then, in the 10 years since he joined Sonos, the company was on a continuous revenue growth (up until 2023FY)
In his tenure as CEO starting in 2017, to the plateau in 2023, sales just about doubled.
Please stick to facts and not emotions. I think people make mistakes and in this case they made a big mistake by rushing the headphones (that would have been a success were they WIFI compatible and not just Bluetooth) and a "new" app that still hasn't reached parity with the old one - although they are getting there.
I am happy with my Sonos system despite all of this and I hope they have learned their lesson.