not sure at this point who wants to be a low quality, overpriced, dumb speaker. I have had a lot of Sonos speakers and I didn't get the hype at all. The app sucked, the interface sucked, and there were two apps because if you had old speakers they made you use an old app and if you had newer speakers they had a newer app.
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Sonos Execs Launched Ill-Received App Despite Employee Protests
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FYI, if you're ever interviewing for a retail Specialist role at Apple, don’t answer the question "What do you love about Apple?" with the above point. I learned this the hard way.
Sounds like the Sonos execs with MBAs weren’t paying attention to the Challenger case study in their Managerial Decision Making class.
Selling my Sonos system soon and looking for another brand. I've had enough.
Sonos was such a great, innovative product when they first launched. I started with a ZP100 (still have it) and added a Play:3, a couple of Sonos One's and a Playbar & Connect:Amp for passive surrounds. They all sound & work great. Thankfully, I could never update to S2 because of the ZP100. Sad to see them hit such a low point but that's typical when company's grow and tend to shoot themselves in the foot while trying to keep up with the competition (can you say AirPod Max?).
I really, really hope we as a society are learning from this, and that these go down as case studies in business school.
In both cases they are finally actually financially hurting from their short term greedy decisions. Maybe not so much Boeing since they're feeding from the government trough. But that's the only way they'll learn.
I doubt anything will change because it's also a great example of how these companies are structured really to enrich a very, very few people at the expense of everyone else. The people that made the decisions to fire and separate people and cancel their bonuses and raises, very likely did not get fired or their raises and bonuses canceled.
I read your comment after making mine above, and this is depressing. Of course there were already tons of case studies showing people why you don't do things like this.
Seeing how many other companies there are where this pattern is repeating or already has repeated in the last few years alone, I can say with confidence that we are not living in such a society.
The video game industry alone in its current state is lousy with such cases.
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I think your series of events is more accurate than mine, bravo. I don't think Spence was ever CEO of BlackBerry, and who knows how much decision making he was doing there. I'm not sure the brain death of that company can be blamed on any one person, except perhaps Lazaridis.
This doesn’t surprise me and I think a lot of others in software development think the same. There are very few companies where quality goes above all. Apple seems to be an exception lately, delaying software that isn’t ready. I know the fight, and I know how hard it is to get company bosses to NOT look at a short term win.
A couple of months ago I bought a pair of ERA 300's, and a Mini Sub for music play in a high ceiling room.. The app was a mess and impossible to play Atmos from Apple Music through the app (The only way possible for true Atmos). I almost returned the whole set up- then they promised to fix the app. So I used Airplay and settled for "loseless" . It's still wonky , but IF they would just allow Atmos play through Airplay 2- I could live with it. The sound is great... when it works.
Let us hope similar PHB's are not on charge of nuclear reactors, aircraft, or the military. Oh wait...
“…Sonos laid off some of its employees to cut costs and also did some internal restructuring that was "causing chaos" by separating people who had worked together for years…”. There you have it. Brilliant execs. Full speed ahead. What iceberg?
Nobody’s going to tell the Company’s lawyer that somebody yelled or screamed in a meeting.
Sonos' lead counsel Eddie Lazarus did an internal investigation into the app's development and told Bloomberg that the app was delayed, from early 2024 to May 2024, and that there had been no "yelling" or "screaming" in meetings. Sonos apparently had a list of what it considered "essential" bugs that needed to be fixed pre-launch, but it decided that less critical bugs could wait until the app was released. "Our list of essential bugs, obviously, was not comprehensive enough," Lazarus told Bloomberg.
This company is in crisis, and usually when that happens, the dedicated employees get laid off and the weasels get promoted.
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Not sure which device you’re using, but Trueplay doesn’t work with iPhone 16 yet, just in case.
It depends. The app works fine for many people (including myself) but not others.
After almost 30 years in the computer industry, I went back to school and did an EMBA in the early 2000s. The Challenger disaster was indeed a case study, vividly backed with video of interviews of people involved in the decision to launch. There were several lessons to take away about creating organizations in which information flows and decisions are based on real information and not wishful thinking and desires.
The story coming out of Sonos sounds like a replay.
I feel like the C-suite is co-opting the software engineer's complaints to mask their real motivations for pushing this release out before it was ready:
The board/shareholders wanted Sonos to get into the headset space because everyone looks at what Apple's got and wish it was their's instead. The executives had to pull the trigger on a half-baked app to hit a target they had set with the board on entering that new market. They didn't respect the warnings of their engineers because they were too MBAbrain'd and focused on making the board happy by doing things that may increase short term profits at the cost of their own brand reputation.
Ah yes, know-it-all MBAs not listening to engineers, the people that know what they're talking about. A tale as old as time.
When will it end? So many businesses are being ran like this and we all know it isn't sustainable.
When will it end? So many businesses are being ran like this and we all know it isn't sustainable.