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Sonos Lays Off 200 Employees After App Failure

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Sonos is laying off 200 employees in an effort to streamline its product teams, reports Bloomberg. The layoffs come as Sonos continues to recover from a failed app redesign last May that alienated longtime customers.

sonos-logo.jpg

Following widespread criticism over the app's buggy interface and missing features, Sonos temporarily suspended development on hardware products and focused all of its effort on app improvements. It took months for the company to add functionality that had been removed with the revamp, and revenue declined 16 percent in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2024.

Then Sonos CEO Patrick Spence penned an apology and outlined the steps Sonos was taking to fix the app in July, but he ultimately stepped down earlier this year. Spence was replaced with interim CEO Tom Conrad, who founded music service Pandora and has been a longtime Sonos board member.

Conrad told employees that Sonos has been "mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be," which is why the company is restructuring. Going forward, Sonos will have a simpler organization with groups for hardware, software, design, quality, and operations, rather than separate groups for different product categories.

Article Link: Sonos Lays Off 200 Employees After App Failure
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/05/sonos-employee-layoffs/
But when Apple does it, there are people on here that say, "Clearly, most people here don't know anything about software development", "Software will always have bugs", "It's a beta!", "What, are you an Apple engineer?", "Are you Tim Cook? Do you run a trillion dollar company?" etc. etc.
 
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This is really awful. These employees did nothing wrong. Leadership didn't listen to feedback and pushed through a ****** product to probably meet some sort of performance bonus requirement someone up top made. They made a bunch of money, released a crap product, then employees lost their jobs.
 
AppleMad98004 said:
They are getting rid of people because sales are slow. The app fiasco is just an excuse. Sales are slowing at many companies and it looks like this may be a big year for layoffs.
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Agreed. Sales were already slowing down in 2022 and 2023 long before the app fiasco. They're now just using it to justify new leadership and layoffs. That's not to say the new app isn't without a huge amount of problems, but it feels like the story is burying the lead here.
 
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I know a lot of great engineers and designers (who were at Bose) whom I hope are alright tonight. The whole roll out debacle could have been avoided if common sense and timing were properly applied. The whole nightmare of involving firmware dependencies and new hardware and assuming a lot of things simply didn't work. It's a shame and I hope they turn that ecosystem around. They had a great thing going and now sharks can smell blood. And a lot of talent will probably get sucked back up by Bose, Apple, and others.
 
I have always felt that Sonos is a tad overpriced, maybe if their products were 25% - 30% cheaper they wouldn't be blaming everything on an app.
 
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