Sonos Unveils Overhaul Plan After App Debacle (theverge.com) 26
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence has unveiled a plan to address the fallout from the company's botched app release in May 2024. The audio equipment maker aims to overhaul its software development practices and rebuild customer trust after the controversial update sparked widespread criticism, The Verge reports.
The company will extend warranties by one year for select products and implement more rigorous testing processes, including an expanded beta program. Sonos has also pledged to introduce major app changes gradually and create an opt-in system for experimental features.
To improve internal accountability, Sonos will appoint a "quality ombudsperson" to escalate concerns and report to leadership. The firm also plans to establish a customer advisory board for pre-launch feedback. Executive bonuses will be tied to app quality improvements and regaining customer confidence.
The company will extend warranties by one year for select products and implement more rigorous testing processes, including an expanded beta program. Sonos has also pledged to introduce major app changes gradually and create an opt-in system for experimental features.
To improve internal accountability, Sonos will appoint a "quality ombudsperson" to escalate concerns and report to leadership. The firm also plans to establish a customer advisory board for pre-launch feedback. Executive bonuses will be tied to app quality improvements and regaining customer confidence.
What a load of BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I think they knew it would be a mess. But they would save a ton of money on going back to a single dev team and they thought the aftermath would be as easy to clean up as a normal buggy release. They underestimated the scale of the problem they were causing, but I really didn't see any blame put on developers.
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Every single remedial step they called out is a change to the development process and none include a sound thrashing for management ignoring devs that said it's not ready.
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Yeah, because they desperately needed a ground-up rewrite. It might sound like it's put on the developers, but management not allocating proper resources and planning for technical debt all along is what led to the need to break from it.
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Still not seeing the sound thrashing for negligent management...
The train wreck was the rewrite. It was pushed out before it was ready. That was an action by management. All their remediation suggests is that they have added another layer that management will ignore.
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Indeed. This was gross management malpractice, nothing else. That they now try to blame the developers shows that they are not serious about fixing anything.
Re: Which once again proves my theory: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can tell by the way you're asking that you're expecting a "no".
Re: Which once again proves my theory: (Score:2)
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If you can avoid it, yes. If you cannot, the software should be minimal, hardened and at least some actual engineers should have been involved in its production.
In a software-defined economy (Score:2)
Sonos doesn’t have a MVP without a solid .app foundation - First Principles. Sonos lost its Apple sandbox-moment it could brand at the exclusion of all others. Now, its in the predicament that I won’t buy it – until I know what the software shitshow side of the product supports, includes and excludes. No f#cking way Sonos is owning my allegiance, buy-in and stranding gear that Sonos has decided they don’t want to compete against.
I am a musician. Its hardware delivers. Its connectivit
Probably just fluff (Score:3)
They were likely stupid enough to never establish solid processes and solid engineering. That does save a lot of money in the short run, after all. If they were really serious, fixing that gross management malpractice would take 5...10 years. But I am pretty sure they are not serious.
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They did pretty well until they farted out the S2 debacle. Since then, it's been limping along, and has now failed entirely.
The S1/S2 thing seemed to cause the fanbois to fully rally around the management, but what they missed was that it was inherently because of lazy engineering (aka. "cost cutting" or "lack of investment"). They could have carried on supporting S1 and S2 at the same time, but it would have slowed down their "innovation" in the new shiny., and their new shareholders couldn't be expected t
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Probably just fluff (Score:2)
If they had done well the first time they wouldn't have got themselves into a position where they felt they had to do a complete rewrite. That's not a thing when your design is modular enough and your code is comprehensible. Clearly theirs was neither, whether because of design or development model or management screaming for changes to made more rapidly then they could be made correctly.
It's too late (Score:2)
A screw up like this against your loyal customer base is unforgivable. It was all done in the name of profit. No amount of back pedaling or promising to fix this or that is going to help. The C-Suite made the final decision to flip the switch (against the warnings of the developers I might add). It's the C-Suite that is the cancer that needs to be cut out.
I wonder if the recovery plan... (Score:2)
...includes kissing my speckled ass.
Never another penny on Sonos product.
Wires work just fine.
Apologies mean nothing - Allow Rollbacks (Score:2)
I was one of the Sonos users affected by this. I used wireless sonos speakers to play music from my personal music (yes, legit) library. I used it daily for years.
One day in May, this just stopped working. It was not clear at first what was wrong. I had to debug it myself. After working through many appalling, mysterious error screens I eventually concluded it was the Sonos app itself. Sonos's help was no help at all, it had me checking my media library configuration instead of recognizing the app release h
So ... leadership team completely unchanged? (Score:1)
There were plenty of concerns which the leadership ignored "together".
Only if a "quality ombudsman" had power of veto over the C-suite's decision-making would this calm the customer base.
My suspension on purchasing more Sonos products remains unchanged on this news. I still can't search my music library for music: that's an automatic no-go, and worse: that functionality appears to be forever blocked given Sonos' switch to the cloud.
Why would a techie care in the first place? (Score:2)
There's no reason for anyone competent to want scornworthy proprietary ewaste and when their unwise choice backfires I consider that justice.
I remain unaffected by IoT manufacturer shenanigans because I'm too intelligent to desire what they're selling.
Re: Why would a techie care in the first place? (Score:2)
Bonuses? (Score:2)
Surely the 200 million and counting should be deducted from future exec bonus. Rather than rewarding them for sorting out their own screw up.
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Agreed. I can't believe they're trying to show how serious they are about changing, by threatening to take away their own bonuses "unless the company succeeds in improving the quality of the app experience and rebuilding customer trust". How much do you want to bet that the Sonos leadership team will decide that they've met those goals by the time bonuses are due??
Full management wipe. (Score:2)