So Sonos - What Happened?

This is the most disturbing issue with the new app for me: device discovery is still not as reliable as it was before the update, and Sonos have had three months to come up with some solutions. For me personally it’s actually got worse - discovery worked 100% reliably on May 8th, but these days I often have a few devices failing to show up. As discussed in https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7226285844410552320/ even SSDP has become unreliable for some of us, which is a firmware regression, not directly related to the app.

Anecdotally we see that when folks wait for an hour to get through to Support, all they can recommend is a factory reset dance, which obviously does nothing for the underlying issue and often makes things worse.

In the Before Times we (and Support) knew what kinds of local network issues could affect discovery and come up with work-arounds. At this point none of us have any idea.

It does suggest (to me at least) that Sonos has developed the new network design in an ideal networking environment, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of their customers have networks centred on routers supplied by their Internet service providers.

Those IPSs buy the routers in huge numbers based mainly on how cheap they can get them, and not on the technical competence of their design.

If they are going to make progress, Sonos needs to start testing what they are doing in the real world, with real (cheap ISP-provided) routers - not with the professional kit that they use in their development environment.

I suspect they are going to need to re-think the new design, and the quicker they realise that the better, for all concerned.

But… the people that make the decisions at Sonos won’t be reading this so, in reality, it was pointless me writing it.

Examples of network configurations known to work well would be helpful.

They don't need to come clean because it’s the same list of things that have always caused issues with Sonos: wifi interference, IP address conflicts, firewall settings, router settings, etc except that now the new app seems to be less tolerant of faults and mutability than it was before.

Basically, it’s the same slices of Swiss cheese that need to be properly aligned but the holes have gotten smaller.

Two words. Hubris and Icarus.

This is the bit I don’t buy into so much. WiFi interference and IP address conflicts would be unchanged, and would cause problems regardless of the new app. 

Firewall and router settings might be important if Sonos would talk openly about what they have done, or are trying to do with the new app and speaker firmware changes that it now exercises. 

Well in my mind if there were “common thread that users could look into to help themselves” Sonos would be quick to point that out--especially given the hubris @Kumar talks about. That would shift the onus to the users and absolve Sonos.

If the choices are between taking a hit to their share price, reducing their fiscal guidance, and taking a big hit to their reputation versus simply putting out a support article on their website saying “check this setting” then it’s pretty obvious what they would do.

With their current senior leadership, execs, directors and the language they use in public statements… I’d guess never.

I expect when it’s eventually fixed it’ll be a ‘move along, nothing to see here’ message coming from them.

If there was going to be any real transparency about the issues and openness around why the release went so disastrously wrong it would have happened by now.

Companies of all sizes make mistakes. Increasingly they are open about what happened and understand that being open about things going wrong is actually good PR.

For me, Sonos leadership still live in the old world where it’s all a secret, or even worse the users fault.

Great take, @sigh. Sonos made a very tentative baby step toward transparency with the ill-fated and all-but-abandoned AMA back in May. After that it was “all a secret, or even worse the users fault.”

Last week’s earnings announcement was positive(ish) … pairing that with a “technical transparency” press release would have put some meat on the bones.

I would not say that; CEO ejection by the Board often happens the day after the Board has expressed confidence in him/her. Having an immediate replacement that can be also announced is part of the process of preventing a stock price collapse.

More importantly, what I still haven’t seen articulated anywhere is this: A detailed description of the pot of gold from a Sonos user perspective, at the end of the transformation rainbow for which Sonos has wreaked such havoc. To justify that, it has to be something as innovative as the initial Sonos entry two decades ago was. 

For instance take S2. All the drama about it in 2020, and a damp squib in terms of delivering a better user experience compared to S1. I say this from all I have read about S2 of course, I did not leave S1 in 2020. The fact that Sonos is abandoning S2 confirms this view.

So do you think Sonos will come clean and be transparent about the actual causes of the connectivity issues?

Not sure why you jumped to CEO change or the board, there has been almost complete technical silence and little transparency about the causes of issues at all levels.

The AMA, for example, had 2 senior directors (software development & UX) and 1 director of product management. There were a couple of tiny snippets, eg volume control changed to the new sonos api instead of upnp + soap

I would honestly say that is secondary at the moment. For people still having issues that haven’t been address and regressions being pushed out, the more important things are

• do Sonos understand why these things aren’t working or regressions (from a user perspective) are occuring?
• do they know how to fix them?
• have they updated internal testing systems and processes to ensure it won’t regress again in the future?

What shiny is promised currently matters less than delivering permanent fixes. At the moment returning features is promised shiny on moving timelines.

From the AMA

It’s probably a good idea to give you some background. This is a new app - we started from an empty project file. As the project progressed, we stopped investing our time in the old app code. Over time we “cross-faded” our engineering attention into the new app.

It says nothing and explains nothing about what went wrong. Zero transparency and provides zero confidence about how things are run.

The day Facebook took themselves offline they had a basic explanation of what had happened and was going on. Within 24 hrs there was a full explanation. In between for those more technically interested there were more details as it was happening.

Companies are being open about this stuff. A staff member accidentally deleted a production database. A decision to downsize servers meant the cloud platform couldn’t cope with traffic, automated testing failed to catch a bug and it was pushed to production, config errors and so on from companies of all sizes.

Showing you understand what went wrong, how you addressed it and how you will prevent it happening in future is good PR. It gives your clients confidence that even when things go wrong you can be relied upon and trusted to do your best to fix it and prevent it happening again.

We’re almost 3 ½ months in and there is little to no information from Sonos about what happened, why and how they will prevent it from happening again.

I am merely pointing out that the silence of the Board on this matter is not indicative of anything, because there have been questions here on the lines of is the Board sleeping.

As to the first, no, I don’t think this will happen. Their lawyers will warn them that saying as little as possible is a better way to stay out of legal trouble in future. In any case, for all Sonos users, actions that deliver are of much more interest, I imagine.

And if you read all that Spence said on the earnings call last week, that was a very remarkable mea culpa. I was surprised to see him that open about the problem.