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Ian_S
Prodigy III
August 11, 2024

So Sonos - What Happened?

  • August 11, 2024
  • 12 replies
  • 1640 views

So, at what point do Sonos come clean and at least be transparent about what is causing the bulk of the connectivity issues? Surely after 3 months you must have a good idea, because if you don’t that’s even worse news. 

The reason I ask is, if there is any common thread that users could look into to help themselves, it might be useful information. If it can only be fixed in the Sonos code, fine, but an explanation of what’s gone wrong, why and then when you expect it to be mostly fixed would still help enormously. 

Technical silence, spin and empty promises are not the way to earn back the trust of your user base. 

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    Prodigy II
    August 12, 2024

      

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

     

    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.

    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

     

     

    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. 

    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.

      Kumar
      August 12, 2024

        

      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.

       

      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. 

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