Is the CEO satisfied with this mess

So have you spoken to customer support staff (level-1 or level-2) since the new Sonos App was released a couple of months ago? Were they not able to assist you?

The CEO has the ability to change or do something about this mess but he doesn’t. So infer from that what you will.  

I have not been able to get through to support and wonder why they are left struggling to pick up the pieces. They clearly were neither prepared nor able to cope with such a massive issue.

When I did go online to support the answer was fundamentally - phone us and we’ll try and help!

I am afraid that for such a huge problem affecting so many people this simply is not good enough! Equally as a customer spending hours on the phone trying to re connect all items is not a thing I expect to have to do.

It is also worth noting that the share price has collapsed from c 17.8 in May to about 14.4 just now! An almost 25% collapse in share price shows what the market thinks of the company for making such a huge mess of this issue. What little old me thinks is probably irrelevant to the CEO, but stand me alongside thousands more and the markets take note!

Meh. The share price was less than $10 in October 2023 and more than $40 in April 2021. There are much more important things than the app that drive the share price.

That's not a collapse. it depends how micro you look at it (and what your agenda is in citing share prices). If you isolate the last six months, it looks like a plummeting trajectory. There’s no doubt the app has played a big part. But take a look at the 1Y chart and you’ll see it was way below that price from August to November last year. Look at the 5Y chart and, aside from the massive spike during the pandemic/lockdowns when streaming music (and TV) really exploded for a couple of years, the price is looking better than pre-Covid, although largely flat overall since. Clearly you’d want your investment to go up rather than remain flat, and the Ace was meant to boost things, but the share price always seems to hover between USD$11 and $19. 

Tales of Sonos’ demise are greatly exaggerated… That said, Spence will have some explaining to do on 7th or 8th August when the next quarter’s results are presented. 

I think you will find what matters to the CEO is whether the board and the investors are happy with his progress. They are the people he answers to and as long as they are happy with him and his explanations then I suspect he will be satisfied.

Personally I am not happy with his attitude towards customers and partners or the culture he will be influencing/creating within Sonos, but I am not the one who is paying his wages or setting the objectives and milestones he needs to deliver.

I would hope he has some serious explaining to do and consequences, but maybe this was already raised by him with his task masters as a required short-term upset/upheaval to achieve the companies long term goals.

Stranger things have happened and there are multiple times I have thought a company board/investors should eject senior members from a company as they appear to cause more harm than good in my eyes, but for reasons known only to them they don’t.

It’s too bad that Amazon Prime Days are over. I’m to the point of shopping for a new sound system. Better yet, I may just go into the basement and get my trusty Sony boombox and use it instead of dealing with the Sonos software. I’m so tired of having problems with my Sonos system!

It’s only my personal opinion, but I’ve served on many boards in my time, and I don’t see any board condoning this type of move. I’m a firm believer in the conspiracy v cock up theory, and it’s far more likely that such a huge impact was neither foreseen nor welcomed! There doesn’t seem to have been any significant or robust testing pre release, and I am quite certain that had they known in advance they would not have released such a buggy version

Audio tends to be a buy once, use forever purchase. The immediate short term cash value of current customers to a company is relatively low. Compared to an old world audio system, a SONOS system might be expanded until it fills the house, but it then becomes forever. The main value of current customers to the SONOS company is potential referrals.