Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

Everyone makes mistakes. Sonos’s customer base is outraged, its share price has gone from the $19 range at the start of the year to sub-$14 now.

Investing for the future existing of the business is essential. Seeking growth is common. Doing so at the expense of a loyal customer base which itself offers upgrade and on-sell opportunities seems foolhardy. I’ll echo the sentiments many others have expressed - by all means develop a ground-up platform suitable for the next gen but don’t brick the devices of your previously loyal user base in order to do so. Given their demographics, they probably won’t respond well to becoming unwilling beta testers for a shockingly unready product. That’s not even reflecting on the serious money they’ve invested to merit such treatment.

As others have said - why the rush? Why nail all of our colours to the mast of your sinking ship? Why not push back the new app feature 3 months (hell, take 12!) and restore a version of the previous one where the essential core features work? Early adopters and the time-rich can do earl- access beta. There likely will be a time where technical dependencies and the overhead of managing 2 products in parallel gets too much and they need to be converged. It clearly wasn’t in April and it isn’t now. I appreciate that attitudes vary by culture but the “brave” thing to do is admit to a mis-judgement and re-plan. Right now, you’ve admitted to a mistake but committed us all to carry on with the death-march anyway. “Brave” is not the right word for that.

I feel a management change coming on and a future business school case study. Honestly, I’d rather be part of the customer club Sonos used to have, which actually felt unique for much more positive reasons.

No good to me as I wont be buying any more sonos kit and I don’t listen to Radio, I like to pick my own music

I'm glad to (finally) see some reflection on the side of Sonos. I hope the company understands that it did not just fail to release a working app, but that the biggest disappointment was in the response of the company. If this message had gone out 2 weeks after the initial release, when to scale of the disaster was clear to everyone, I (and probably others too) would have been much more understanding and earning back trust would have been much easier. It's damn near impossible now.

I expected as few weeks ago that the edit queue functionality would take a long time to be "reintroduced". At least this message gives me some comfort that my lowered expectations of Sonos have been calibrated well.

This sentence has me puzzled a bit on what exactly the commitment to me (or us) is.

Mr. Spence,

Please resign immediately.  Joseph Biden had the wisdom and humility to do so.  You have directly caused and are responsible for a terrible mess.  I have not been able to access my Music Library for two months and counting now.  I have spent countless hours trying to fix the mess you are responsible for having allowed to exist in the first place.

By your actions, you have created an enormous well of ill-will towards Sonos now and in the foreseeable future.

I am sure the Sonos community would love to know how this update ever came to be released.

The argument that the May release was “needed” to enable the headphones that had been promised to investors, is a load of bollocks. I work for a publicly traded company, so I know that it’s dangerous to disappoint investors. However, the debacle of this release has the stock down ~20% YTD, so by comparison the hit might have been smaller if they’d gone to investors in Q2 with tail between legs and saying “Sorry, the headphones are pushed back to Q3”. If this “ground up” software rewrite was going to be needed to enable headphones and/or any other future products, well, first there should have been a moratorium on shiny new product releases (“Squirrel!”) and change for its own sake, whilst they got the software rewritten and stable on the current products. The result of not having done so is that they’ve now got sideways and will never catch up. If they’re always introducing change from new products before fixing the bugs related to previous products (and life in general), stability will be perpetually elusive.

I would be curious on the metrics Sonos studies on repeat buyers of their products or those of us that add on throughout the years. I would say it is pretty large group among the community. I am one of those in the camp where 6 or so years ago, I bought my first pair of Sonos speakers to ‘try them out’ and see how they worked and if I really liked them or satisfied, would add on and continue to add on. I ended up loving them and added on over the years. Now up to 10 speakers throughout my home. Plus my family and friends that I recommended Sonos as well that are now jokingly giving me a hard time about this debacle.

Now, I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer. But, isn’t there a relatively basic marketing strategy that it can cost five to seven times more to acquire a new customer versus retaining an existing one? Their success rate selling to us as existing customers has to be quite high. No idea on that % versus selling to or acquiring new customers versus, selling to us the existing base. It just seems you would not want to disrupt your current base of fairly loyal customers in the manner they have since early May. The people that are going to continue buying your products.

Just seems basic business that the application that operates your hardware is not something as a company you would want to so royally f--- up as to brick systems, users unable to even add new products, not even mentioning the removal of basic features that were lost and have been complained about as we have exhausted for months here on the forum. It’s incredible they missed the mark so terribly on this. Now my fear is that internal developers and others are going to just bail on Sonos and who knows if anyone will be able to pick up the pieces.

Imagine coming home from the shop having spent a load of money on a bunch of Sonos kit today, plugging it in and then spending several hours trying to get it to work. Then realising after an internet search or two that actually you had no chance of making it work, because it doesn’t work. I guess the upside is that you could maybe return it to the shop. I on the other hand get to keep my worthless junk, that may or may not work again in the future. Having worked in software development a bit I know mistakes can be made, but to get into this situation with your core application is shocking. I hope they fix things quickly for everyone that has already invested. Going forward the brand is dead once this gets into the mainstream media. 

Why does my system constantly keep working? I have 13 Sonos speakers, and can load up the app and search for and play a track in 4-5 seconds. The volume slider is instantly responsive, I have no intermittence in playback, and all my thumbnails load up every single time, morning, noon and night.
All my favourites, recently played, and playlists are there too, and I have no issues accessing Apple Music or Spotify.
Where’s the letter from Patrick Spence apologising for keeping my music working perfectly? When can I be like everyone else and have difficulties. I’ve tried doing nothing and still my music plays. 
I feel like I’ve been singled out for exceptional functionality, it’s not fair. At this rate, if this carries on, I’ll just keep my speakers and buy some more. 

Still as of today I cannot use my 12 Sonos Speakers in my house!!! Because of your CEOs incompetence. I really don’t care one iota about this * and fake apology. 
 

Get my speakers to work! Or prepared for a class action lawsuit!

*Moderator Note: Modified in accordance with the Community Code of Conduct.*