Happy now Spence et al?

And now the fallout from this terrible decision impacts more than just customers, resellers, and investors.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220357/sonos-layoffs-august-2024-app

And from Darwin1984 commenter on this story: 

“Developers are not employees. Sonos fired all its US developers years ago and out sourced support to various countries to contractors. Pretty easy to see why the app is in such an abysmal state. The company has gone downhill every scene Spence took charge and customers and employees have suffered as a result. He should be the one to go.”

Wow. As a marketer, I feel for the 100 laid off as we are always the first to suffer when the financial going gets tough…

Looks very much like the app will be fixed and that, once ‘completed’, Spence will have no choice but to step down. For an app redesign to create this level of consumer chaos at such commercial detriment makes the position untenable, you would imagine. 

Question is will you still be buying yourself that Christmas present for that fully functioning Sonos system of yours or having solidarity with your fellow marketers for whom Christmas cheer will be meagre this year? 

You bet, I need another speaker!

I am doubtful that Sonos outsourced all it’s developers.  I’ve never heard that before, and it sounds like a terribly inefficient way to run a tech company.  The out sourcing of support is partially true.  This was done a couple years back, and this forum was supportted by contractors.  That is no longer the case though as Sonos hired support personnel since, to support the community here at least.  I can’t confirm the location and employment status of other support staff.

As far as the layoffs themselves, it’s obviously not good.  I don’t think you can conclude that layoffs would not have happened at all if Sonos didn’t release the new app and Ace headphones though.  If Sonos had not released the Ace, and relied on sales of existing products alone, they likely would had a drop in sales anyway.

Why not revert to S2 then, until you address your issues, organizational/management first, since I don’t know how it is possible to take a decision to release such application at all ...

As has been said 1000 times, the old app doesn’t support the new hardware, and sales of the new hardware take priority over everything else.  Investors mean more than customers in the venture capital world.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220421/sonos-s2-app-relaunch

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220421/sonos-s2-app-relaunch

Which is exactly what many people have said for many months. It would be the right thing to do, but sadly the damage is already done. 

They also laid off 100 employees today unfortunately. Some in customer support. Spence is still around, of course. 
 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220357/sonos-layoffs-august-2024-app

“The cuts spanned across the company and impacted divisions including marketing, product and engineering, platform and infrastructure, and software quality.”

“Sonos is also in the process of winding down some of its customer support offices, including one in Amsterdam that will close later this year.”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220421/sonos-s2-app-relaunch

I would not read too much in to that.  It’s somewhat stating the obvious, that Sonos did consider their options, but I don’t think it definitively shows that Sonos is favoring this option at the moment.

That said, with the mentioned product delays, Sonos could prioritiesthe older app updates to work with Ace and whatever new products are coming before the rumored October release.  That seems like it would be essential for any kind of rollback, but would probably postpone some other future projects in the pipeline, that may already have been delayed anyway.

Better to just go back to the old app with no changes at this point, Sonos needs to get folks back to fully operational.

Release a new (S3?) app that supports the Ace and other new hardware. It worked well for S1/S2.

No need for me I am still using the old s2 app

Sonos deserve to crash and burn. They have had ample opportunity to put things right and have continued with their single minded "we know what's best for our customers" attitude for far too long. 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220421/sonos-s2-app-relaunch

Of course they do.

Will be my fault, I decided to sacrifice my speakers and enable upgrades on everything.

Then again it is the verge reporting, so… 

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220421/sonos-s2-app-relaunch

Which is exactly what many people have said for many months. It would be the right thing to do, but sadly the damage is already done. 

For months. And months. Many of us, especially those of us in technology, product rollouts, brand awareness, etc. have been warning for MONTHS that this path was folly.

I mean, who does Sonos think their bread and butter customers and brand ambassadors are? Sudo-audiophiles that want their music, when they want it, no interference.

Meanwhile the company plugged their ears and whistled Dixie, pretending to know better than everyone.  Brand suicide is hard to watch, especially because I love my Sonos products.  This disaster of an app is death to the brand though.

I’ve read so many comments and posted links on articles.  Everything references the iOS or Android app changes.  What is being done for Windows users?  I’ve done all the posted suggestions to fix Windows and all I can play is one song at a time before I get the “Unable to access music library” message.

Sit down and hold onto something @mscanlon: the Windows and Mac desktop apps have been in maintenance mode for years. Updates to the desktop apps are few and far between, as evidenced by the music library wizard still pretending to support “click-click-done” http sharing when that mechanism was obsoleted three months ago.

The Web App is advertised to be the successor to the desktop apps.

Here’s a thought…?

If Sonos are considering providing the S2 App, perhaps to those users who are affected by some of the new-App issues …I’m wondering if the intention would be to temporarily ‘replace’ the new Sonos App with the older S2 App (until the new App is fixed for them), or will the two Apps simply run alongside each other? 

The Verge article just left me with quite a few unanswered questions.

Given there is no substance behind the statement, “has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app” is likely to simply be “yeah, we talked about that but decided to carry on with fixes”.

”There have been discussions high up” = “the board spoke about it”.
For a media outlet like The Verge, spinning that into a click-bait headline - especially for eager Sonos forum users - is solid gold.

The Verge specialise in click bait titles, followed by whatever random thoughts pop into their heads, to make some non-news article. They lost their credibility many years ago and haven’t shown any reason to consider they have got it back.

According to The Verge

Valve confirms it'll support the ROG Ally with its Steam Deck operating system

because they had the line

Added support for extra ROG Ally keys.

In some release notes and one of Valves designers said they added some hardware support for the Ally and other handhelds.

Valve have always said from day one they want SteamOS to work on more than just the Steamdeck, then other manufactures released handhelds, so Valve being Valve have be adding support for other manufacturer handheld hardware most likely because it’s already been made available for Linux as opensource drivers anyway.

Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary for Valve to be doing. It could also be years before any version of SteamOS is release for handhelds. They still haven’t got around releasing the PC version they said they would release “soon” after the steamdeck launch.

Valve always do things on Gabe time.

Me neither, I never moved to S2, remain a satisfied S1 user since 2011/2020 . S1 is a very good remote control for a multiroom home audio system, that does all I need it do for local library as well as streamed music. The only useful update it delivered to me in all the time I have used it, is the option to tweak the sound quality of the downstream Sonos units via Trueplay tuning, that worked very well out of the box to get my Sub to sound right for where it was placed.

Not having used S2 at all, I cannot comment on the extent to which the user experience of Sonos was elevated by it over that delivered by S1, from 2020 till now.

By all accounts, Sonos seems to be in a maze of its own making, struggling to get to the end of it. The only difference being that unlike in the typical maze, this one permits no back tracking to course correct, but only forward moves.

It will be interesting to see how long Spence lasts in his job.

One should not confuse Spence for Sonos. Spence seems to be doing the Titanic captain act twice in his career. Though he wasn’t captain when Blackberry went bust, but definitely was on the bridge. Unlike what Edward Smith did, he won’t go down with the ship though.

Sure is a lot of trouble for a dumb pair of headphones that nobody asked for

You obviously haven’t been around here long as the Headphones were often mentioned during the past 4 years or so and I wouldn’t be too quick to judge things, as Sonos still produce excellent hardware and the Ace is no exception to that fact.