Update on the Sonos App from Patrick Spence

Why is this app so bad! It’s unusable. This is ridiculous for such an expensive system! Sort it out or give me a refund and I’ll shop somewhere else from now on!! 

Welcome to all sonos-customers that are all having * up sonos-installations :-(

Money back and fire the CEO ASAP!!!

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

Hey Mr. Spence & so called leadership team:

I’ve chatted with Best Buy reps, installers, and multiple friends and family who will never recommend or purchase your products again.  Sonos lied with the Ace roll-out, used deceptive marketing/advertisement/push campaigns, that basically hoodwinked most average users into falling for that pack of lies with this crap app (that should have been rolled out as S3 for the Bluetooth cans).  

Even a once stalwart supporter of Sonos - Wired magazine has just posted how awful the new app is! 

To paraphrase a friend who I had recommended an extensive whole-home Sonos system to last year:

“Look the app is basically a remote control for my music system.  Sonos stole my user-friend and familiar remote control and replaced it with one that barely functions, is hard to learn, not intuitive, and missing features that were PROMISED at roll-out! And now it’s going to take them 6+ months to fix it!” 

Like so many, they don’t have the time, energy, or desire to read the Ken et al: “mine is working great” posts here (even if they sometimes offer some solutions to get their once USEFUL remote control to work).

And while Q3 got a little revenue bump from the Ace cans, just wait till Sonos actually has to post all of the returns from wholesalers, retailers, e-sellers, and more.  They didn’t have to count those immediately, but they are coming in in record numbers for Sonos and they will have to be accounted for, this quarter.  I hope the investment community understands this as the last earnings call sure didn’t highlight that fact and blamed the delayed new products for the lower Q4 estimates. 

What are you clowns trying to do, sell of the company cheap next quarter so you can hop into your golden parachutes and go wreck another company?? 

https://www.channelnews.com.au/is-it-time-for-sonos-ceo-to-quite-with-their-app-latest-debacle-damaging-the-already-tarnished-brand/

Touches on a few points raised by some of the good folks here - those Aussies aren’t just good at breakdancing! 

In a slight detour off-topic

@press250 & @craigski my speakers seem too laid back to care about what time it is. Following the reboot of one, it contacted [0-3].sonostime.pool.ntp.org during boot up, made 1 request about an hour later then nothing. This is the entire list of dns requests containing “sonostime” yesterday 😂🤣

They are also reluctant to accept some of my speakers have gone and will never return.

The network matrix shows one speaker expects 10 other speakers to be available rather than 3 😂

Resuming normal service…

Maybe I’ve just been in too many company financial presentations to staff, especially where company financial performance affects staff bonus, share options and more recently sharesave schemes, but I’m not convinced the wording means they will spend $20-30 million to fix things, which is the conclusion people seem to be jumping to.

From the transcript it makes a good soundbite that the company will spend $20-30 million

We expect these investments will come at a cost in the range of $20 to 30 million in the short term, but are necessary to right the ship for the long term.

I do wonder though, because to me “at a cost” “in the short term” doesn’t mean we will spend, it sounds more like a bit of number shuffling inflating that figure. Much of which could be recovered later, even though it will appear as a reduction in q4 figures.

Of the 3 items listed, the only one which involves a definite spending money is increasing the support team staffing.

Other things that could contribute to that cost to me are:

Delaying product launches.
The projected revenue and profit from new products now comes later. If projections were originally for pre-holiday but it will now be post-holiday there will be lost sales. Marketing budgets allocated and spent won’t be recovered short term and campaigns will need reorganising. Short term that has a cost, but once launched, the money will still come in if it is a successful product launch, just maybe without the holiday impulse purchases.

Having the Chief Innovation Officer switch his focus onto getting things fixed, will have a nominal cost impact that could be attributed against his current projects in the short term.

And so on. Sonos doesn’t need to actually spend that much money to get that figure, they can be notional costs attributed projects, existing budgets spent which won’t be recovered via revenue and profit in Q4 (short term?) but will be mostly recovered next year.

As I opened with, maybe I’ve just been in too many presentations where what appears to have been said isn’t what is actually said, but I highly doubt Sonos are going to be spending $20-30 million.

Quite, and there are many ways to add up things to make up such numbers.

What is significant though is that such a high number has been put out in an investor call. Perhaps for the first time this is a formal public acknowledgment by Sonos, and a mea culpa by Spence, that confirms beyond any doubt that the issue is not just restricted to a few here and Reddit, and is also not just another little glitch, but a major event that is affecting product roll outs and short term financial performance metrics. 

What this means for Sonos users presently afflicted, I can’t say.

Hi @sigh and @Kumar, referring to the earnings call transcript, Sonos reduced revenue guidance for the current quarter nearly 40% (!)  to $240-260M. They cited two factors: reduced sales of current products and delay of two yet-to-be-announced product, both attributed to the new app rollout. That revenue hit is much more significant than the ill-defined $20-30M in unanticipated costs.

Yes, but revenue hits are even harder to connect back to. For all you know, this frenzy to push Ace and the app out was to bolster this anticipated drop in sales. 

The problem for Sonos has been that there has been no real innovation since the first ground breaking one in 2004, and one can offer the same ice cream in only so many flavours. And, competition has now caught up and even surpassed them - except where it came to local library play that seems to be a shrinking market need now. And which even Sonos is trying its best to kill!

Indeed. I’m hopeful, now it has been said in an official and public call it has some potential benefits for both staff and users.

Potentially, internal tensions regarding what staff can or cannot publicly acknowledge will be reduced and more open responses can be made. Such as this

If, however, it is the app that appears unstable (missing speakers, can’t connect, or anything that works in the Desktop app but doesn’t in the main app) then you are probably right - things will improve with further updates.

No doubt there will also potentially be some damage limitation against the Q4 results. If there hasn’t already been an adjustment for q4 results, then now this figure has been said the stock market analysts shouldn’t hit the price as hard when the results come in.

How long it will take to get back on track is still the unknown.