Sonos Lays Off 100 Employees as Its App Crisis Continues (theverge.com) 52
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sonos laid off approximately 100 employees this morning, a source familiar with the situation tells The Verge. Those affected -- I'm told the marketing division took a significant hit -- abruptly lost access to the company's internal network. 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.
Sonos confirmed the layoffs to The Verge on Wednesday afternoon, providing a statement from CEO Patrick Spence. [...] These latest cuts come as Sonos continues to grapple with the fallout from its disastrous mobile app redesign. On Sonos' earnings call last week, CEO Patrick Spence stressed that fixing the app is the company's number one priority -- so much so that two hardware launches planned for later this year have now been delayed to keep all focus on the app. Further reading: Sonos' $30M App Fail is Cautionary Tale Against Rushing Unnecessary Updates.
Sonos confirmed the layoffs to The Verge on Wednesday afternoon, providing a statement from CEO Patrick Spence. [...] These latest cuts come as Sonos continues to grapple with the fallout from its disastrous mobile app redesign. On Sonos' earnings call last week, CEO Patrick Spence stressed that fixing the app is the company's number one priority -- so much so that two hardware launches planned for later this year have now been delayed to keep all focus on the app. Further reading: Sonos' $30M App Fail is Cautionary Tale Against Rushing Unnecessary Updates.
Stick a fork in it (Score:2)
It's done. The spiral of death is almost complete.
When your sound company (Score:2)
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people these days don't just listen to music, they want "an experience", so you need to have an app. logical.
it appears they were quite competent at reproducing sound, but clueless and reckless at managing app experience expectations and annoying people with anxiety.
i just wonder one thing. i read that the new app caused older devices to work at lower quality, or even rendered them unusable. did they try to uninstall the app? that tends to work for me! it's a loudspeaker, ffs.
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Problem is there are plenty of "sound companies" but what made Sonos stand apart and people buy it was its connectivity which is primarily its app.
Take away the app and it's no better than the competitors
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False, You know nothing about Sonos, a perfect fit for /.
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Oh ok, I guess they didn't lay off 100 employees then. Are you sure YOU know about Sonos? What do you think their strengths are if not connected speakers?
Re: When your sound company (Score:2)
What other form or remote control would you suggest ? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. I would love to have a non-app solution for my whole home audio system. Which is not Sonos based.
IR and RF remotes were adequate in a world where one physically inserts the playback media, and is listening in the same room.
With streaming, such remotes are basically unusable. Even a voice remote is useless to me when it comes to classical music. Selecting one of 1000 versions of the Goldberg variations on
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Have you checked out Roon? [roon.app] You sound like you'd be a good candidate for it. You provide a computer and Ethernet, point the software at your NAS, and then it handles pushing audio to your endpoints. I've been using it for a few years now and have found it to be the missing link between Qobuz and my ripped CDs/bandcamp stuff.
Re: When your sound company (Score:2)
I did , as a matter of fact. It was very good. But it didn't handle my local music collection as well. There is no UI to deal with metadata, which was problematic. I didn't love the price, either.
Music Assistant also supports Qobuz, and is free. It's got some rough edges, and j reported many bugs, but it is still great. I use it daily.
marketing cut off = we are dead or being sold! (Score:3)
marketing cut off = we are dead or being sold!
silentbozo (Score:5, Interesting)
How hard was it to revert back to the old app?
Seriously, this should have been step one, day one, once they figured out the people in charge of the new app launch should all be terminated for being idiots.
How is it only now after they've lost a bunch of market share and had to lay people off that this is back on the table? I would have hazarded a guess that they finally terminated the idiots who were keeping it from being an option... but apparently the CEO is still there...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
"Sonos has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app for Android and iOS â" a clear sign of what an ordeal the companyâ(TM)s hurried redesign has become. The Verge can report that there have been discussions high up within Sonos about bringing back the prior version of the app, known as S2, as the company continues toiling away at improving the performance and addressing bugs with the overhauled design that rolled out in May to a flood of negative feedback. (The new Sonos app currently has a 1.3-star review average on Google Play.)"
Depends... (Score:1)
How hard was it to revert back to the old app?
Does not seem hard on the face of it, but maybe the new app went with a major backend overhaul, that was very hard to undo...
In hindsight they still should have tried but I think they thought they would just get through new release pains and then it would be smooth sailing.
I'll bet they sad some QA and developers that tried to tell them to abort early on but the warnings went unheard...
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How hard was it to revert back to the old app?
"Sonos has explored the possibility of rereleasing its previous mobile app for Android and iOS â" a clear sign of what an ordeal the companyâ(TM)s hurried redesign has become. The Verge can report that there have been discussions high up within Sonos about bringing back the prior version of the app, known as S2, as the company continues toiling away at improving the performance and addressing bugs with the overhauled design that rolled out in May to a flood of negative feedback. (The new Sonos app currently has a 1.3-star review average on Google Play.)"
I had wondered the same thing, but from what I've read the implication is that the task is too hard for two reasons.
One: there were new products released that require the new stuff, so reverting means bricking those devices until they can be completely reworked.
Two: from what I've read it's not just the user-facing mobile app that got replaced. It's the entire back-end structure. It's not as straightforward as just rolling back the app, even if you were okay with losing the new products. You'd have
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"How is it only now after they've lost a bunch of market share..."
Have they?
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Seriously, this should have been step one
I can tell you've never done a business degree. Step one is never "admit you fucked up". In fact that's never a step. You just promise fixes in perpetuity.
Admitting you fucked up is one of the few things that get you fired as a CEO.
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Wild guess (Score:3)
I am going to make a wild guess that the origin of this is a unnecessary rewrite of the app that was an "unimprovement". Perhaps the company thought they could make more money by "enshitifying" the app.
Probably there was a product manager or product champion who wanted to make his mark and was given too much freedom to put his personal stamp on the app. It's an old story, repeated many times.
Testing? (Score:2)
These latest cuts come as Sonos continues to grapple with the fallout from its disastrous mobile app redesign.
Did they not test it fully to see that it worked properly? And if it was a major re-design, then did they not do focus-group testing and limited initial rollout in order to determine that customers would be OK with it?
The mantra "move fast and break things" has proven its lack of worth - it needs to be put out of our mercy and given an indecent burial. Maybe, with more stories like CrowdStrike and now Sonos, the tech sector will take the hint. Of course, a few more CEO's and 'thought leaders' might have to
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The new app and associated firmware was not yet at feature parity. They only had a small team working on the new stuff and had to force the new stuff on everyone to allocate the full staff. Really a stupid idea how they did it.
It was a ground up rebuild to get rid of technical debt but it was very obvious that it was going to be a bad experience even if it worked perfectly.
Re: Testing? (Score:3)
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Sonos does not "move fast and break things", they are slow and unresponsive and, until recently, among the least likely to break things. Don't let the facts get in the way of your fantasy.
Another possibliy (Score:2)
It could also be that the speaker market is rather competitive and even the cheap stuff is generally good enough for most people. Hell, I picked up a JBL Go 3 on clearance recently to attach to my scooter and was pretty impressed with how decent something so tiny could sound.
For just background music around the house, the Amazon Echo Dots that I got on a Black Friday deal a few years back do the job just fine. Yeah, they don't shake the walls with bass, but most if the time that's not something I want any
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Google and Apple speakers are a better comparison for entry level whole house. They let you cast audio from any app and you can sync multiple rooms.
They are not in the same category as devices to feed built-in speakers and all that.
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"Google and Apple speakers are a better comparison for entry level whole house."
Better comparison than what? They aren't comparable to Sonos. There is nothing comparable to Sonos if you use Sonos for what it does.
The closest competitors for Sonos are Heos and PlayFi and Blusound that I am aware of. There's also Roon, but all these have significant differences. People who assume that smart speakers and bluetooth speakers are competitors to Sonos do not know what Sonos is.
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You can ignore the smarts on those smart speakers and just use them as multi-room audio devices. They're not the same (said elsewhere that Chromecast Audio is closer).
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I realize a Bluetooth speaker isn't the same thing as multi-room audio. I was specifically addressing audio quality of the speakers themselves and pointing out that to most people, even the cheap consumer grade speakers sound just fine. Sonos is catering to a very specific niche and they may have overestimated the size of their market.
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The people buying Echo Dots are not generally the same market in the first place.
That said, the $30 Chromecast Audio combined with an amplifier was a good starting point, though there isn't a 12V trigger option on the CA to let you turn the amp off when not in use. We really went years without a good multi-room synced audio option.
The $299 WiiM amp is a directly competitor to the $699 Sonos amp. Less than half the price and without the complexity of their messy app.
While Sonos does have smart speakers, th
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The people buying Echo Dots are not generally the same market in the first place.
They do multi-room audio. [amazon.com] It really comes down to whether you feel the audio quality is satisfactory and if it's truly worth shelling out extra just for more bass and volume, which most of the time probably would go unutilized anyway. Most people don't want their entire home to sound like a bar or nightclub.
It's a bit like that realization that wealthier folks shop at Dollar Tree, too. Just because someone has the money to spend doesn't mean they're automatically going to drop big bucks on a multi-room
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That's less about audio quality and more about having to use Alexa as your music player. It's true that Sonos does this but not in such an annoying way. I still think an app agnostic casting option with speaker groups like what Google and Apple offer are the better thing.
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"While Sonos does have smart speakers, they are really just an add-on product that works in the same ecosystem as amplifiers connected to in-ceiling and built-in speakers."
LOL that's like saying that GM has cars but they are really motor oil salesman.
"The $299 WiiM amp is a directly competitor to the $699 Sonos amp."
Sure, if you ignore a host of Sonos features and its own messy app.
"They were always a higher end product."
No, they are not a higher end product once you realize that their market is not what yo
Technical Debt (Score:3)
They have been kludging new features on top of old for generations of hardware and this is a rewrite that requires a clean break and replacement firmware.
Turns out technical debt can lead to actual insolvency pretty quickly.
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What evidence do you have that this is the problem? None whatsoever.
Sonos did a clean break between S1 and S2. They handled this transition pretty well. What happened here is simply their recently evolved incompetence. Sonos has traditionally been reliable and "kludging new features" has not remotely been part of their vocabulary.
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S1 to S2 was just a breaking API change and dropping support for legacy devices that don't support the full set of features. This new rewrite was from the ground up - whole separate team developing the new app.
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. We need to make the new app be the app going forward so we stop splitting our attention
This is very old news - 3 months ago.
https://en.community.sonos.com... [sonos.com]
I didn't notice (Score:1)
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Changing volume takes2 and 10 seconds to propagate to the speakers.
The app always starts with saying your system couldn't be found, then after some random delay, it finds your system.
Even changing volume on the speakers themselves seems to take forever.
In fact here's an absurdity, changing the volume on Spotify is often faster than on their own app!
It's a big fail from fundamental useability POV.
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People report problems with the app, that is well known. The person you are responding to said he does not use the app, did you not notice that?
I also do not use the app and I have no problems whatsoever. I use Sonos daily. The new app sucks, the product itself appears unchanged *to me*.
Also, the problems are constrained to the phone apps, the desktop apps are unaffected. Those speculating that there are underlying firmware redesigns that compel use of the new app do not know anything.
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he does not use the app, did you not notice that?
Did you read the part where I said
Even changing volume on the speakers themselves seems to take forever.
So even the firmware on the speakers seems effected.
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My S1 system is still working just fine. The app's just the same as it's ever been - which isn't brilliant, but it's functional.
The only thing my S1 system can't do that annoys me is that it can't talk to SMB2 servers, so I have to run a read-only proxy just to support Sonos. Yeah, I _could_ probably dislike that I can't have HD audio, even though one of my devices supports it, but honestly, my old fart ears probably can't tell the difference any more, and the kids listen to absolute shit, so don't need it.
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I have a Sonos Arc, Sub, and Ace and use them daily and this is the first time I'm hearing something is wrong. I don't use the app outside of setting up the device for the first time. What's the problem?
The problem is that some fundamental features were lost and still not recovered.
Probably the most egregious is that when the new app came out, local music libraries — the original bread & butter of Sonos, the feature that many homes built out their entire speaker system for — dropped out of sight for many people, without warning.
Even today, three months after release, you can't search your local libraries!
And that's just one problem, but it established the impression that Sonos was quietly a
Dumb the app down ... (Score:2)
Dumb the app down so you charge for "features" on a subscription basis later on. It's not working. Hopefully other companies with this mindset are watching this disaster unfold.
This is shocking (Score:2)
Wow, sonos still has employees?
So glad I avoided that product.
Malice or incompetence? (Score:2)
From the desperate back-pedaling in the C-suite, it appears that in this case it was incompetence.
Appity app app (Score:2)
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It does appear that the problems are tied somehow to the recent headphone release, though it's clearly more complicated. It would be poetic that the company's demise could be directly attributed to releasing a headphone product when headphones are the antithesis of "whole house audio".
Front the very start, Sonos distinguished itself through sophisticated software. How things have changed.
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