Sonos CEO Patrick Spence Steps Down After Disastrous App Launch (theverge.com) 37
Sonos Chief Executive Patrick Spence stepped down on Monday, following a tumultuous period marked by a botched app rollout that angered customers and hurt sales of its new headphones. Board member Tom Conrad, a former Pandora chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO while the audio equipment maker searches for a permanent replacement, the company said.
Spence's departure comes eight months after Sonos released a revamped app that launched with missing features and technical problems, leading to widespread customer complaints and necessitating an extensive fix-it effort. The company will pay Spence, who joined Sonos in 2012 as chief commercial officer, a $1.875 million severance package. He will remain as a strategic advisor until June 30, earning $7,500 monthly, according to a regulatory filing.
Spence's departure comes eight months after Sonos released a revamped app that launched with missing features and technical problems, leading to widespread customer complaints and necessitating an extensive fix-it effort. The company will pay Spence, who joined Sonos in 2012 as chief commercial officer, a $1.875 million severance package. He will remain as a strategic advisor until June 30, earning $7,500 monthly, according to a regulatory filing.
Hope for Android? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see (Score:5, Funny)
Cost Of Living (Score:2)
After taxes that $2 million will be closer to $1 million. He lives in Santa Barbara, one of the most expensive cities in California. For example, the median price for a home there is almost $2 million. So that severance package will keep him afloat for a couple of years. The $7,000 a month will probably cover his mortgage and property taxes.
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Orrr he could sell the $2M+ home that he probably already owns outright, buy a cheaper one in some place with a lower cost of living, and retire.
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Yeah, but rich people's mentality prevents them from living simple lives. They feel that this quality makes them superior. For me, 1 million dollars would be all I'd need for the rest of my life, and I'm not even 50 years old. But for the rich people that live around me, 1 million dollars wouldn't last a full year.
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Your numbers are bizarre. How does $7,000 a month cover a $2 million rent? Do you really think the CEO of a large corporation lives in a house that's just $2 million? Googling, he lives in a $2.8 million house (122 Olive Mill Ln), and I'm really surprised it's that cheap, honestly.
And a 2 million severance is something of a pittance. He made an annual salary of more than $5 million/year. Of course he isn't wondering if he can retire off that or pay his mortgage.
You are poor and imagining that rich peop
Re: Let's see (Score:2)
Dude that's only $90k/year. The severance was likely part of his contract, which are the kind that most people would balk at if not for the money involved. For example, they commonly include terms like a not being allowed to quit within the first five years, and after that's over, not being allowed to quit without giving a one year notice.
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If you call until June 30 "permanent." It's 6 months.
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Hell, I could cause a CrowdStrike-level fuckup for half of that!
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If you're a big enough investor to have influence over CEO selection, you're investments are diversified. You have a higher risk tolerance for your individual investments than the companies themselves, so you need to incentivize the leadership to take bigger swings than they naturally would.
Advisor? (Score:2)
The company will pay Spence, who joined Sonos in 2012 as chief commercial officer, a $1.875 million severance package. He will remain as a strategic advisor until June 30, earning $7,500 monthly, according to a regulatory filing.
Putting aside the reasonable-but-still-unjust severance amount, who exactly negotiated a $7,500/month six-month executive-level paid advisory position for a failed CEO?
Makes me wonder just how egregious the financial (or actual) crime has to get before a company actually fucking fires failed CEOs instead of paying them to hang around and (probably) cause more harm.
This is like keeping the IT Security expert on retainer with system access after you caught them trying to sell the company HR database online.
Re: Advisor? (Score:2)
That would be with cause, and would include criminal penalties. There is no severance if it's with cause.
Re: Advisor? (Score:2)
Somehow Chelsea Clinton has skills to be board member of IAC.com and Turo.com.
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Putting aside the reasonable-but-still-unjust severance amount, who exactly negotiated a $7,500/month six-month executive-level paid advisory position for a failed CEO?
I assume the company wants to retain him during the transition phase to the new leadership. Retaining him for 6 additional months with his original contract as CEO would be much more expensive than offering him the temporary advisory position.
It really needs fixing (Score:2)
I used the old S1 app at my folks the other week and was surprised at how responsive and useful it was. The S2 app currently is just a nightmare on Android. You open the app and are left hanging for 30 seconds just to get to the current playing song and get volume control.
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Yes, but didn't you notice how you didn't have HD sound, a host of music providers you've never heard of, voice assistant support and more expensive upgrade options? That's what you're missing out on by languishing on S1.
S2 isn't compelling enough to have completely alienated their user base. Then to clobber it with a cr-app and you really have to wonder why anyone wanted S2 at all, and how many of them would be back to S1 if they were allowed to do so.
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$9/hr "engineers" like the 737MAX?
F-Sonos (Score:1)
Couldn't have happened to a nicer chap.
Sadly, his replacement won't be brought in to "sort the company out", they'll be brought in to "fix the bugs in the app", so apart from having someone who can do that, Sonos will still be the failure it is today.
F Sonos - I'm never paying them another penny. I'll use ebay to replace anything in the short term, and then buy some other brand for anything new.
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I replaced all my SONOS connects with BlueSound node Nano devices. A pricey replacement, but worth it.
As a bonus I was now able to turn off SMB1 on my home Samba server !
Why does everything need an app? (Score:3)
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Take the input and output it, quit trying to fuck with my signals. If they want a separate app for EQ and the like then fine, have that but have it be an option instead of requirement.
I think that's how my Jabra headphones are set up - there is a Jabra app for equalization (and possibly other "features"; I don't have them handy to check), but they work fine as Bluetooth headphones even without the app.
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Why does everything need an app? Especially headphones and stuff. Take the input and output it, quit trying to fuck with my signals.
That's a great way of making a sub-standard device with poor capabilities. The ability to "fuck with your signals" is the cornerstone of easily improving sound quality. The ability to configure how multiple devices work in sync and redirect different channels to different devices is a value added feature. It's the whole purpose of being for these devices. If this appeal to you DON'T BUY A SONOS. It's as simple as that, it's not a product designed for your use case in mind, go buy something that is.
Car analo
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Tell me you know nothing about the situation without using those words.
Sonos speakers are closer to media players than they are speakers. Once you get the music playing (IF you get that far, since they do not play nice with a LOT of WiFi setups), your phone can die in a fire and the speaker will happily continue playing whatever the last thing you told it to.
I'm not a fan of their setup, since the aforementioned WiFi issue is more likely to shoot you down than anything, and we ended up RMA'ing our first Son
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Why does everything need an app? Especially headphones and stuff. Take the input and output it, quit trying to fuck with my signals. If they want a separate app for EQ and the like then fine, have that but have it be an option instead of requirement. It's like TVs and and their super smooth motion option that is default on and somehow makes it looks like its playing in fastforward and normal speed at the same time.
The app is there to slurp all your precious private data, have a channel for ads that can't be easily blocked and ensure that you can't easily use their products on a competitors app which also keeps you buying their products.
Remind me again how getting rid of the headphone jack was a good thing.
More relevant than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
-George Carlin
George Carlin was part of the problem (Score:2)
Stuff like that is why I stopped caring about what George Carlin said. Sure, he'd might make you laugh, but he also told you to stop caring.
George gave up. I'm not at that point yet.
Total rewrites can work, but it's rare (Score:5, Interesting)
I've personally seen "total rewrite" software projects succeed. In one case, it was critical back-end server software responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Why did the rewrite work? The engineers ran the new software for months behind the scenes (no customer exposure), in parallel with the original, feeding it all input from production, and comparing its output to the production output of the original. Every discrepancy was treated as a bug. When differences stayed at zero for a long time, the rewritten version was released.
A second example was an interactive product design tool also responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The original was spaghetti code riddled with technical debt, but it ran. The new was clean, modern code. The new code gradually replaced the old code, component by component. The company ran both new & old versions in production at the same time and gradually exposed the new version to more & more users, fixing bugs as they came up. The whole process took several years.
Successful rewrites can happen, but they take a lot of planning and careful testing. Clearly this didn't happen at Sonos.
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I've personally seen "total rewrite" software projects succeed.
Microsoft rewrote its C# compiler from C++ into C#. It was a complete from-scratch redesign, rearchitecture, an entirely different *way* of writing a compiler. It took about 5 years.
Why did the rewrite work? Because management allowed it to stay its course, longer than most leadership would in most software companies...
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Sure, the team had a spec as well. But specs aren't sufficient -- they don't account for all the ways that your code is called by others. For instance, callers may rely on behaviors that you didn't intend and didn't put in your spec. A few hundred million function calls provides a lot of confidence. :)
Back to basics (Score:1)
One of the best things about early Sonos was the standalone handheld controller device they had. It was easy enough for non-techies to use and very responsive. But as with any hardware, it started glitching after a few years. The alternative was an expensive replacement, or a free mobile app.
The app was much more confusing to use for casual users, but hey, free is free. V2 just threw everything into the mix, without nailing down the casual user experience. The reason they couldn't go back to v1 was that a
Hey Sonos (Score:2)
I STILL can’t adjust my volume without the system screwing up.
Sure, maybe Spotify have screwed up the API implementation, but it still makes you look bad.