What the hell is going on with Sonos?

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The CEO pays the price for a disastrous year

Update: I first published this op-ed in June, when Sonos was really under fire. I reviewed it at the end of October to update it with the latest news from the multi-room audio specialist. A further review was carried out in January 2025, following news of the CEO’s departure. Continue reading to catch up on the current Sonos situation.

Sonos has announced that its CEO, Patrick Spence, has resigned from the company, effective immediately, and board member Tom Conrad will serve as interim CEO.

“We will begin a search for the next CEO and will work to find a leader who will continue to build our legacy and work with the team to move the company forward,” Sonos spokesperson Erin Pategas told The Verge, adding that the departure would be a sign to “turn the page on the chapter we are in and forge a path forward that takes us in the direction we want for ourselves and our clients.”

So what happened? Let’s rewind…

They say bad things come in threes, and the PR team at Sonos headquarters would have been praying that would ring true as we headed out of spring 2024.

There was a trifecta of bad news that not only affected the value of the Santa Barbara, but also shook the confidence of what was, for years, a very loyal and happy user base.

The start of Sonos’ problems actually began in October 2023, when US District Judge William Alsup threw out the verdict in the company’s $32.5 million lawsuit against Google, stating that two of its key patents were unenforceable and invalid.

At the end of that month, we saw Sonos’ share price hit $9.89, less than half of what it was just 6 months earlier and less than a quarter of its 2021 all-time high of over $43. dollars.

As Reuters reported at the time, Sonos was deemed to have incorrectly attempted to connect its multi-room audio technology patents to a 2006 application to claim its inventions predated Google devices.

“This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry toward something new,” Judge Alsup said. “This was a case where the industry was leading with something new and, only then, an inventor came out of the woodwork and said he came up with the idea first.”

A Sonos spokesperson said the ruling was “wrong on both the facts and the law” and that the company would appeal.

However, in April 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the US trade court’s decision that Google’s product redesigns were sufficient to avoid infringing wireless audio patents. Sonos multiroom.

The next (and most damaging when it comes to user reputation) for the Sonos brand came when the new Sonos app update arrived in May.

Every tech editor and their dog wrote op-eds about this, so I won’t go into the details here, but the long and short of it is that Sonos released a new app, ahead of the launch of the Sonos Ace headphones, which went down like a shit sandwich between the user base.

The new app was/has a lot of bugs, and while Sonos is constantly updating the app and adding things back in, it’s missing a lot of widely used features.

The Sonos Community forum and Sonos SubReddit were flooded with comments and posts explaining how and why the new app is a disaster.

Now, technology users like to complain about anything new and there will always be some complaints with a completely new platform up and running, but the negative consequences were huge and, in my opinion, completely justified.

It’s clear that Sonos rushed the new app out so it would be ready in time for the Sonos Ace launch a month later. Sonos apparently didn’t want to delay its long-awaited debut headphones, especially since many of the details were already on the tech rumor circuit.

Reports in the following months highlighted that disgruntled Sonos engineers raised concerns that were ignored.

Initially, Sonos stood firm about the new app, sticking to the company’s line that everything was in the best interest of users in the long run.

Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, chief product officer, told The Verge: “Redesigning the Sonos app is an ambitious task that represents how seriously we are committed to invention and reinvention. “It takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing that it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.”

Now-former CEO Patrick Spence also spoke to The Verge, a couple of weeks after the launch, stating: “Everyone at Sonos has been testing it for months. “It has proven (we know from data and feedback) that it is easier to navigate… It is faster and more responsive, and it is a better experience overall.”

However, he also admitted: “What I wish we would have done is probably communicate the roadmap a little more clearly.”

Although I’m not sure that will hold up. Would the community be more accepting of the new app if they had been told that key features — features they’ve used for years, like searching personal music libraries and queuing songs — would be initially retained but eventually added back?

Like I say, I’m not so sure.

In July, a couple of months after the disastrous launch, Sonos finally publicly apologized.

It had taken a long time to arrive, but I guess it takes “courage” to ask for forgiveness. But that’s exactly what Patrick Spence did, 11 weeks after Sonos’ much-derided updated app was released.

“I want to start by personally apologizing for disappointing you,” Spence wrote in a blog post published July 25.

“There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t hurt by letting you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and remains our number one priority.”

Spence also used the apology to highlight that updates had been rolling out every two weeks since the app’s launch on May 7, and gave details about what updates would arrive in the future, on that biweekly cadence.

And, to give Sonos some credit, it has delivered on that promise. The app is now much more stable, and when Sonos launched Arc Ultra in October, it claimed that 90% of the missing features were back in place.

The launch of Arc Ultra was interesting because Sonos had publicly admitted to delaying hardware releases to focus on fixing the app issue.

“Our focus must be on enforcement above all else,” Spence told investors during an earnings call in August. “This means delaying the two major new product launches we had planned for the fourth quarter until our app experience reaches the level of quality we, our customers and our partners expect from Sonos.”

The launch of Arc Ultra, alongside a new Sonos Sub, indicated that the Sonos boss thought the app had returned to an acceptable standard.

However, a quick look at the Sonos community forum suggests that some users disagree.

What the community is definitely not accepting is the final part of the trio of bad news that has plagued Sonos in recent months… the reworded privacy policy.

Consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, on his YouTube show, highlighted that Sonos has made a change to its privacy policy in the US, with the removal being a key line. The updated policy removed a sentence that said, “Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers.”

This caused absolute chaos within the user base. At least the user base is people who like to post their feelings online.

Sonos quickly responded to these concerns, stating that the sentence was removed because it was too broad and could have been considered false depending on each state’s privacy laws.

“Sonos uses several modern, industry-standard marketing tools, including third-party service providers and social media platforms, to help us identify and display relevant ads and marketing communications,” spokesperson Julia Fasano told The Verge. “Any data shared in this process is hashed or pseudonymous, ensuring that our customers’ personal information remains protected and private and that Sonos does not sell personal data.”

In what was potentially one of the most exciting years in Sonos’ history, with launches in new categories including headphones (and set-top boxes were scheduled), the brand would have hoped to ride a wave of positive press, rather than putting out fires left, right and center.

That was largely the case with the seven-point plan to fix things, which was announced in October.

Add to all this that reviews of the Sonos Ace headphones have also been mixed, which in itself is unusual for Sonos; You usually launch a new product and get top marks across the board.

Sonos is a brand that, for years, has earned a reputation for offering high-end products that “just work.”

That kind of reputation, in technology, can evaporate in an instant and it’s clear that Sonos is well aware of that. Brand communication focuses heavily on getting existing users back on your side.

It remains to be seen if too much damage has already been done, although changing the CEO is obviously a big step.

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