Sonos’ app update was one of the most disastrous software releases from a consumer tech company in recent memory, and just about everywhere on the internet, customers have a forum to voice their opinions, and the anger toward Sonos is palpable.
Dave Lee of Bloomberg News:
What happened to Sonos is essentially a cautionary tale of company management ignoring the dangers of “technical debt,” a term used by software engineers to describe the combined threat of outdated code and infrastructure to security, usability, and stability.
Sonos has been accumulating technical debt for 20 years, and when it began to seriously revamp its app in mid-2022, the company realized that its infrastructure and code were largely outdated. Because Sonos’ apps have been so frequently changed, merged, and improved, the majority of the work done for the new app was spent cleaning up the existing mess, rather than introducing new features.
The company could have addressed its technical debt sooner, but it appears they were missing a key element: urgency.
MacDailyNews’ take: In a properly functioning company, with a properly functioning board, CEO Patrick Spence would have stepped down a long time ago (descending in a golden parachute to earth), but he’s still “leading Sonos” and ready to blast away with all his “decision-making skills” again.
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