How Sonos Botched an App and Infuriated Its Customers
- Reference: 0175112419
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/09/23/155253/how-sonos-botched-an-app-and-infuriated-its-customers
- Source link:
> What has happened to Sonos is at its heart a cautionary tale of company leadership [2]ignoring the perils of "technical debt," the term used by software engineers to describe the compounding threat of outdated code and infrastructure on security, usability and stability.
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> For two decades, Sonos had allowed its tech debt to pile high. When it undertook in earnest its effort to revamp its app in mid-2022, the company knew it was sitting on infrastructure and code written in languages that were pretty much obsolete. The Sonos app had been adapted and spliced and tinkered with so often, the vast majority of work being performed for the new app was less about introducing new functionality than sorting out the existing mess.
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> The company could have tackled its tech debt sooner but appears to have lacked a crucial element: urgency. It finally came in the form of the Sonos Ace headphones, the first product in the Sonos range to be fully mobile rather than using home or office Wi-Fi. The app needed to be rebuilt, as did the cloud computing setup underpinning it.
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> Ace is a critical product for Sonos. Now that Sonos' pandemic sales boom has subsided, Wall Street has started to question where revenue growth will come from. Sonos Ace is a big part of the answer. Despite the company's lofty and well-earned reputation, Sonos' share of the $100 billion audio market is only around 2% because it has not gone toe-to-toe in the headphones category with Apple, Sennheiser, Bose and the rest.
[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/05/18/0125202/facing-angry-users-sonos-promises-to-fix-flaws-and-restore-removed-features
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-23/how-sonos-botched-an-app-and-infuriated-its-customers
Technical debt resolution (Score:2)
Declare bankruptcy and open a new account.
Seriously - you build a parallel system and it's not done until it meets or exceeds the standard set by the existing system.
Sonos gambled they could half ass it and get away with it, just another in the series of cheap moves that got them into trouble in the first place.
As they mis-say (Score:1)
Penny-wise, pounded foolish.
Not the only one. (Score:2)
Not the only one. Last year, HiDive re-did all their apps, website, all of it.
Giant fail. So bad that I bailed out. I have better use for $5 a month than supporting that clusterfuck.
I guess design is dead, testing is dead, QA is dead, and let's just leave it all to the end user to sort out.
Lack of experience: (Score:2)
Never rewrite your production software. Always renovate in smaller pieces. The software architects and developers will soon convince the managers of a total rewrite, but they are almost always wrong. Take the most buggy components first and get value for the investment much sooner.
Re: (Score:1)
I assume you never worked in a bigger company not managed by engineers? Tech debt reduction always takes lower priority than next quarter’s sales targets/functional features, you often need to wait for a big “event” to get the green light for tech renovation. Sure, you can hide some work behind functional changes, but this mainly helps with local/component-level tech debt, not with bigger issues.
code written in languages that were pretty much .. (Score:2)
code written in languages that were pretty much obsolete..
I'm scratching my head on that one. I wonder what languages that would be?
Sounds like either an excuse or not hiring the right people, I'm guessing both.
I felt sympathy for Sonos, until I read this (Score:2)
> The app needed to be rebuilt, as did the cloud computing setup underpinning it
So, one less a cloud-enabled product plagues this world. Excellent news!