Ben Cohen
Appearances
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
His first day on the job, he wrote this letter to employees in which he said that he has a Sonos home system. He watches TV with his Sonos soundbar. And when his daughter was born, he brought another kind of Sonos portable speaker into the delivery room of the hospital. This is a guy who is such a fan of the company's products that he even has a tattoo of Sonos headphones.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
So like he is permanently inked with his devotion to Sonos even before he was the CEO of Sonos.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Well, I think that's like the million dollar question for Sonos right now, right?
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
The first is that these apps that run our lives, they demand constant improvements and they can't have any disruptions. The best updates are the ones that you don't notice. And technology is at its best when it just works, right? When it has that magic, as Steve Jobs used to say. In this case, it just kind of stopped working.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
And I think Sonos has sort of rethought its software development process throughout this time. Part of the issue here is that lots and lots and lots of people using Sonos products felt these changes at the same time. And if you had rolled them out in smaller chunks... You could have contained the damage and fixed these issues before they became issues for everyone.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
I do listen to music at home. And if I had my choice of what we would listen to, it would probably be a lot of Taylor Swift. But I don't have a choice because I have a three and a half year old daughter. So what I've been listening to a lot of lately is the soundtrack to the movie Cars 2.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
I am not a Sonos household. However, I have learned that basically everyone in my life belongs to a Sonos household.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Sonos is known as a premium home audio equipment company, and it really revolutionized home audio by creating this ecosystem of smart audio products that work seamlessly with each other. And in fact, when I talk to Sonos users, the company that often comes to mind is Apple.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Like, if you're an Apple user, if you have an iPhone, probably you have a MacBook or you have an iPad, and you want to be able to control all of it within that same ecosystem.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
And people who own Sonos products don't just own one Sonos product. The average Sonos household owns three products. So maybe that's a speaker with a soundbar under the TV or a portable speaker that they can bring on the road or headphones. I mean, there are a lot of people who own, like, lots of Sonos products because they need speakers in each room of the house.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
And when your three-and-a-half-year-old daughter is listening to Cars 2 in her bedroom, you might want to listen to Taylor Swift in another room.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Basically, everybody noticed right away, like the very first day, in part because it was pretty hard not to notice. Sonos users couldn't use basic features of their speakers. They couldn't access their own audio systems. It was almost as if these speakers had become like sleekly designed bricks.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Very, very expensive bricks. And what actually happened with the app kind of depends on the user. Some found that it was like missing essential features of the old app, like the ability to edit playlists on the fly or set alarms for when they should wake up in the morning. Some people found entire libraries of music were just suddenly inaccessible to them.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Speakers that vanished from their audio systems in the middle of a song. That basic promise of being able to control music in a room suddenly wasn't being fulfilled. And for most Sonos users, regardless of the experience they were having, the product basically just became worse overnight.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
The chief product officer at the time defended it as courageous to do this, like because, you know, they were releasing this new app and it would have been easy to just keep going the way they were going. But they felt that this was like a necessary change that they had to make for the future of the company.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
In a very, very big way. So the company has said that it has cost at least $100 million in revenue. And the company had to delay two product launches last year as it was dealing with the fallout of this botched app release and the bungled response to it. So that's $100 million in revenue.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
Sonos released an app that was supposed to be their most extensive app redesign ever. And it kind of turned into their most expensive app redesign ever.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
it was so buggy that it turned into one of the most disastrous software updates in the recent history of consumer technology, which I know sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but it's kind of not.
The Journal.
The Botched Software Update That Cost $600 Million
They replaced the CEO, Patrick Spence, with a guy named Tom Conrad, who was already on Sonos' board. But he's someone with extensive experience in product design, software, and music platforms, having been the chief technology officer of Pandora for 10 years. He's also something of a Sonos geek. He really, really cares about the product. In fact...