The past year has not exactly been a triumphant one for Sonos, and the normally beloved tech manufacturer has been forced to devote a great deal of its energy to cleaning up the aftermath of the controversial update to its app.
Today, two years later, Sonos is unusually self-critical and acknowledges its mistakes. In an interview, acting CEO Tom Conrad says that they simply tried to change too much at once. This led to a storm of criticism from angry users. Speaking with TechRadar Conrad said that:
"We just changed too much too fast, and made a bunch of tactical errors along the way. For my first year at the company, we had to pour so much of our energy into righting the ship with respect to the software platform that underpins all of the system experiences, that we purposefully paused our new hardware introductions to get back to par on that front"
As a result, Sonos almost completely paused all new hardware development last year and instead focused on fixing the software and regaining the trust of its customers. Going forward, they promise to be more cautious and to work more closely with their users. They will invite more people to beta testing and roll out changes more gradually instead of releasing huge updates all at once.
This is a clear and positive change of course, and it certainly sounds like they have learned from their mistakes. New products are also on the way, with several launches planned during the year, and hopefully they will be successful, allowing the company to return to "speakers that just work."
Do you use Sonos, and are you one of the many who lost confidence in the manufacturer last year?