2025-01-17 Sonos.The $500 Million Debacle at Sonos That Just Won’t End

2025-01-17 Sonos.The $500 Million Debacle at Sonos That Just Won’t End


Companies update their apps all the time. This one annoyed customers, cratered the stock and cost the CEO his job.
公司经常更新他们的应用程序。这个更新惹恼了客户,使股票暴跌,并让 CEO 丢掉了工作。

The most peculiar business calamity of the past year started when millions of people suddenly discovered that something was terribly wrong with one of their favorite pieces of technology.
去年最奇特的商业灾难始于数百万人突然发现他们最喜欢的某项技术出了严重问题。

It just stopped working.
它刚刚停止工作。

Sonos, the company that makes premium audio equipment, rolled out a redesigned app last year that was supposed to improve the user experience and accelerate the company’s pace of innovation. Like other Sonos products, the idea sounded great.
Sonos,这家生产高端音频设备的公司,去年推出了一款重新设计的应用程序,旨在改善用户体验并加速公司的创新步伐。和其他 Sonos 产品一样,这个想法听起来很棒。

Until it led to one of the most disastrous software updates in the recent history of consumer technology.
直到它导致了消费技术近代史上最灾难性的软件更新之一。

As soon as the glitchy app was released in May, the complaints from Sonos customers came in loud and clear. They couldn’t use its basic features. They couldn’t access their own audio systems. Their speakers had become sleekly designed bricks—and they couldn’t help but feel completely infuriated.
这款问题频出的应用程序一经在五月发布,Sonos 客户的投诉就接踵而至。他们无法使用其基本功能,无法访问自己的音频系统。他们的音箱变成了外观时尚的砖块——他们不禁感到极度愤怒。

Sonos has been dealing with the fallout of its botched launch and bungled response ever since.
Sonos 自从失败的发布和糟糕的回应以来,一直在处理后果。

It cost the chief executive his job this past week—and the company says it has also cost at least $100 million in revenue. But if you measure the financial hit by the company’s market capitalization, the real cost of this whole debacle was closer to $500 million.
上周,这让首席执行官丢掉了工作,公司表示这也导致至少 1 亿美元的收入损失。但如果按公司的市值来衡量,这场整个风波的实际成本接近 5 亿美元。

That’s roughly how much Sonos’s value has plummeted since the company unveiled what it called “our most extensive app redesign ever.”
自从公司推出所谓的“我们有史以来最广泛的应用程序重新设计”以来,Sonos 的价值大致下降了这么多。

As it turns out, it was also the company’s most expensive app redesign.
事实证明,这也是公司最昂贵的应用程序重新设计。

To understand why so many Sonos customers are so frustrated, it helps to understand why they’re Sonos customers in the first place.
要理解为什么这么多 Sonos 客户感到如此沮丧,首先需要了解他们为什么成为 Sonos 客户。

Millions of people buy Sonos’s wireless speakers, headphones and other home equipment for the company’s elegant blend of hardware and software, so perfectly integrated that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It’s simple, reliable and seamless. It just works.  
数百万人购买 Sonos 的无线音箱、耳机和其他家用设备,因为该公司将硬件和软件优雅地融合在一起,完美到你无法分辨两者的界限。它简单、可靠且无缝。它就是这么好用。

The company’s new interim CEO knows all of this—because before he was the leader of Sonos, Tom Conrad was a loyal customer.
公司的新临时 CEO 对此非常了解——因为在他成为 Sonos 的领导者之前,Tom Conrad 是一位忠实的客户。

He listens to music through his Sonos home system. He watches television with his Sonos soundbar. He travels with one kind of Sonos portable speaker. He brought another kind of Sonos portable speaker into the delivery room when his daughter was born. He is such a fan of the company’s products that he even has a tattoo of Sonos headphones.
他通过他的 Sonos 家庭系统听音乐。他用 Sonos 音响条看电视。他旅行时带着一种 Sonos 便携式音箱。他在女儿出生时把另一种 Sonos 便携式音箱带进了产房。他是如此喜欢这家公司的产品,甚至还纹了一个 Sonos 耳机的纹身。

“I know as well as anyone the incredible power of what we can do,” he wrote to employees this past week. “When it all works, it’s absolute magic.”
“我和任何人一样了解我们所能做的事情的巨大力量,”他在过去一周写信给员工时说。“当一切都奏效时,那就是绝对的魔法。”

So what happens when it doesn’t work?
那么当它不起作用时会发生什么?

“Our customers are taken out of the moment and are right to feel that we’ve let them down,” wrote Conrad, who was already on the Sonos board when he was tapped for the interim job. “I think we’ll all agree that this year we’ve let far too many people down.”
“我们的客户被带离了当下,他们有理由感到我们让他们失望了,”已经在 Sonos 董事会的 Conrad 在被选为临时职位时写道。“我想我们都会同意,今年我们让太多人失望了。”

That’s because people expect baseline functionality from the tech they welcome into their homes. They want it to do what it’s supposed to do. That’s it—and that’s enough.
那是因为人们期望他们欢迎进入家中的技术具备基本功能。他们希望它能完成应有的功能。就是这样——这就足够了。

For these products, stability is success.
对于这些产品,稳定就是成功。

Sonos hasn’t been stable since the day it pushed out a flawed software update. When users opened the new app, they found it was missing essential features of the old app, like the ability to edit playlists and set alarms. For some, entire libraries of music were inaccessible. For others, there were inexcusable lags and speakers that vanished from audio systems in the middle of a song. For most Sonos users, the product was simply worse.
自从 Sonos 推出有缺陷的软件更新以来,它一直不稳定。当用户打开新应用程序时,他们发现缺少旧应用程序的重要功能,比如编辑播放列表和设置闹钟的功能。对于一些人来说,整个音乐库都无法访问。对于其他人来说,存在无法忍受的延迟,扬声器在歌曲中途从音频系统中消失。对于大多数 Sonos 用户来说,产品变得更糟。

This is an existential conundrum for all kinds of software. The apps that run our lives demand constant improvements—and they can’t have any disruptions. This sort of tech isn’t like a car that you can replace every few years. It’s more like maintaining a house. You have to figure out a way to fix the plumbing while you’re still living at home.
这对各种软件来说是一个存在的难题。运行我们生活的应用程序需要不断改进——而且不能有任何中断。这种技术不像可以每隔几年更换的汽车。更像是维护房子。你必须在仍然住在家里的时候想办法修理管道。

Sonos executives said they had to upgrade decades-old systems that were holding the company back. But the problem wasn’t what they did. It was how they did it—and what they didn’t do.
Sonos 高管表示,他们必须升级阻碍公司发展的几十年旧系统。但问题不在于他们做了什么,而在于他们如何做以及他们没有做什么。

At first, they defended their decision to overhaul a critical piece of aging infrastructure all at once, even as they acknowledged the app had issues.
起初,他们为一次性全面改革一项关键的老化基础设施的决定进行了辩护,即使他们承认该应用程序存在问题。

The day after it was released, the company’s then-chief product officer told the Verge: “It takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future.”
在发布后的第二天,公司时任首席产品官告诉 The Verge:“重建一个品牌的核心产品需要勇气,并且在这样做时要知道可能需要退后几步才能最终跃入未来。”

But it soon became clear that Sonos had actually stepped off a cliff.
但很快就清楚了,Sonos 实际上已经掉下了悬崖。

Before long, the buggy new app had become as pleasant as a termite infestation. There were so many complaints from disappointed customers that executives seriously considered just going back to the old app. But they couldn’t. After rigorous testing, they determined the previous version of the app was no longer compatible with the rest of its software.
没过多久,这个有缺陷的新应用程序就像白蚁侵扰一样令人不快。失望的客户抱怨不断,以至于高管们认真考虑过直接回到旧应用程序。但他们不能。在经过严格测试后,他们确定旧版本的应用程序不再与其余软件兼容。

All of these problems were compounded by a lack of communication. It took until July for the then-CEO, Patrick Spence, to apologize. Even when Spence detailed his plans for repairing the app, he cautioned that it would take more time. And today, it’s still not entirely fixed.
所有这些问题由于缺乏沟通而加剧。直到七月,当时的首席执行官 Patrick Spence 才道歉。即使 Spence 详细说明了他修复应用程序的计划,他也警告说这需要更多时间。而今天,它仍然没有完全修复。

But at that point, there was almost nothing that any CEO could have said to quiet the uproar.
但在那时,几乎没有任何 CEO 能说些什么来平息骚动。

People buy Sonos products so they can listen to what they want, when and where they want it. They don’t want to hear why they can’t.  
人们购买 Sonos 产品是为了能够随时随地听他们想听的东西。他们不想听到为什么不能。

Since the mishandled launch, the company has shipped 20 updates to restore missing features and exterminate “stubborn and esoteric bugs,” Spence said.
自从启动失误以来,公司已经发布了 20 个更新来恢复缺失的功能并消除“顽固且难懂的错误,”Spence 说。

And the company is trying to win back the trust of customers by reassuring them that it has learned valuable lessons from its very costly mistake.
公司正试图通过向客户保证其已从非常昂贵的错误中吸取了宝贵的教训来赢回客户的信任。

The first lesson? It was way too slow in responding to irate users.
第一课?在回应愤怒的用户时太慢了。

The second lesson? It should have been slower in rolling out new technology.
第二个教训?在推出新技术时应该更慢一些。

“In hindsight,” Spence wrote in a Sonos forum on Reddit, “we shouldn’t have introduced such a big change so quickly.”
“事后看来,”Spence 在 Reddit 的 Sonos 论坛上写道,“我们不应该如此迅速地引入如此大的变化。”

When he was CEO, one of his priorities was getting the company moving faster. But there’s a crucial difference between moving fast and speeding. And when companies move too fast, it can end up slowing them down.
当他担任 CEO 时,他的优先事项之一是让公司运转得更快。但在快速行动和超速之间有一个关键的区别。而当公司动作过快时,反而可能会减缓它们的速度。

It did for Sonos. The company delayed two product launches to devote attention to this crisis, which could have been avoided with iterative testing, phased releases and other tweaks to its software-development process. It plans to implement them so that this never, ever happens again.
它对 Sonos 来说确实如此。公司推迟了两款产品的发布,以专注于这场危机,而这本可以通过迭代测试、分阶段发布和对其软件开发过程的其他调整来避免。公司计划实施这些措施,以确保这种情况绝不会再次发生。

After all, for Sonos and so many other companies, there are three words that sound even better than it just works.
毕竟,对于 Sonos 和许多其他公司来说,有三个词听起来比“它能正常工作”更好。

It still works.  
它仍然有效。

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