Spence will receive a cash severance of $1,875,000, per SEC filings. He will also get $7,500 per month and serve as a Sonos board advisor until June, and his unvested shares will vest.
If I was this bad at my job, I’d be shitcanned with no compensation. It’s pretty cool how we reward failure at the highest levels.
Just as a way to soothe the outrage about this POS of an app: A fair share of the problem can be minimised by using Home Assistant and Music Assistant to control the Sonos devices. This way you very rarely need to actually use the app anymore.
Which is good because it’s indeed shit.
I’ll have to try Music Assistant - I use HA and the Spotify app
Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a “closed system” as Sonos.
Sonos is the apple of speakers: great hardware, but overpriced and a walled garden.
I’ve had my Sonos sound bar controlled by HomeKit since the day I bought it and have never needed to fuck with their app.
I guess I got lucky?
Sadly you still need that POS to intially configure it and the occasional update.
No I didn’t actually.
I’ve never bothered with the app.
I just use airplay and let HomeKit handle it and have had absolutely 0 issues with it.
My appleTV discovered it and provided it to HomeKit and I was done.
I’m so confused by some of the stuff in this thread. I still use my sonos stuff and never even noticed the update beyond seeing that the UI changed a little at some point. I know people had some issues but I never stopped being able to do what I wanted with my beam, sub and a couple of satellite speakers in other rooms.
I use streaming services for music when i’m not using it for the TV too. I usually use the streaming apps themselves rather than the sonos app to do anything. I have set some custom EQ stuff with their app, but that’s understandable.
I don’t think they are anything special and they are very expensive things for what they do, but my problems are very few and far between. Every now and then my beam doesn’t get commands from HDMI via my TV… and the TV is always the issue (it’s old.) That’s really it. I’m not in love with the stuff and when it’s time to replace it i’ll look at what else is out there, but I don’t hate it either.
Right when S2 came out, If you needed to go in and screw with anything they would force you off of S1 into S2.
Right when the app released it was pretty bad. They broke the integrations. Speakers were having a lot of trouble being added. My SL ones were just appear and disappear randomly for a bit. It took them like a month to sort it out.
But 99% of my use cases are audio over ARC, and playing music in one kid’s room every night. The arc never stopped working for me on my beam 2.
When the sl-one dropped off I just used an echo for about a week. Plex was broken for two separate 1 weeks bands during which I also just used the echo.
I think it didn’t bother me all that much because I’m already presenting to home automation, and any of my cloud immigrations just explode every time a company farts.
I’d love some speakers that allow streaming without having to be cloud-controlled. I’m afraid I’d have to make them myself.
Damn, I’m in the wrong business. Been making really bad decisions for free
Obviously. You could be the next Phil Harrison. Failed with Atari, got picked up by MS to lead Xbox. Failed with Xbox One, got picked up by Google to lead Stadia. Failed with Stadia and is currently keeping a low profile because he probably understood that failing any higher than Google is going to be a long shot.
I had 7 Sonos speakers. 2 months after they updated their app I sold them all and replaced them with the Denon 150s. I was such a Sonos booster and loved their products. Now they are a dead company to me.
Sonos basically failed their way out of me ever buying their shit. I bought a Wiim pro and am still using my Samsung soundbar from a decade ago. No complaints.
i don’t know if any of you lot have experienced the sonos app firsthand, but let me tell you that it is worse than you could possibly imagine. it takes ages to open, has a million buttons, and pretty much all of them are useless. it has a play/pause bar on the bottom of the app that does not go away. if you want to change your speaker settings, that’s hidden away in a menu (within the app) called “system settings”. why would they call it that?
the app makes you type in the wifi password when pairing a new speaker, even if that speaker has the ethernet cable plugged in. the app also doesn’t support certain wifi passwords so i had to change my wifi password before connecting my speaker.
I have an easier time using my Home Assistant dashboard to control my Sonos devices rather than the native app. Takes forever to load in Sonos but with HA, it’s near instant.
same here. as soon as i got the speakers set up i closed the app, never to open it again. i would have done this anyway, since i like to have all my things in one place, but the app certainly didn’t do itself any favors here
As a Sonos user, yea - I hate the new app. The biggest annoyance is how long it takes to start up, because I don’t have an IR TV remote I need to use the app to change the volume (or stand up and use the volume control on the side).
I wish I could be such a PoS where I join a company, propose a massive investment into something, see it’s failure and firing a bunch of staff, then bounce with a nice severance package to join a new company to repeat that over and over again.
I am glad most of my devices couldn’t be upgraded to S2 anyway with the size of clusterfuck that turned out to be.
They freaking removed SMB/NFS playback. That’s like 90% of what I listen to.
Haha, I’m also “lucky” to be stuck to S1.
Golden parachute successfully deployed.
$1.8M is pretty small as golden parachutes go. Was probably the smallest amount allowed under his employment contract which avoids a lawsuit.
Absolutely this. I’ve never seen a CEO golden parachute anywhere near being under $2m before. To most large company CEOs $2m is pretty much nothing relative to their regular stock options.
To paraphrase OP’s body text, if I did a shitty job I wouldn’t be receiving $1.9M checks in the mail.
