Sonos, the high-end speaker company, continues to reel from its disastrous app update last May. The company lost revenue and approximately $600 million in market capitalization. Then came the layoffs and a CEO exit. WSJ’s Ben Cohen explains. See The Journal live! Take our survey! Further Listening: - The Glitch That Crashed Millions of Computers - The Snowballing Problems at Vail Resorts Further Reading: - The $500 Million Debacle at Sonos That Just Won’t End - Sonos Finally Hits the Hard Reset Button Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Updating your software. It's one of our modern common chores. Mostly it's annoying, inconvenient, but we do it because it's supposed to make sure our stuff works better. So when a software update somehow makes things worse, people get mad. Like back in 2014, when an iPhone update caused a bunch of people's phones to crash.
The latest software update called iOS 8.0.1 meant to fix software bugs, reportedly crashing some users' phones instead.
Or in 2016, when an update to the Nest thermostat left people angry and cold. Their internet-connected thermostats have been malfunctioning ever since they got a software upgrade last month. Or last year, when a CrowdStrike software update caused major travel delays.
It was a faulty software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike that caused disruptions across multiple industries.
In the best-case scenarios, companies act fast and fix the problems, and we can all move on. But our colleague Ben Cohen recently wrote about a software update that has plagued a company for months now.
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 company with the software update from hell is Sonos. It makes high-tech speakers that are controlled through its app. And when Sonos updated that app last spring, a lot of users suddenly ran into all kinds of issues. Many couldn't do basic things like connect to their devices.
Recently, they've had an app update. Oh my God, I can't get anything to play on it.
Sometimes I have to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out what the heck is even going on with my devices. But everybody's mad about the app.
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