1mo ago

Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance

arstechnica.com Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance

Frustrated users think Spence’s removal is “well deserved.”…

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.

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Sonos ought to be licensing their protocol as a standard for multiroom audio to compete with airplay. Seems obvious to license it to Denon, Yamaha, etc. I’m using Yamaha MusicCast but if I were buying today I’d standardize on either Airplay 2 or Spotify Connect instead. IMO Sonos is a dead man walking.
- Sonos actually uses AirPlay as well. Frankly, they lose when it comes to multiroom audio vs that interface, and they need to make their money off of selling speakers (compatible with AirPlay and other services). Their problem is they wanted to be a clearing house of users listening habits, where you’d need to use the app for them to track that (where you sign up / in with your services); that’s asinine, and they just need to be a speaker company.
  
  That’s so corporate. Everyone’s big idea boils down to being a service instead of a seller (because that’s theoretically more profitable), but it sucks.
  
  Maybe. I’d say it’s more corporate for Sonos to try to develop yet another closed wireless audio sync protocol just to force users to sign in through their app so they can data scrape you. In the absence of a true open wireless sync protocol (maybe there is one and I’m unaware, in which case I’d like to be educated!) I’d rather them use a more widely adopted protocol than roll their own.
  Edit: I think maybe I misunderstood the comment I replied to and they were agreeing with this statement in general.

71 comments