Unfortunately the sunk cost fallacy is often rational when you consider reputational consequences of the individuals making decisions within the company.
It's pretty easy to spin an easily reversible decision as "complicated" and "a bit messy", but you'd get fired for taking a risk and wasting years.
The interesting question is: What will Sonos change to make sure that such a desaster will not happen again? Besides some software engineering challanges I see a big failure in the approach to user experience design. It looks like hardly any real user was involved, but that is key to UX design.
Oh my goodness; the new Sonos app is so unequivocally bad compared to the previous design.
Literally everything I do with our speakers is more difficult now, especially anything that involves searching for music or radio stations.
The new app also removed the ability to "easily" synchronize volumes across a group of speakers by moving the volume slider to zero then to the desired volume.
I honestly don't know what the product team for the app was thinking. It's as if they forewent customer testing in favor of pulling a Steve Jobs.
Oof. Companies have gained the ability to push updates over the air to hardware a customer bought 5 years ago. Sounds great, now you can get bug fixes and new features, right? ... Or, you know, they can push a "redesign" that introduces tons of bugs and eliminates useful features! Existing customers are now plugged in to corporate dysfunction more than ever before!
Regulators could require a minimum transition period (e.g. 1 year) where existing customers have a choice between old and new apps, i.e. no forced migrations. New customers could be shipped the newest software with their new hardware, as Apple does.
Not sure which update this is about, but just a couple months ago my app updated with a big redesign and they forgot the alarms feature! [0] I wasn't able to turn off my alarm for a couple of weeks until they reimplemented it.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 33.4 ms ] threadIt's pretty easy to spin an easily reversible decision as "complicated" and "a bit messy", but you'd get fired for taking a risk and wasting years.
We'd rather expect you to test before releasing a terrible app. Did you not talk to anyone outside of the chain of 'do as I say, I know best'.
Literally everything I do with our speakers is more difficult now, especially anything that involves searching for music or radio stations.
The new app also removed the ability to "easily" synchronize volumes across a group of speakers by moving the volume slider to zero then to the desired volume.
I honestly don't know what the product team for the app was thinking. It's as if they forewent customer testing in favor of pulling a Steve Jobs.
https://en.community.sonos.com/speakers-229128/alarms-didn-t...