_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Wall Street Ruined the Roomba and Then Blamed Lina Khan
cameldrv wrote 51 min ago:
I think that the difficulty is that Chinese companies both don't
respect IP, but also move much faster than U.S. companies in the
consumer electronics space. Part of the speed advantage is being
physically close, linguistically close, and culturally close to the
factories that are actually making the products, but there are other
advantages as well.
star-glider wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
This is literally what's happening to Apple right now. Instead of
focusing on innovation and research, they're just skimming their 30%.
Works out great for the share price until something like LLMs come
along, and oops you have no innovation muscle left.
brcmthrowaway wrote 33 min ago:
Apple == IBM?
asdff wrote 38 min ago:
Not every company needs to participate in making llms. It isn't like
apple consumers are going to ignore the smell that keeps them from
android and pc and samsung headphones currently.
ineedasername wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
âwhat is it about capitalism you donât understand?â
This question, asked by the person wanting to not put capital into
investing further in the companyâs lucrative core competency, instead
favoring dividends depriving capital and a slow death milking a product
facing ever steeper competition.
Capitalism has some awful failure modes, but Iâm not sure what system
of economics was on display in this case, but it doesnât look like
capitalism. Theft? That seems closer.
rsanek wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
"We are pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed
transaction."
HTML [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/st...
zaptheimpaler wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
We know the FTC blocked the deal. What is this quote supposed to be
showing us?
piker wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
I wasnât aware. Itâs kind of useful to imagine a world where
those products and the backing of Amazon. Iâm not familiar with
the market, but I can imagine availability of cheap competitors was
the proximate cause of this companyâs demise.
renewiltord wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
The 'we' is doing a lot of work there. 'You' might know, but many
do not and explicitly have different views. An example thread:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330028
arjie wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
The article makes the case that iRobot mismanaged their business at the
behest of investors. Suppose one grants that this mismanagement
occurred[0]. Then years into the mismanagement, Amazon offers to buy
them. At this point, whatever path the company has been doomed to by
mismanagement has already been taken.
In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad
business decisions have been made. So the FTC decisions must then be
seen in this light. Therefore, the case made by this article is made in
the context that a dominant player in an industry has made decisions
that slowly but surely doom them and seeing the imminent doom, they
have found an acquirer who might be able to rescue them.
The FTC is operating in a universe conditional on iRobot already having
done what they've done. Consequently, even if you can blame iRobot for
getting into the situation, you must also blame the FTC for closing off
their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off to the Chinese.
As for the other thing about neither the FTC nor the EU actually
bringing any proceedings against Amazon or iRobot and simply requesting
information: this seems either naïve or a misrepresentation of how
governments act to end deals. It's not that convincing to me that
organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up
the big companies are "just asking for information".
One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're
very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with. They
employ the same tactics. Every immigrant knows to be rightfully fearful
of the white, pink, blue, and yellow slips and the RFE notices they
receive. A simple "Request For Evidence". A common strategy back home
in India, too.
I suppose the reason those in the West are less aware of these things
is that the standard bureaucracy mostly works if you're a domestic W-2
employee. Interactions with the government are few and generally
functional. So they come to believe that the government is a highly
honest machine: if it asks for X, it does not indicate anything more
than a request for X. Those interacting with the more politicised parts
of Western government find that they strategically employ the usual
tactics that Indian bureaucracies wield routinely at the lowest level.
Overall, therefore, I don't find this convincing. Looking at the other
things that Matt Stoller writes, I also suspect there is a partisan
slant to this.
0: Businesses are hard. You operate in the fog of war. We could easily
be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.
jibal wrote 11 min ago:
> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.
IOW, he doesn't share your partisan views.
aidenn0 wrote 22 min ago:
If we look just at 2022, then allowing the Chinese to foreclose on
iRobot vs Amazon buying it is basically just a question of who owns
the name "Roomba"; there were zero companies making robot vacuums in
the US, and the result is still zero companies doing so.
groundzeros2015 wrote 26 min ago:
What is the relationship between the first half of your comment and
the commentary about W2 workers?
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 28 min ago:
> The FTC didnât bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024,
Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.
DannyBee wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Matt Stoller is often just trivially wrong. Like his arguments, and
often "facts", rarely survive any sort of even mild scrutiny.
At one point i wrote a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of where
either his facts or his arguments were just wrong, for like 10 of his
articles, but i eventually gave up.
He doesn't even really try. I just decided i'm not the target
audience. The target audience is either people who already agree with
Matt Stoller and want to feel like they are right, or people who
can't be bothered to do even a trivial amount of research.
He's definitely not convincing anyone else.
azemetre wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Saying their arguments are bad but the dog ate your response isn't
exactly convincing either.
jibal wrote 16 min ago:
Yeah, this strikes me as pure projection. I see absolutely no
reason to think this guy is right about anything. He says "like
i've said, i've done point by point before if that's what you
want" ... as if the mere fact that he's written something makes
it correct.
"He doesn't even really try. I just decided i'm not the target
audience. The target audience is either people who already agree
with Matt Stoller and want to feel like they are right, or people
who can't be bothered to do even a trivial amount of research.
He's definitely not convincing anyone else."
Sorry, but this is a form of rhetoric that I'm very familiar with
from ideological cranks.
DannyBee wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
Feel free to look at my comment history on matt's previous
articles, like i've said, i've done point by point before if
that's what you want.
I'm just not spending the time to do it anymore because after
doing it a lot, matt doesn't ever get better.
It's always just the same garbage.
Past a certain point, it's just not worth engaging with garbage
anymore, and it's not reasonable to say "well you didn't engage
with his garbage this time, so therefore you lose/are wrong by
default".
No, actually, past a certain point, the onus is on him to stop
producing garbage before anyone has to waste their time engaging.
While i did go point by point for a while (years actually) on
his articles, I finally gave up when he started writing articles
about the early days of android, and asserting lots of things,
and I was actually there and doing the work with a small number
of others, so i know why certain things were done because either
I decided them, someone i know very closely decided them, or I
was in the room when it was decided. As usual, Matt simply
asserts his own set of facts, and when pressed for sources, it
turns out he has none. It's just his own views, masquerading as
fact. But that doesn't stop him at all! He'll just assert
facts that are convenient to him and when pressed for sources
just ignore or move on to the next target.
Always another BIG newsletter to write!
This is of course, independent with whether i agree or disagree
with any of his particular views - there are plenty of people i
disagree with who i would happily point you at on antitrust if
you want it, becuase despite our disagreements, at least they
aren't making up facts and writing soothsaying garbage based on
it.
asdfasvea wrote 13 min ago:
>>>Feel free to look at my comment history on matt's previous
articles
Feel free to post one simple link for us.
You can't do that but you can follow the above sentence with
1000 more words?
avianlyric wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
> One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that
they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar
with.
Thatâs probably because both the US and Indian systems of
government and state bureaucracies both originated in the UK (with
significant alterations, but still fundamentally forks of the UK
systems). Even chunks of the EU bureaucracy are based on UK customs
and rules in places, a consequence of the UK being the only Western
European country that wasnât completely demolished in World War
Two.
fny wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Apparently, antitrust zealots can't take a loss without a heaping
pile of copium. In their minds, all mergers are evil--especially so
when then involve a mag 7. iRobot had a market cap of around $100M
during the acquisition. Amazon's market cap was around $1T! What
great ills did they aim to prevent?
Meanwhile, the FTC successfully sues Google over monopolistic
practices, and they get a slap on the wrist.
freefrog1234aa wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
He does address the issue. He said there are provisions that allowed
the merger if iRobot had admitted they were on the verge of
bankruptcy. They didn't because the purchase price would be lower,
hence less for shareholders and the CEO, etc wouldn't have big
payoffs. In a word, greed.
gizmondo wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
> They didn't because the purchase price would be lower
He said that alright, but what's his source of that information?
DannyBee wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
He probably doesn't have one.
As i've mentioned elsewhere, i've called him out on facts where i
was literally there and he has no idea what the's talking about,
and he doesn't care.
He just makes up facts to suit his arguments and hopes nobody
looks too hard.
I mostly just wish his nonsense wouldn't keep getting posted here
as if it is of any quality at all, and worth engaging with.
jibal wrote 5 min ago:
"He probably doesn't have one" is a made up fact if ever there
was one, along with "he doesn't care" and most other things
you've written here.
"and worth engaging with"
So stop with the extraordinarily low quality engagement.
themafia wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
> closing off their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off
to the Chinese.
There was only one escape route? And it happened to be the one they
selected themselves? That seems dubious.
> organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break
up the big companies
We literally have laws which _require_ them to do this. This isn't
ideological targeting it's the consequence of the "due care clause"
of the constitution. You should ask why previous iterations of the
FTC have ignored this responsibility not why the one in question
actually tried to live up to it.
> A simple "Request For Evidence".
These are publicly traded corporations not hapless individuals.
> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.
You've tried to obscure yours but I suspect the same thing of you.
> You operate in the fog of war.
This is goalpost shifting to the level of propaganda. You operate in
a market. If you fail your assets will be auctioned off. The death
of a corporation is a natural consequence of the system we've
developed. It's required. It caries none of the weight of the death
of an individual or of war.
> We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.
> In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad
business decisions have been made.
This seems contradictory. We could easily be telling a different
tale if the 2010s played out differently; however, as you say, one
cannot go back.
BurningFrog wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
There are no laws requiring break up of big companies!!
There are laws around breaking up monopolies, which is a completely
different concept.
jibal wrote 8 min ago:
> There are no laws requiring break up of big companies!!
You're mistaken.
> There are laws around breaking up monopolies, which is a
completely different concept.
Not really.
CPLX wrote 1 hour 20 min ago:
There are laws requiring the breakup of big companies.
Not solely because of their size, specifically.
But size is coincident with attributes that are in fact
anti-competitive.
phantasmish wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
The way we used to enforce those laws before the mid-70s was much
closer to âbig companies get broken upâ than it is now.
The modern standard for how and when we intervene is not
necessarily the correct one.
MarkusQ wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
Not every story needs to have a bad guy.
In many cases (I suspect this is one of them) there is room for
multiple bad guys. Why couldn't the FTC, Roomba Management, Wall
Street, China, etc. all be at fault? Seems like it fits the evidence
nicely.
derbOac wrote 59 min ago:
Maybe this is naive on my part but I find an argument like "the EU
and FTC raised their metaphorical eyebrows at us and so we had to
fold rather than merge" sort of pathetic.
I think the idea of Amazon buying Roomba causing monopoly concerns is
kinda weird. But I also think it's absurd for anyone to blame the FTC
for this. Amazon had enough leverage and money to take on the FTC
over this, and probably could have made the FTC look laughable in the
process, if they pushed antitrust. The fact that they didn't says
everything about the actual value of Roomba.
itopaloglu83 wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
One thing I keep repeating is that Roomba subreddit was managed by
the company and would ban people for life is they were to share any
bad experiences or anything negative about the product.
crazygringo wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
> Part of that collapse was a result of a phenomenon where financiers
would force technology companies to stop innovating.
Here's the thing: not every company needs to do deep tech innovation,
and not every company should.
The financiers were almost certainly correct that iRobot would make
more money focusing on selling vacuum cleaners, not developing
military/space robots on the side. Building fancy military and space
robots is fun and cool, but if it's not producing profit or clearly
leading to better consumer products that make money, then it's not the
right company to be doing it. Plenty of other companies will do it
better -- it makes sense to have one set of companies relying on grants
and defense contracts that innovate and that do fundamental research
and aren't taking investor money, and another set of companies that
take lots of investor money and focus on consumer products without
expensive R&D. The idea that they have to be the same companies is
silly.
The real story here is not about shutting down R&D -- that makes sense.
It's about whether you think the FTC/Lina Khan was right to oppose
Amazon acquiring iRobot, and whether they bear any responsibility for
what happened after.
y0eswddl wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
when and how did she do that exactly?
crazygringo wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
"On January 31, 2024, one of the FTCâs Commissioners spoke at an
antitrust conference in Brussels and said the
FTC had been prepared to block the transaction." [1] "We are
pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed
transaction... The Commissionâs investigation revealed
significant concerns about the transactionâs potential
competitive effects. The FTC will not hesitate to take action in
enforcing the antitrust laws to ensure that competition remains
robust." [2] "Amazon and robot vacuum maker iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT)
said Monday they would end their plans to merge in the face of
opposition from EU and U.S. antitrust regulators."
HTML [1]: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/050...
HTML [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/0...
HTML [3]: https://www.investing.com/news/economy/amazon-roombaparent...
hodder wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
This is such a bad faith, and frankly dishonest take on the situation.
As you know, Khanâs FTC worried it wouldnât be able to prevent
Amazonâs acquisition of iRobot in court, so instead it dragged out
approval, which it never granted, while continuously threatening to
block.
Simultaneously, her FTC openly worked with the EU to convince the EU to
use its more expansive antitrust regime to get the EU to block the
deal. That dragged the shot clock for the deal lower and lower (deals
have backend dates contractually agreed to, after which the parties no
longer are committed to work towards closing the deal and can walk).
Even as the EU was challenging the deal and the shot clock was
approaching zero, her FTC was STILL not granting approval and
threatened to block and drag it out another year in U.S. courts, all
the way until Amazon threw in the towel.
After the deal collapsed, the FTC celebrated and took credit.
The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is
directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and
supported by Amazon right now.
ajkjk wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
The point is that "sold to Amazon" or "sold to chinese competitors"
being the only options is a false narrative. There was also the "do a
good job" option which is being conveniently omitted by people who
want to blame the FTC.
crazygringo wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Sorry, can you explain the "do a good job" option in more detail
please? How should they have been run differently to generate more
profit?
twoodfin wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
If weâre arguing about strategic decisions made a decade ago in
this context, arenât we really arguing about whether any company
should ever fail?
This is Matt Stoller throwing a bunch of dust in the air because he
wants to have been right when he was glad Khan shut down the
merger, and then right again when the husk of iRobot sold out to
the Chinese. Because Matt is always right, and âWall Streetâ is
always wrong.
throwaway382948 wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
That's only an option if the FTC can rewind time. Can they?
ajkjk wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
er? No we are talking about the attribution of blame. If you're
saying "what a shame that iRobot is being sold to Chinese
competitors" and then you "...because of the FTC" you're
essentially lying; it's because of incompetence and capitalism
and then also maybe a little bit the FTC (although I'm very
skeptical of that as well, because in this whole narrative the
FTC is the only party that can be even claimed to be acting
prosocially).
throwaway382948 wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
People focus on the FTC because not blocking struggling
companies from merging seems a lot more tractable than
revamping capitalism or stopping humans from making business
mistakes.
iRobot was (arguably) mismanaged just like Spirit Airlines or
Warner Bros, but I'd appreciate if the FTC didn't make the
matter worse.
tekacs wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
A huge fraction of the knee-jerk reactions here seem to miss the key
point that the post is trying to get across:
> In the mid-2010s, during Furmanâs tenure running economic policy
under Obama, the company sold its defense business, offshored
production, and slashed research, a result of pressure from financiers
on Wall Street.
> Mesdag engaged in a proxy fight to wrest control of the company from
its engineering founders, accusing one of its founders and iRobot
Chairman Colin Angle of engaging in âegregious and abusive use of
shareholder capitalâ for investing in research.
Yes Roomba sucks at this point. We get it. Thing is, if you slash
research... that's what eventually becomes of your product.
crazygringo wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
Their research wasn't on vacuum cleaners. It was building robots for
the military and space. That's exactly what investors were
complaining about -- the research wasn't leading to better vacuum
cleaners. It was a distraction and not what investors wanted their
money being used for.
underlipton wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
It's crazy that the Dodge brothers destroyed the company/shareholder
relationship for every contemporary and future US-based corporation
and then died.
imglorp wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
This is what's wrong with investing overall: 1Q future blindness.
We'd have almost nothing if it weren't for university partnerships
and corporate R&D way back when. There's no way to accomplish this
now except to stay private.
themafia wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
Well, they took most of that money, and then just bought back
their own stock. It's something more than just 1Q blindness and
failure to understand the importance of research.
HTML [1]: https://media.irobot.com/2016-02-04-iRobot-Announces-Sale-...
JackFr wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
A company who does cutting edge R&D for defense contracts and and
consumer small appliances is destined for trouble. They are two
very different lines of business. While you might make an argument
about synergy, the problem stems from the investors who are
investing in two very different lines of business. Ultimately one
of them was going to win. The failure to realize that offshoring
would turn suppliers into competitors is a known issue in the
consumer small appliance world and it looks like they were not
ready.
Interestingly enough the R&D portion that was sold off, became
Endeavor Robotics which was sold to Teledyne FLIR Systems and seems
to be doing fine.
gruez wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
>There's no way to accomplish this now except to stay private.
cue all the lamentations about how evil private equity is.
JumpCrisscross wrote 4 hours 17 min ago:
> Thing is, if you slash research
And if you dump your defence contracts you may have trouble paying
for research.
bogwog wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
I'd be interested in learning about how the US military uses
Roombas (assuming it's not classified)
misir wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
In the article it's mentioned. They have built robotic stuff to
clear rubble for example.
mh- wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Those vacuums are stronger than people realize.
km144 wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
> âIn my trips to Wall Street,â Dyer told the panel, âone of my
analyst friends took me to lunch one day and said, âJoe, you have to
get iRobot out of the defense business. Itâs killing your stock
price.â And I countered by saying âWell, what about the importance
of DARPA and leading-edge technology? What about the stability that
sometimes comes from the defense industry? What about patriotism?â
And his response was, âJoe, what is it about capitalism you donât
understand?ââ
I find this article a pretty compelling critique of the extractive
incentives of Wall Street and a good argument for government stepping
in from time to time to adjust those incentives. Where is the societal
good in the engine of capitalism prioritizing short-term extraction
over long-term value creation?
frmersdog wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
It's also wrong to think that company performance has anything to do
with stock prices nowadays, anyway. Look at Oracle, supposedly an
established company with a predictable runway for future earnings,
jumping 40% (40%!) and then shedding that jump over the following
months.
Or... wait for it... Gamestop. Not just what happened in 2021. What
happened in 2024. What's happening now. (Compare its market cap to
its cash, and then how it compares to competitors, and then
price-to-earnings, and then again to competitors).
Look at the market as-a-whole. Falling earnings, stock prices going
up.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that iRobot was simply just marked
for death. Any company not named Apple that is manufacturing in
China, Wall Street has decided that they're going to face headwinds
from IP theft and competitors backed by the full faith and force of
the Chinese Communist Party, and they get busy squeezing every ounce
of value out, potential be damned (because, as far as traders and
shareholders are concerned, such companies already are).
twoodfin wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
What is the current AI/data center mega-boom if not forgoing
short-term extraction for long-term value creation?
re-thc wrote 3 hours 41 min ago:
> What is the current AI/data center mega-boom
Short term extraction.
The long term value is in AI research not scaling LLMs.
randerson wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
Given how many people are getting rich from the inflated stock
prices of every AI-adjacent company right now, including the ones
with no obvious path to profitability, I could make the argument
that they're already in a short term extraction phase.
(I'm also not sure if putting a significant % of the population out
of work will create long term value to society.)
twoodfin wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
The stocks are inflated because Wall Street believes current
$$$$$ capital investments will create massive long-term value!!
re-thc wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
> Wall Street believes current $$$$$ capital investments will
create massive long-term value
Clearly not. The stock market has a correction at least every
few years. So Wall Street only believes they can sell the stock
for higher within a few years. Not very long term is it?
zozbot234 wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
If you could predict a stock market correction before it
happens, you'd be very, very rich. The fact that corrections
sometimes happen does not negate the existence of market-wide
expectations for any given stock.
re-thc wrote 33 min ago:
> If you could predict a stock market correction before it
happens, you'd be very, very rich.
Same goes for if you can predict the price of a stock...
but analysts do it anyway and set targets for stocks.
> The fact that corrections sometimes happen does not
negate the existence of market-wide expectations for any
given stock.
The crash or not is part of the expectation. Regardless of
what you read on articles, those fund managers often sit
out situations they don't deem worthy of investing.
ChadNauseam wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
> So Wall Street only believes they can sell the stock for
higher within a few years.
Or they think the returns from holding the stock will be
higher.
Animats wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
It's interesting that Rod Brooks has been erased from the history of
Roomba. He's not even mentioned in the Wikipedia article.
JKCalhoun wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
I see him (Rodney) in both the Roomba and iRobot articles.
Animats wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
The Roomba is not in the Rodney Brooks article.
arjie wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
With Wikipedia, most things are less erasure and more
incompleteness. I looked at the Rodney Brooks article and
couldn't find an easy way to introduce the Roomba into it without
sounding stilted[0] since I don't know how involved he was in the
creation of the device and I don't know enough about the company
to make an educated guess. If you know how he was involved
perhaps you could share some links to news and so on that says
so. I don't mind fixing the Wikipedia article to appropriately
link.
0: The best effort I could make would be to edit "He is a founder
and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot" to say "He is a
founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot
(manufacturer of the Roomba)"
ChrisArchitect wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
Related:
Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268854
ghaff wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
Roombas just weren't that useful for most house layouts and situations
(cords/toys/clutter/etc.) I seriously considered getting one and
decided it just wouldn't be a win.
cameldrv wrote 45 min ago:
I have one and it's OK for my kitchen with hardwood floors. I have a
lot of stairs in my house. In a couple of places, there are just one
or two stairs going up or down between rooms, but obviously the
Roomba can't do it. Because of that, it's based in the kitchen and
mostly stays there. With a bunch of little kids, it's quicker than
sweeping the floor every night, and I just keep the cords out of its
way.
If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole
different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my
knowledge.
echelon wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
Roombas have always been terrible.
I bought a top-of-line Dreame, Roborock, and Eufy recently for our
place - we have lots of pets.
The Dreame is easily 10,000x better than Roomba ever was. It never
makes mistakes. I'd advocate for Dreame for anyone in the market for
a robot vacuum. The app is annoying, but everything else about it is
sublime.
Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and
didn't lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement
components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills. The Anker team
nails user friendliness and design, though.
klabb3 wrote 42 min ago:
> Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and
didn't lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement
components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills.
FWIW there are 3p replacements that are super cheap for roller
brush, side brush, filters, bags etc. As for detergent for the mop,
I first thought I was smart to buy 3p detergents meant for robot
vacuums because they were cheaper. Turns out they clogged the tubes
which was tricky to fix, but I did it. After that I bought Eufys
original, and lo and behold, it was much more concentrated, which
meant it was actually significantly cheaper than the 3p ones (and
smells better).
Navigation is spot on. Obstacle avoidance sucks though (to be fair
my floor is patterned stone - hard to see anything) and cat toys
sometimes get stuck in the roller brush.
Btw whatâs the alternative to roller brush?
enraged_camel wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
I just want one that removes the âgotta declutter all the floors
and hide anything and everything that could possibly get stuck in
the rollerâ prerequisite step completely. Iâve tried literally
five different brands (including the top Chinese ones) and they all
scream a variation of MAIN BRUSH JAMMED after running for a while.
drob518 wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
Which does best with pets? We have a German shepherd that sheds
like crazy. We vacuum every week and it will often fill a Dyson
canister vac. We empty it every time we vacuum. We had a Roomba
back in 2002 or so, but it was little more than a novelty (just
wasnât great vacuum and got hung up on too much stuff).
amadeuspagel wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
"Wall Street" is one entity, which first ruined the Roomba, then wanted
to buy it, then blamed Lina Khan for not being allowed to buy it. Makes
sense.
margalabargala wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
It is a single entity that contains multitudes. Some of those
multitudes have contradictory intentions.
Just like you. When it happens to a person we call it "cancer".
ToValueFunfetti wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
Typically we don't say that someone with cancer is slowly
committing suicide. Technically correct, perhaps, but it needlessly
applies central autonomy where it doesn't really exist.
SiempreViernes wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
Wall Street actors almost universally love to describe the market
as a singular entity, so they can hardly complain righteously.
amadeuspagel wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
Apparently it's not just "Wall Street" but "the market" which
is a singular entity, which ruined the Roomba and then blamed
Lina Khan and which can hardly complain about being described
as a singular entity since it describes itself as such.
kittikitti wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
Thank you for this article. It explains a phenomenon where many
robotics and AI companies are actually failing in the current era. I
learned so much from the reporting.
xnx wrote 5 hours 18 min ago:
Roomba screwed up for sure, but they found a way out with Amazon until
US consumer "protection" shut it down.
BeetleB wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
"The FTC didnât bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024,
Amazon and iRobot called off the deal."
How did they shut it down?
xnx wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies
about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from
iRobot, in whatâs known as a âsecond requestâ and an
indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials."
HTML [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-inve...
shkkmo wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
A routine request for information is not shutting down a merger
and presenting it as such is not good faith communication.
acdha wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
In other words, they didnât shut it down.
bpodgursky wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
There are later press communications where Khan's FTC took
credit for it. There was a strong implication they let the EU
do the lifting but would have filed suit if they hadn't.
graeme wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
Indeed. Statement here:
HTML [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/...
amanaplanacanal wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
IRobot says it was the EU which killed the deal:
HTML [1]: https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-ag...
orwin wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
The article claims EU didn't challenge the deal, only requested
information about the market and possible unfair practices.
HTML [1]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/...
bluGill wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
Preparing all the requested information can be expensive. It
is likely enough to kill many deals.
OvidNaso wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
So then back to the original aricles implied take about the
incompetence of these wall street investors. What kind of
billion dollar deal doesn't have info on the deal?
monero-xmr wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
Hard for me to understand how the consumer was protected by preventing
Amazon from acquiring them. Only for Chinese firm to get for cheap in
bankruptcy. But maybe Iâm not educated enough in socialism to
understand the nuances
triceratops wrote 40 min ago:
Why aren't any American firms interested in buying it cheap?
moregrist wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
> But maybe Iâm not educated enough in socialism to understand the
nuances
Socialism is when the government owns businesses or entire
industries.
Regulation is when the government has rules that companies have to
play by.
The FTC is involved in regulation, not socialism.
Not all anti-capitalist actions are socialism. Not all socialism is
anticapitalist.
You can disagree with a lot of things that the US government did
under Biden. None of them were socialism. The closest recent example
we have of socialism is the US government taking a 10% ownership
stake in Intel. Which happened under Trump.
The previous best examples were all during the fall-out of the great
financial crisis as part of TARP.
In retrospect, I think TARP was ultimately a pretty
capitalist-friendly form of socialism. I am less sure about the
Intel stake.
_DeadFred_ wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
The foundational minds in Capitalism called for the need for
government controls on it to keep markets healthy. It is LITERALLY
Capitalism to have government oversight and intervention.
NietzscheanNull wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Did you read the article? Amazon wasn't "prevented" from acquiring,
they decided against proceeding:
> The FTC didnât bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024,
Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.
adamsb6 wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Khan had already accused them of abusing monopoly power and filed a
lawsuit against them, and had a history of blocking acquisitions.
At this time she also had a lawsuit in place seeking to undo the
nearly decade old acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp.
The smart thing to do in that environment isn't to push the issue
so that years later someone can't write that there wasn't an
official challenge. It's to read the room and abandon the deal.
contagiousflow wrote 4 hours 40 min ago:
Couldn't you just blame any business non-decision on fear of
regulation?
"We were prevented from building a proper Windows phone because
we already had such large market share on desktop, and already
had an anti-trust against us so our hands were tied"
It's just an argument that creates a Kafka trap
csb6 wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Not sure how you could construe U.S. anti-trust actions as socialist.
They prevented Amazon from acquiring iRobot. That is government
intervention in the free market, but that is not the same thing as
socialism. In fact you could argue a socialist administration would
have wanted the merger (large firms tend to make labor organizing
more tractable since there is only one employer to negotiate with).
bryanlarsen wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
At the time the former was a known bad, and the latter was a
potential bad.
The FTC properly weighted known bads more highly than potential bads.
7thaccount wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
Possibly an unintended consequence. Those abound in our governing
systems as you're rightfully complaining about.
On the other hand, competition is good for consumers and letting
Microsoft and Amazon use unfair tactics to crush the competition or
their large revenues to just buy up all competition isn't good
either. That is part of the problem today in that practically every
industry is a monopoly or near total monopoly (maybe there are 2-3
firms colluding). There are no incentives to innovate or keep prices
competitive in such a gilded-age system. There was a reason we broke
up all the robber barons. There is also the hazard when you have
businesses that are so large that they effectively control everything
and the government can no longer regulate them. High inflation is at
least partly coming from this lack of competition. There is also the
issue of the money supply where we degrade our currency to make it
easier to service the debt. That is also a really big component here.
daft_pink wrote 5 hours 28 min ago:
To be honest the Roomba sucked and got eaten alive by better chinese
competitors.
I bought a top of the line expensive Roomba years ago and ended up
switching to neato a year later, because I would just come home and it
would be stuck on something.
caycep wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
I see what you did there...
throw-qqqqq wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
> To be honest the Roomba sucked
I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best
appliances. Itâs a work horse!
Weâre had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays
it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if
Iâm home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy
to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isnât a
tinkerer.
Maybe I just donât know what Iâm missing - Iâve never had
others - but I love my Roomba.
asdff wrote 39 min ago:
The main thing is with the chinese ones you get lidar and a cached
map from that lidar run (so you can send it to clean specific
areas) and they cost maybe a third or less what roomba charges, at
least when I was in the market.
macNchz wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
I also have a 980 that's going strong. A number of parts replaced
over time, so refreshingly repairable. My mother in law has had a
whole lineup of Chinese robot vacuums in the time we've owned
Roomba and they haven't seemed miraculously more effective. Ours
does get stuck occasionally, but it runs every day so...it's not a
huge deal if it doesn't finish on any given day.
Semaphor wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
I had an ancient-ish Roomba (620, 11 years ago). The repairability
was amazing. This was from back when there was little competition,
but just 2 years ago I could still get every part replaced. Only
screws, nothing else. It was beautiful. I got a new vacuum/mop now,
vastly better functionality, in exchange for the cloud, but I'm glad
my old one lives one at my parents.
I've read it's way worse nowadays, but if they stayed at their
quality from back then, I'd have probably paid more for an offline
workable repairable vacuum.
iwontberude wrote 3 hours 39 min ago:
They all suck. (No pun intended)
observationist wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
How much difference was made by the Chinese competitors being able to
use whatever IP they wanted, and Roomba being constrained by law and
licensing, and not being able to enforce their own IP? What were the
consequences of having to engage with China for manufacturing,
effectively giving them the capability to clone any R&D on the fly,
without having to figure things out themselves?
How much did regulation and taxation and red tape play into Roomba's
inability to compete?
What sort of VC deals were they shackled by, in order to siphon off
the data and abuse it for third party marketing, and other forms of
enshittification?
There's a lot that American companies have been held back by. Some of
it is actually good, consumer protective and well crafted, but it
won't work if you allow other players in the same market to ignore
the regulations and restrictions without consequences. Other policy
is just stupid and self destructive, and other policies border on
malignant, deliberately giving foreign companies significant
advantages, directly and indirectly, without any other purpose.
American companies are way too easily forced into a race to the
bottom dynamic, resulting in failure and huge wastes of money and
effort.
malvim wrote 3 hours 52 min ago:
No one ever forced any company to work with China. They all went to
China over decades because it was cheaper and made more profits,
knowing full well thereâd be technological transfer since it was
always Chinaâs goal and even explicit in contracts and
agreements.
Being surprised now that profits became technology transfer and
China is now a real competitor is useless. They knew it, just
didnât think the Chinese could be real players in tech, or
didnât care because short-term profit was more attractive.
So it was profits then, and if youâre asking âwhat sort of VC
deals were they shackled byâ, itâs profits now. So the point of
the article still stands, Wall Street screwed them over.
observationist wrote 2 hours 42 min ago:
Oh, for sure, I'm just highlighting that it's not like they're
playing on a level field. The US marketplace is self defeating
with asymmetric regulations, unenforceable patent and IP
knowledge transfer with countries like China that just ignore it,
effectively, with zero accountability. It's not all external
though, they could have had a much better leadership team and
used all sorts of things in their favor early on to really
capture the market, despite anything and everything else that
happened. Apathy, VC-style race to the bottom dynamics, probably
went public too soon, and didn't build momentum and a culture of
high quality R&D (a whole lot of drama every time they considered
using private data and monetizing on their intimate in-home
access.)
They also missed out on AI getting good - by the time
transformers came around and people realized they'd be really
useful for stuff like Roombas, it was too late, and with
shareholders just looking to cash out and minimize their losses
toward the end, there's not a lot that could have been done to
save it. Even if they'd gone to Amazon, there wasn't a lot left
that had value beyond the branding, imo.
I think American companies would be more successful and higher
quality if the regulation and IP policy we embraced were
reciprocal. As it stands, unless you're Apple or Samsung or a
giant, you have to win the CCP PR lottery for any sort of
accountability with Chinese companies. Most of the time they're
going to ignore you, because there's no downside. It's only in
those cases where there are political ramifications, individuals
being embarassed, or they feel a need to trot out a "look how
conscientious and good faith we are in the international
markets!" piece useful for other wheeling and dealing.
azurezyq wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
what law and licensing prevented iRobot to adopt Lidar? Given Lidar
is used everywhere already.
observationist wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
It's not any particular feature - it's the licensing and
royalties paid on tech patented and owned by other parties in the
US, or by parties the US recognizes. Since that's not reciprocal,
it's a drag on any US company, or company that respects US
jurisdiction.
Put enough sticky notes on a Tour De France rider and you'll
eventually guarantee their loss. That's the one-sided policy
problem with the US, internally. Now if other riders are doping
and using secret electric motors, but the stickied up rider can't
cheat in the same way, then you just guarantee their loss, even
if it's only a little degrading.
We need a better, more accountable, and more transparent
international trade framework. Something that shuts out bad faith
players that use slave labor, child labor, exploitative wages,
things like that, and appropriately scales tariffs and other
mechanisms to penalize the violations appropriately.
I'd much rather the playing field be entirely fair and even than
do the current US thing of "well, we're going to impose a lot of
moralistic and patronizing rules on ourselves, but allow anyone
anywhere else to ignore those rules, because it makes for good
political theater back home, and it makes shareholders happy."
vincefutr23 wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
Sucked not the ideal pejorative for a vacuum
seanmcdirmid wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Sucking is a good state for a vacuum. If Roomba sucked well enough,
it wouldn't have gone bankrupt.
dylan604 wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
Growing up, local morning radio shows were no longer allowed to say
"that sucked" so they all switched to "that vacuumed". The
ridiculousness of being offended by idioms like this amuses me
ulrashida wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
"We have not yet begun to truly suck."
like_any_other wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
> better chinese competitors.
From the article: Under a trade regime overseen by men like Furman,
the company offshored production, thus teaching its future rivals in
China how to make robot cleaners.
malvim wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
* Surprised Pikachu face *
dpc_01234 wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
Did your Roombas also yelled in the middle of the night "PLEASE
CHARGE ROOMBA!!!" every few minutes with no way to disable that
behavior?
I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also
imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.
bhaney wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
One of the first things I did with my robot vacuum cleaner was open
it up and yank out its speaker.
rootusrootus wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
That's a good reminder I need to go track down my roborock, it got
stuck somewhere again. There's a map thankfully which helps me
figure out where to look.
km144 wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
Sure, but the author is arguing that the outcome you're describing is
tightly coupled to the perverse incentives that he describes in the
article. Investors pushed the company towards extraction over
innovation and the end product suffered as a result.
fellowniusmonk wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
Explore vs exploit?
Let's run an expierement where we just run exploit forever, let's
restrucute the private sector, our countries moral baselines and
eventually our executive leadership to be maximally exploitive,
lets do that for about 45 years and see where it lands us -Some
greed is good guys in the 80s probably.
Grosvenor wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too.
They never got better.
kibwen wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
And the commenter above is highlighting the article's hypothesis
about why they never got better.
viscanti wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
I believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in
innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have
sucked less.
pgwhalen wrote 11 min ago:
It does seem like that upon reading the article, but itâs not
what the title of the article suggests.
randomfrogs wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
It's a vacuum cleaner. All you want it to do is suck.
nine_k wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
But not at navigation.
charcircuit wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
The innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making
robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards
military applications like building robotic hands.
crazygringo wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Exactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum
technology then maybe this article would have a point. But
they were building stuff for the military and for space, and
there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of
that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in
better vacuum cleaners.
echelon wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
This is a fantastic video essay on iRobot's strategy/leadership
mistakes. The company was distracted and stubbornly out of tune with
what consumers wanted: [1] The patent expiry sealed the deal.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44XYQepBF7g
caesil wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
Why not let Amazon take a stab at turning things around, then? It's
better that they fail? I don't get it.
lkramer wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
According to the article, there is a defence invoking that exact
sentiment if a merger is about to be blocked, bu iRobot decided not
to invoke it (likely because it would have caused the price to be
lower).
gizmondo wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
Why the price would be lower? Presumably the price was already
agreed upon. Having a provision in the contract that the price is
reduced if this argument is made to the antitrust authorities
makes no sense.
I now realized that I recently saw some old tweets from this guy
where he first opposed this merger and then celebrated the
cancellation of the deal. So it seems he's just grasping at
straws to look less like an idiot.
BeetleB wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
> Why not let Amazon take a stab at turning things around, then?
The point the article is making is that iRobot's bad decisions are
the reason the company was failing. Blaming regulators for a poor
acquisition outcome may be fair, but they were a very minor part of
the outcome.
KerrAvon wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
couple things
- tbh, I think the Amazon deal doesn't matter much in the long run.
The damage had been done earlier.
- why give Bezos any more free money? He's already rich enough.
adamsb6 wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
They'll just hire the engineers they need out of the failed
iRobot and not compensate the investors / founders for building
something worth acqui-hiring.
The existing Roomba revenue stream probably doesn't matter. The
expertise or maybe the brand (not a great brand imho) aligns with
some company priority.
dcgudeman wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
Free money? I honestly don't understand comments like this. It's
as if you aren't even trying to make sense. Amazon would have
been bailing out Roomba so if anything this would have cost Bezos
money.
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
Outstanding article. Our current goals and incentives are not
sustainable.
lotsofpulp wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
I donât see evidence that iRobot vacuums would have been
competitive with Chinese ones, simply because the moat does not exist
(there is no secret sauce that makes it difficult to make a competing
product).
As for the rest of the article, itâs not Wall Streetâs fault the
government doesnât pay iRobot enough for research (nor should it).
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
As the article states they were more than vacuums- they also did
defense work and research. They gutted that for higher short term
gains. Offshoring to China also likely helped China learn to build
their own.
lotsofpulp wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
If they were getting paid enough for defense work and research,
then they would not have gutted it. But the government should do
R&D itself anyway.
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
You should try reading the article, it mentions that too.
lotsofpulp wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
It only mentions a one sided view presuming an investorâs
intentions. There is no numerical analysis on whether or not
iRobotâs spending on various efforts was yielding or likely
to yield a return.
DIR <- back to front page