Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs? Sure there would have almost guaranteed be job cuts with the acquisition due to redundancy, but would it have been the same amount?
However on the flip side, it feels like iRobot has been stagnating for years and entering some weird categories. I still fail to see why they entered the air purifier market and them selling a stick vacuum next to their iRobot is sure one way to say "our expensive robot doesn't do everything we claim it does".
I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing. It is shocking how much better it is, when it was in the middle of a clean and I could tell it to go start a different clean and it just did it? It didn't complain or anything, I shouldn't be surprised by this but after the experience with iRobot feeling like it stands in my way every time this felt like magic.
It genuinely makes me sad to see iRobot not be what they used to be, it feels like they got complacent with Roomba.
If the company is on the verge of closing, clearly there is something wrong with the business model. So for it to actually save jobs they have to first have the 1.7 billion that Amazon was going to pay and then have enough capital and a business reason that makes the acquisition make sense.
There are not many companies like that out there, particularly for a company like iRobot. There was synergy between iRobot and Amazon.
I am not advocating for a monopoly, but clearly another company wasn't stepping up to take amazon's place.
Neato! Oh wait, they shut down.
Google! Maybe, but would the EU see that any differently anyway?
Yeah, there's not really a long list here. Maybe one of the non-US home automation companies might make sense, but they'd likely just put it on a glidepath to shutdown.
I mean there is Microsoft who would have the money but it just doesn't really fit into anything they are doing.
Dyson? Sony? But yeah a non US company also opens up other questions that may block it.
While you're not wrong, just because the model doesn't work doesn't mean there isn't still value there.
If you are presented with the choice to shutdown a company or have it live on in another company saving some jobs. I would think the second is the better option.
It is possible that the only reason the business model doesn't make sense is not having a diverse enough of a catalog so research in a specific thing can be justified by multiple products.
IMO, probably never. I think this would open too many shenanigans of running a possible acquisition into the ground or attempt to lobby whatever government agency would regulate this.
At some point, to make rules easy to enforce, you have to absorb some collateral damage.
T-Mobile was cleared to buy Sprint because Sprint was not able to be a going concern. The end result is the same, with 3 national cell carriers.
How is market competition or the public served by companies whose only strategy is to fail and be bought by the ever shrinking number of ultra rich mega corporations?
One outcome is Spirit goes into bankruptcy reorganization and still operates, which is hardly unprecedented for an American airline. Nearly every major airline has filed for Chapter 11 since 2002, the lone exception being Southwest.
It’s always interesting that Chapter 11 is a way out of pension promises. That someone can take employment at a certain wage, and then the company can renege on the back half of the compensation once the person retires.
Philip Greenspun has a good writeup about why that is: https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
this seems like the important part of that doctrine, and a perfect justification for why an amazon acquisition shouldn't be allowed.
letting a company fail really just means letting it sink far enough that some other acquirer will pick it up.
If yes, it sounds rough!
> On 19th October 2023, Convoy ceased operations and laid off remaining staff. Remaining staff were given no severance and were told their stock options were worthless.[9] In a memo sent that day to employees, Lewis points to "a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets" as major factors resulting in the company's failure.[10]
"We have no idea who owns this IP in order to ask for permission, because the company went bankrupt" comes up fairly often in discussions about copyright duration and video games.
A lot of the time - especially with failing companies where the sale might happen at rock bottom prices, but otherwise too - the acquirer and seller may have very different ideas about which part of the transaction matters.
E.g. one company I co-founded sold off a business unit after we pivoted, and where to me at least the technology was the most worthwhile part - far better than the platform the buyer had. But to them the 6% of the userbase they were able to convert to paying users of their own service was what justified the sale price. And as much as I think the tech we sold them with the userbase was better, I get that to them - even if they agreed with my assessment, and maybe they didn't - it wasn't sufficiently better to them to justify replacing what they had and knew how to develop and knew how to operate (we sold the system, not the company, so none of our staff went with them).
Acquired IP gets used when it is the focus of the purchase, and the acquirer knows exactly what they want or need that IP for, but even then more so if it's e.g. patents rather than software. A lot of software acquirers thought they needed still end up languishing and eventually dying.
But I've seen so much IP "fade into oblivion" over the years. I'd say, I don't even know who currently owns the rights to the majority of the software I've personally developed in my career. Some would be easy to track down. Others near impossible.
For example, see Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space station tech and then Sierra Space's tech. I don't have any inside knowledge, but I'd imagine the path Sierra is on is likely one similar to the above strategy.
What happens if they get taken over by Amazon? Investors get a big exit, and employees hold on to their jobs for a bit longer (before the inevitable layoff). Amazon then uses its massive retail power to push an inferior product and edge out the smaller companies doing better work and competing on merit, leaving the space worse for everyone.
Only if your definition of capitalism includes a robust antitrust component (which mine does, but I know I differ from the mean here).
1. Prove you can do something amazing 2. Raise a bunch of capital to scale it, betting on future revenue 3. Deliver! Great product, stellar growth, soaring revenue, re-invest in product 4. Flood of copycat competitors, drives up acquisition costs, eliminates higher price point, revenue tanks 5. Pivot. Try to sell another story, build the start of another product leap, loose traction in a new way, pivot. 6. Seek an acquisition before the music ends 7. FTC
In other words, product development (esp. app + hardware) is expensive, difficult, and constantly changing.
We don’t have a capitalist system competing on product merit but acquisition arbitrage. In almost all cases the inferior product wins.
Look at what Kroger is doing with Albertson's for an example. If that merger fails, it's very likely Albertson's will go bankrupt because the shareholders looted the company of all their assets to ensure it can only survive if it's acquired
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/11/03/albertson...
If we wanted a society where the purpose of a business is to produce useful things, then we should not have the rules set up like they are.
You can't create an entire system of rules and regulations that set it up so the incentives are all aligned for companies to exist to make money, and then be surprised when those incentives work.
The early ones were noteworthy for being novel, but (IMO as an early adopter) weren’t very good at cleaning. About ten years later I experienced someone else’s (then) modern Roomba, and it was still essentially the same crappy product, randomly banging into walls and struggling with carpet edges.
When the Roborock appeared with LIDAR, it was like the future in comparison, and frankly what Roomba should have already delivered years before.
When an established company with a big market share and opportunity for a technology lead is so out-innovated, it suggests that something is fundamentally rotten.
LIDAR is indeed a game changer, but Roborock was far from the first manufacturer to use it in botvacs.
The first Roborock with LIDAR was released in 2019 and I remember getting a Neato botvac with LIDAR in the early 2010s.
Edited to add this quote from the website:
Matic's intelligence is localized on the device, and it never sends any of your data to the cloud for processing. That means no user information is ever sold, shared, or even collected in the first place.
Anoth quote from the website:
> The HEPA bag is designed to hold about a week’s worth of debris with daily vacuuming and mopping. Replacement frequency will vary based on your usage.
The "membership" (ie. prepaid refills) is advertised at $180. The best-case scenario is you're trading the always-online smart appliance debacle for the overpriced ink cartridge debacle. Pick your poison.
I have no idea if any other models run without smartphone/tablet setup but if so, that would potentially eliminate any privacy issues ;)
Maybe it's time to create a public spreadsheet with a list of models that run without a smartphone, and potentially any downsides to doing so...
I have a Roborock. I genuinely don't care if the Red Army knows how dirty my apartment is.
LIDAR is clearly superior. There’s a reason every reasonable competitor is using it, even on very cheap models.
I’d be happy to go back to them but I’m not touching them again until they have LIDAR.
Bought two sharks for $300 each. Not quite as good, but so much cheaper. And doesn’t require bags.
I like the simplicity.
The "gets stuck under furniture" is a bug. However, I don't have much furniture at Roomba height. If I did, it'd make the device useless.
- Bigger, better dust bin
- Slightly less dust makes it into the HEPA filter
- Slightly better / cheaper roller design
... and similar details.
A friend gave me their smarter vacuum (which they didn't use), and I hated it:
1) It tried to overthink things and was pretty demanding.
2) It didn't clean as well. My Roomba has a pretty anaemic vacuum, but cleans very well by virtue of going over every place many times in random directions as it bumps along for 30+ minutes. The smart vacuum plotted a course which covered everything once, finished up in record time, and nothing was actually clean.
What's odd is that even now, 2+ decades after launch, so little has improved. What I really want is "cyclone operation," as in any modern dumb vacuum, so most of the dust doesn't make it to the HEPA filter. The design is stupid simple:
- Air comes into a circular container from a hole in the side, so the air spins.
- Suction comes out a hole in the top at a half-way point in the radius of the dust container, while most of the dust wants to stay at the inside or outside
- If you're even more clever, you put the suction at half height, because dust naturally goes to the bottom.
The annoying thing is cleaning or replacing filters.
There's nothing worth buying more than free time.
Meanwhile, e.g. loading and unloading the dishwasher annoys me enough that I must admit I have considered replacing my dishwasher with two slimline or drawer ones so I can use stuff out of one while filling the other...
( Also lol at the "batteries" that catch fire, as if that's actually a thing that people should worry about. Might as well be scared of your canister vacuum's motor burning out and destroying your house, or never buy a laptop!!)
I think you're mad about something but I can't quite pinpoint what, because it's not frustrating, the charging station isn't that ugly and is out of the way (because the robot knows how to get back to it), and lithium batteries have not been a real fire hazard since the note 8. I agree that using them in the first place is kind of Not Nice for the planet, but since you brought up the points of frustrating and tripping over stuff: do you somehow think using a wired vacuum is a pleasant experience?
I love my Roomba, it’s been truly a life-changing invention for me and my go-to mental construct for how robots can improve our lives and how good design can be very simple yet effective. But I probably bought it used on eBay and I continue to buy batteries every 5-10 years for it on eBay when it needs a new one.
For a household product that runs autonomously throughout my house and interacts with many surfaces, and with small kids in the house, I want a reputable supplier, not just whiz bang features and a slick app.
Maybe Roborock is that, but there is so much opacity when dealing with Chinese companies even in cases where the govt is not involved.
DJI, huawei and insta360 are three off the top of my head that are perfectly capable of going up against global brands.
Additionally, almost every high quality brand has manufacturing in China; Apple, Microsoft, Nikon, Canon, Dyson, the list goes on.
This is more a problem of “you get what you pay for”. No name hoverboards were a real problem because designing a compact, high power draw, lithium powered device is hard to do. Segway, ninebot, etc all make great ‘hoverboard’ like products.
this should read "A few Chinese brands make great products"
Most Chinese brands make low quality products; corner cutting is rampant.
> Additionally, almost every high quality brand has manufacturing in China; Apple, Microsoft, Nikon, Canon, Dyson, etc.
That is because the foreign brands set the specs and define the standard of quality, which the factory (i.e., Foxconn) follows to the letter. So Chinese _manufacturers_ can make great products (when required and paid) but Chinese _brands_ generally do not.
This is one reason why Chinese brand products are cheaper than their foreign brand counterparts even when the foreign product was also manufactured in China.
DJI and Anger are two Chinese brands that have worked hard to develop a good reputation internationally, and deliver top products. I wouldn't trust Huawei though.
That’s what I was trying to get across. As I said earlier you get what you pay for. I can buy great products made in China by Chinese companies and terrible products made in Switzerland by Swiss companies.
The only "issues" I've had to deal with are: a) it'll eat cords so the cleaning area has to be picked up before vacuuming (or bad areas zoned off) b) it can (rarely) get stuck so the cleaning area has to be picked up (ie. a step stool I left out) c) it can (rarely) get lost if there are major changes to stuff in the cleaning area (ie. if a bunch of cardboard boxes are left out) d) very rarely (less than once a year) I have to "restore" the map (I think if c happens it might start hallucinating new map area)
I don't know what the replacement part or customer service experiences are like though. We've had our Roborock for 3+ years now, which isn't a huge amount of time but I wouldn't consider it poorly made. Maintaining it to clear out pet hair and such is simple.
You would surprised. The answer is yes and yes. Roomba like robots are dominated by Chinese companies and they are the most advanced manufacturers technology wise as well.
Amazon bought Eero, yet I haven’t seen other WiFi router companies go out of business.
Amazon bought Ring, then a competitor was so successful that Amazon bought Blink.
This notion that Amazon’s acquisition would put competitors out of business seems to be a weird dream. Especially when it is known an easier path to “unfairly compete” would be to just create an Amazon-labeled robotic vacuum and put that on the market.
> I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing.
I'm not saying those two sentences are totally incompatible, but Roborock's home page at https://us.roborock.com/ is basically half divided between "Robot Vacuums" and "Cordless Vacuum Cleaners"
These acquisitions tend to come with huge layoffs anyway.
But what actually happens now is that iRobot lays off its core staff in a desperate attempt to avoid insolvency. The regulators could wish all they want that iRoomba stay a competitive player in this space, but businesses don't run on wishes and rainbows.
The cloud companies will count as TBTF too for the same reason. Although it's harder to see how Amazon might get into a "we'll have to switch the datacenters off tomorrow unless we get bailed out" financial position", since it's easier for them to trade as a going concern, if there was a risk of that happening they would definitely get a bailout.
Also, remember that the bailouts were in almost all cases loans.
Never? The entire point of private companies is that they take risk on themselves. If we have to bail them out we might as well just nationalize them. See: the entire american airline industry.
It seems Roomba was just selling on it's brand name.
"We will acquire you for 2 million shares of VOO"
or something like that. If the only reason is that it's an unorthodox way of doing a deal, I say do it anyway and forge a way into the future of M&A.
Nasdaq is ~ flat since then, which also would not capture the economic dynamic desired (some tech valuations have fallen). The Nasdaq Tech 100 does an even worse job at capturing the dynamic: it's up nearly 50% since the deal was announced.
You'd have to use something a lot more specific, like a basket of specific stocks or some very small sub-index. But then a smaller basket could have a lot more volatility that may be endogenous to a small set of companies, and someone has to get paid for that volatility.
In private deals (one where the company being sold is not directly listed), the traditional way to solve this problem is via earn-outs.
In both public and private deals, using the purchasers' stock as the acquisition currency is also relatively common.
Easier to pretend they're doing it by choice rather than by force of law, which is finally able to reach them, due to the "social correction" of no longer worshiping tech companies.
Furthermore, it is just common sense. If you signed a purchase contract for $1.5 Billion, and it is now worth $0.5 billion, no rational actor would want that deal to go through.
I wouldn’t touch an iRobot (or any camera vacuum) after their camera scandal: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
The new Xiaomi versions now even sport extendible arms to reach corners fully.
If they work, you’d not feel the pressure to upgrade.
Includes robot vacuums: https://www.teslasmart.com/smart-vacuum-cleaners
Why assume that original comment was talking about the car manufacturer when there are robot vacuums from a much older company branded like that?
You have a whole bunch of Chinese companies fighting it out on the market (as the founding fathers would have wanted for US!), offering better and better products, leaving Roombas in the dust. While iRobot sleeps on their laurels, barely innovates and at best is only capable of solving their flaccid inability to compete by... being sold to a monopolist which can push it via their store. That's what they wanted.
If US would still have this kind of healthy market of multiple (smaller) companies competing on product, not IP lawsuits and patents, the government wouldn't have to enact foreign sanctions to defend the economy.
I feel there is a lot that can be done in US but the electronics industry is slowly eroding.
Or: The "electronics industry" (essentially contract manufacturing) is much too low margin to make economic sense in a highly developed country like the US. Have you seen the wages in the hyper competitive electronics industry in China? They are awful. Design and marketing is where most of the value can be captured. Look at Philips N.V. They are essentially strictly design in advanced countries, and manuf. in developing countries. They are doing well.
Hope it's just temporary.
If you work at a temporarily-not-an-unicorn, no antimonopoly institutions care about you.
So here’s one of those scenarios: you’re working at Figma. Perhaps you’re burned out or just want to try out something different. This acquisition deal with Adobe has been signed and you’re grinding through the days waiting for your chance to cash in on the years of work with Figma that have nearly paid off. Then this happens.
This affects startups similarly. The non IPO exit path got that much less attractive.
My ETFs are paying me every six months.
Equity ETFs or bond ETFs? If equity, I guess the max you can get is 4% yield, which is still worse that money market, plus you take equity risk. If bond ETFs, they will tank when rates fall. I never understand the appeal of bond ETFs; money market funds are enough for my fixed income needs. They are basic, easy to understand, liquid, etc.
you mean yields?
the etfs themselves will rocket up.
Which should be the goal. A major acquisition should have always been seen as a last resort, only preferable to going out of business.
Startups hoping to cash out by selling to a competitor is its own kind of silliness in the first place and was largely fueled by lax regulation environments and 0% interest cash.
What ever happened to building durable businesses as an explicit goal
Those mid sized companies you refer to did fine for three reasons:
* If they were competing against venture backed companies, they were likely playing in big markets. My bet is they are still alive today.
* They got acquired by the bigger companies and ended up capturing even more short term economic value than they would have otherwise.
* These venture backed companies expanded the market, actually helping smaller players. I would bet money that VRBO's business increased as AirBnB got bigger.
I agree that there's something sleazy about injecting a ton of capital in a niche space; at the very least, it's distorts all the dynamics in it. But you can't deny that this short term chaos creates long term economic value for everyone else.
Uber demonstrated you could add a tech layer to the taxi business and make it more efficient for riders + introduce a whole new set of people to the driver business. Did this harm existing taxi drivers? Unquestionably.
I know it's hard to look at that business model as innovation but it is because now there's extreme price pressure on these companies (esp Lyft) to remove the costliest part of the equation - the driver. So as a result, you have a ton of very motivated energy towards solving that, via autonomous driving.
It took mediocre business innovation[0] (uber) to drive meaningful tech innovation (autonomous driving).
[0] - Purposely differentiating the tech innovation (which Uber deserves a lot of credit for) vs the biz innovation (which last I read is getting better, though still shaky).
I asked what happened to building a durable business as a goal?
I understand the VC model enough to know that sometimes for years you run red because you need economies of scale or some other engine to finally turn over and then at scale the business will start to generate bigger cash flow once it reaches that tipping point. Even if a bit simplified as an explanation, this isn't what I'm talking about.
What I'm asking directly is why exiting to a big company became a goal in and of itself. Lots of VCs poured money into companies with the distinct hope that those businesses would at the very least be acquired. I think this is the silly part. Every investment should be from the perspective of can this be durable if standing on its own two feet? and a big acquisition is not something that should be taken into consideration as part of the investment and business building strategy of either the VC firms or the founders.
That all got lost. Building a durable business should be the ultimate goal, and selling the business to a big company should be seen as lower status than it currently is.
Its not that I'm saying acquisitions don't make sense sometimes, I'm not. However as far as goal setting and running a business is concerned, it shouldn't really be thought about as a viable fallback or exit strategy until its readily apparent and available, but that hasn't been true for some time now. VCs and founders often explicitly look at acquisition as one of their "success targets" and hopes for a business. Lots of people on HN have admitted that they started businesses with some hopes that they could possibly be acquired. That is the drift away from sanity I'm talking about.
Every single founder I know (and I know a lot of them) doesn't build a business for the specific reason to be acquired. Is it a thought that crosses their mind? Definitely. Is it something investors think about? Absolutely.
But the day-to-day, 12 hour+ grind for them is all about product-market fit and drawing revenue - the things that make a durable business.
The reason VC funding is drying up, big unicorns aren't going public and acquisitions are halted is that investors are actually starting to drill into the numbers now, and finding nothing but hot air.
There's just no world in which the market leader ought to be able to buy their #1 competitor, particularly in a deal where the economics ($10b on $300m rev) only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. I have no idea what these folks were thinking.
The next up cycle in speculative behavior won't follow until after interest rates hit the floor again (inevitable).
I think the ecosystem is healthier for Figma and Adobe remaining separate.
Now maybe these companies are likely just mismanaged and the cost of North American engineering is too high? That said, it still seems like there is a structural problem here that very few hybrid software-hardware companies succeed.
(Okay we do, see CHIPS Act, but too little too late?)
Your call out to BYD is a good one, because it is conceivable that even western-made cars will be made non competitive in 10 years and it seems that we are sleeping through the news (or even encouraging it). I hope I'm wrong, but the road ahead is filled with challenge because the direction is fundamentally wrong, and it will take a lot of effort to reverse course, if that is even possible.
So I think protectioism is fine as long as we properly setup an environment that allows for and encourages competition and innovation. However, that doesn't seem to be a path we are used to taking .
Can you give some specific examples? I couldn't find anything. I'm pretty sure that US and Canada have nearly free trade, due to NAFTA.
Basically a lot of established manufacturers are IBMs of this era.
I wonder how much money is burned in the economy just paying people to write EULAs, laws and service agreements to more effectively avoid liability and screw over customers vs. how many is actualy going into improving products and services?
As someone who doesn’t care at all about stack ranking or any nation’s “national security”, as a consumer, more competition, and more and cheaper products is a simple and uncomplicated win.
Almost all of my favorite companies are in Shenzhen presently. I would move there if I could do so easily.
All my favorite devices were designed/engineered either in Japan or in the USA. I'd take good engineering over cheap manufacturing every time. And we could do with lower number of devices. While they are probably made in the same factory, I'd love a focus on quality instead of price.
countries compete, albeit on different rules - having a monopoly on violence and a centrally controlled money printer tends to do that - so your dream of 'just pure free market competition' can only ever be that - a dream.
The purpose of subsiding what are zombie companies is to maximize employment to ensure internal stability. The wins these companies show are propaganda wins only and don’t make the country more competitive. Foreign manufacturing is also migrating out of China at an alarming rate as shown by falling exports and GDP growth.
None of the development in the Chinese technology sector is sustainable. These companies would never survive on their own without subsidies and are dependent on them. It’s a cascading failure waiting to happen in the Chinese economy and will likely be a global shock. At least the Americans may appear to take longer to develop winning companies but once they do they tend to be sustainable and long lasting as organic enterprises.
Edit: The American free market is working as intended because it rightly values robotic vacuums as useless devices.
This seems like a big statement, can other experts comment?
I believe the biggest hurdle to any changes to current battery tech is that it costs so much to develop an entirely new process and build factories. Most innovation is in the form of small adjustments. For hydrogen to overcome this hurdle it would have to either be extremely cheap or have some unique property. For cars I don’t see hydrogen having that much of an advantage, but maybe electric planes would be feasibly powered by hydrogen due to the much improved weight to energy ratio.
> electric engines that use liquid fuels become mainstream (fuel-cells)
That is surely hydrogen. Do they understand the conditions that are required to stored hydrogen as liquid, let alone natural gas?
Think what goes into a hair dryer? Exterior design, looks good and functional. How you make the plastic cover, do the plastic injection molding? How you design all the internal parts, fan, motor housing, heating wire, power circuits, micro-controllers etc, and make sure everything fits. Some companies even do individual components themselves, like the brushless motor, or there is a Chinese supplier that makes them, which provides much faster time to response. Then do the testing for each component, electric, heat, water, moisture testing. Then design a mass manufacturing system with automation and human labor that achieves really high yield and low wasted materials. This is the hardest part, its easy to make a hair dryer by hand taking 100 human hours and make sure it works. It's much harder to make 1M hair dryers per month, that is going to be used in all sorts of environments and with all kind of abuse, make sure they work well for a number of years so customers don't return them, or you go bankrupt from recalls and warranty, and make sure you only have to throw out the absolute smallest number of manufacturing defects, and really control your cost structure so you still make a profit when importers are squeezing your price. Then the supply chain and logistics, shipping from suppliers and shipping to customers. Then create a number of products for different markets. China can manufacture for cheap, but people don't realize manufacture for cheap and at massive quantities is a technology itself. It's also management, business process, even company and worker culture. China doesn't have the cheapest labor cost. It's the combination of everything that produces a physical product with the level of quality, fit and finish at the price point.
This is an American company I believe considering they are taking privacy seriously
I’m very weary of buying a robot vacuum with a camera from a Chinese company. I don’t fully trust iRobot, but I trust them much more than I trust Chinese brands.
I also couldn’t see myself going back to a robot vacuum without a camera. After I got kids our old Neato vacuum robot got very little use since it always required that everything was picked up off the floor.
That being said I’m quite frustrated by my new J9. It’s supposed to have a feature called SmartScrub, but it’s not in the app. The robot is also supposed to drive back to the base to refill its water tank, but it hasn’t done that a single time since we bought it a month ago. The combination of vacuuming and mopping is also a bit unfortunate since it sucks up a lot of humid air when passing over areas that it’s already mopped, causing a buildup of wet-ish dirt in the air duct.
The robot would get clogged frequently. A few parts would just stop working. Went through 2 replacements before calling it quits.
Switched to Roborock and haven’t looked back. Going on 1 yr now.
A foreign entity would have no obstructions to using collected information as ruthlessly as possible, whereas even a corrupt/politically-motivated/unrestrained domestic entity would have to weigh the comparatively massive risk of being implicated or exposed.
“what are they going to do with it?”
If you have valuable information or responsibilities, that could be motivation enough for foreign agents to seek leverage. If you don’t, then it’s equally fantastic to think the CIA gives a shit about you for some reason.
Don't forget – if someone unlocks your door and leaves it ajar, then anyone can get in.
Chinese companies are not well known for their cyber security practices. Even if you don't care how they could use this information (either individually, or in the aggregate across millions of people), you should also care about who else would be able to hack into the feed.
You don't want a "kia boyz" situation with a camera in your home. Imagine some kid finds an easily exploitable vulnerability and releases some software allowing anyone to tap into your camera? This has happened with security cameras already. It's even worse these days with cloud connected equipment, all you need is a vulnerability in the cloud command and control.
And, although most US agencies are not allowed to collect data from citizens in US soil, they can (and have) collected data procured from elsewhere.
The bottom line is, the same information can end up much, much closer to you.
I realized I was spending 30-60 minutes debugging and manually charging our roombas for each (usually aborted) run. Once the Amazon acquisition was announced, I realized it meant that they'd inevitably send upskirt angle shots of the family to Bezos for ad targeting and forwarding to local law enforcement agencies. That was the final straw.
Supposedly, the Chinese ones are slightly better for privacy because you can MITM their backend cloud connection and point it at a local version of whatever service the robot thinks it needs in order to work.
I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work. So were the older, dumber roombas (especially the square mops from the Mint acquisition). YMMV.
The _exact_ same problem Braava has. Whenever the wheels collect a small amount of dust, they slip too much and the robot can't climb. I actually added sandpaper to the base to help with the grip. Seems like such an easy fix; it's mind boggling that the same issue is present across models, for years!
> I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work.
Yeah, although, if you have pets, even a not so reliable robot will massively cut the amount of cleaning you have to manually do.
Seems like an easy company to replicate (and it has been too)
I'll omit the competitor that I use now. I'll just say that it has a base that empties the robot dust bin, refills the clean tank, empties the dirty water tank, washes and dries the mop. And the mop actually looks like something that resembles a mop (and rotates), it's far better than the 'swiffer' kind of thing that the Braava has, or that the J9 has. I don't see the same wet dirt issue because the navigation takes care of that.
It does have a camera and the parent company is indeed Chinese.
Neato is even worse and their robots aren't much better than they were 5 years ago. They started out really strong but any improvements were marginal.
To be clear, the CCP definitely has a detailed map of my home. But man, I've got two dogs that shed a lot, and it's great. Sometimes you've gotta accept the tradeoffs, y'know?
I think most of the competitors will use a camera for object detection and a LiDAR for navigation, since LiDAR is faster than VSLAM.
Both lasers and food are regulated in the USA by the FDA AFAIK.
I don't have blind faith, I have some faith that trusting the certification processes in most matters is more cost effective for me than to verify everything myself. Especially for lasers that have strictly defined classes based on power output. That sort of trust does take on some risk. But I'm content with that level of risk. Things seem much safer now than they did when I was a kid.
What's the difference between trusting any corp and trusting any agency? I'd say anyone trusting any corp/agency without any doubt would be somewhat delusional.
"The LIDAR units used by these robot vacuums aren't powerful enough to damage cat/children's eyes. I trust that they wouldn't be on the market if they were."
Equates to me trusting every corporation on every safety issue AND that I trust the certifications to be perfect AND I trust nothing ever gets missed. But all three of these is clearly (to me the author) not what I'm saying there.
"The LIDAR units used by these robot vacuums aren't powerful enough to damage cat/children's eyes. I trust that they wouldn't be on the market if they were."
My elaboration on this is that I trust that those lasers are of low enough power to not damage cat/children's eyes because consumer grade lasers are one of those things that I believe to be well regulated and certified before going on the market. I also happen to think that competitors would be tearing these things down at launch and if they found they were out of compliance they'd be very vocal about it.
Then I go onto say "Do you eat any food made by corporations? Or grown by any corporations? Both lasers and food are regulated in the USA by the FDA AFAIK." specifically to someone saying "I don't trust any corporation on any matter". I just find that to be a hard position to take in any practical sense. Society only functions with some level of trust between supplier or consumer.
EDIT: here's a headline from just within the past hour recalling 50,000 cars with a "DO NOT DRIVE" warning[0]. that's from a very heavily regulated industry. these types of things are precisely why "trust" is not really warranted on my part. it's more of just blind acceptance, not trust.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
I think we all agree it's not that simple. But ycombinator comments isn't the greatest place to debate this kind of thing either, so I apologize. I get your side too, and unfortunately I dont think either of us has the time to unravel everything lol x)
Have a great day!
That reminds me of a certain businessman that also owns an EV company...
That lets you build a dataset of these numbers correlated with all the other things Amazon knows about you. Then target you for ads.
Maybe, it notices that your coffee table is smaller than average than other similar people/apartments. They also know you have previously bought dark colored fake wood furniture before. So they advertise dark colored coffee tables to you, in the price range you would be able to afford.
Even where they are public record, there are often limits. San Francisco limits you to six requests per day, costs $0.10 per page, and must be applied in person or via mail.
I mean, I assume the tax assessors don't take a photo of you taking a shit and put it on your property record card?
I see people complaining that Amazon stuffs their face with noname amazon brand clones of anything when they search for it.
So what the EU worries about is that you won't be able to find any other vacuum cleaner except Roomba on Amazon.
Also, I bet $20 Amazon would have laid off a sizable portion of the iRobot workforce anyway just like Activision/Blizzard and Microsoft.
This is exactly what was happening here, the business was being acquired. Now what I would assume is next is a slow death and then their tech being picked up for cheap after bankruptcy proceedings.
Generalized statements are dumb.
Looks like they still haven't figured out this)
Huh what? Biontech is a German company. The German Mittelstand literally runs half of the "hidden champions" worldwide - companies that everyone else depends on, that have utter dominance in their niche market. German cars are of a hardware build quality that makes anyone else - particularly Tesla - be dead in the water (although the software side of German cars is just the other way around, I'll admit that). Germany literally created the market for cheap solar panels by massively subsidizing them during the Schröder years. MP3? A standard developed by Fraunhofer in Germany. CERN and ITER? European based. Europe as a whole has an actually working high-speed train network. The maglev train? A German invention. Brutal and effective collective worker action (aka strikes)? A French patent. Chip-and-PIN? Introduced in Europe. A ton of ISO standards? They are actually extensions or adoption of German DIN, including the paper size that almost everyone but the US uses. Metric/SI system? An European invention. MySQL? A Swedish invention. Linux? Invented by a Finn. Half of mobile communications dates back to stuff from Nokia and Ericsson.
The only area where Europe lags behind is providing insane amounts of insanely dumb capital to startups.
Of course there are winners in all regions of the world. Most of your examples are pretty biased though. Japanese cars > German cars. China is probably more relevant to the massive cost reductions in solar panels. Europe has a high-speed train network because of its age and size. Not practical in many parts of the world but I would say China's network is much better than Europes. Maglev trains were not a German invention.
You are missing the bigger picture of my half serious side. I am not talking about specific inventions but that 1) making a generalize statement is pointless and just introduces useless strife and 2) the EU is starting to get eaten away by Chinese manufacturing and innovation. There is a balance between regulation and free markets and if I was wanting to HQ a company I am not sure I would pick the EU.
[1]https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/world-map-manufacturing-out...
In other words, capitalism.
I think they should be assumed harmful, and burden of proof should be on the acquirer to demonstrate public good.
Larger companies can get better deals from their suppliers. It can be a nice alternative to bankruptcy for a company which is unprofitable on its own. It would allow for integrations which would be all but impossible with separate companies.
Of course in practice it rarely works out like that. Megacorps usually do acquisitions to get rid of competition or to obtain technology. The smaller company is almost always completely gutted within a few years, to the detriment of their original customer base.
Or maybe not. But the point I'm making is that we don't have to solve the bad features of our economic system in ways that make things worse, just because that's how it's always been done.
Alexa in your vaccuum, duh.
If history is any guide, then there is negative public benefit in the vast majority of cases.
Mao, durring the cultural revolution thought the same thing. That villages could be doing all their own metal work. No one needs a major steel or iron works so break those up and let things be produced locally.
It backfired spectacularly.
There are things that can only be done at scale (steel). There are things that you can let have more linear growth as you scale (accounting), IT.
You get very interesting things when companies get very large. Bell labs, gave us unix (that ATT gave away cause it was a monopoly). Xerox gave us the modern GUI. ML foundations emerged out of google. The funding for 23 and me came from google founders and helped push squencing (capital into that market).
Innovation tends to come from taking smart people throwing piles of money at them, and letting them do their thing.
This was the realm of the aristocracy, then the university, then the government and now it's in the hands of private business. Everyone may hate on musk but rockets that land is progress that got made because he got stupidly rich and beat the incumbants.
If you want something different, you can have that. You can start your own company, run it in the style of Mondragon (cool corp go check them out) and claw your way to the top.
That's because they bombed themselves to smithereens twice within 30 years about a century ago.
If Facebook and Google have a duopoly on online ads, and businesses in India and Saudi Arabia and Russia and Europe who want to advertise online are sending money to America, and the companies are making lots of their American employees rich - that sounds like a good thing for America?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
But so long as the collusion has a greater negative effect for foreign businesses, and most of the money extracted from American businesses stays in America - that's more money for America.
Hypothetically. At least, this is what I assume American legislators are thinking when they ignore competition issues.
There's a current SCOTUS case about this exact question and it looks likely that it will be decided in favor of these companies to repatriate their revenue without paying a single penny in taxes. In other words: they racked up hundreds of billions in revenue and just held it overseas until they can claw it back without paying their fair share.
They are far from perfect but ultimately better than push notification from ebay-like application after random googling some thing.
It’s hardly a good thing that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. soak up so many businesses into their already vast portfolios.
What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies.
Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV.
Or Nest integrating with Google Home
Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo.
There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.
Apple headphones "just work" with Apple devices.
You can switch audio from your phone to your Apple TV with a single confirmation click. No need to unpair and then manually initiate a connection on your desired device.
I don't know how competition law enforcement is going to make Bluetooth work better?
But your solution would be to make Apple technology worse?
You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon.
You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.
Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair".
The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.
Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues.
The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.
sound quality is potato level in calls, though.
That said there is a successor called LC3 [1], but hardware support for it has been lacking as it's a relatively fresh standard.
More, look at how non-integrated much of the big companies are. Sony used to amuse the heck out of me for how isolated all of their products were from each other. Microsoft, similarly, had some odd screwups in their own ecosystems. Often by trying to present it as if they had a set of APIs that would work on all of their offerings, but with hard to reason about restrictions based on what you were targeting. Amazon was similarly run as a series of different teams/companies that all happen to be under the same umbrella company name.
There is nothing preventing cross company integration but these companies themselves. That behavior should not be rewarded by customers or allowed by regulatory agencies.
Because those tech companies intentionally make it unnecessarily hard. Rather than creating an (open) standard they dig out an extra moat around their walled garden, and make it essentially impossible to release well-integrated products without paying the Apple/Google/Amazon Tax - if they even allow it at all.
Just compare it with a standard like Wifi or Displayport: it's orders of magnitude more complex than pushing some audio to a headphone, yet it works seamlessly across dozens of vendors. When was the last time you had to worry about your computer with a Windows Ethernet port not being compatible with a router providing Apple Ethernet?
Not that it hasn't been done before, but it's been a while. x_X
Until they don’t. Adding an Apple Watch to my iPhone means it no longer supports airdrop, and I can’t install apps to my iPhone via Xcode.
Reference? I admit I use Airdrop once every 5 years or so, but I've had a Watch for longer than that.
Nest… is that still a thing?
Ring-Alexa integration is good but not great.
Amazon Music the app integration with Alexa is… non-existent? I can’t play music on my phone and move it to an echo device. I’m now resorting to posting on HN and hoping that a product dev or PM notices.
A healthy market would see casual interop between these services, and they all started with that interop before slowly strangling it out and monetising through adverts, tracking, data mining, and exclusivity. Open protocols allow you to bypass that though, which is why each of these networks are locked down.
There's no reason why your Airpods should talk over a proprietary Apple protocol and your web apps only work 100% effectively on chrome browsers, having inferior functionality by design if you don't commit fully to the landlord of your walled garden of choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
Of the entire top-100, there are maaaybe 10 or 20 in a monopoly-like position, and that's mostly because they intentionally dug out a very specific niche.
Monopolies abound! /s
I wish US regulators would do better.
I was confused by this because most rankings say Volkswagen is the biggest company in Europe, but it looks like LVMH is currently #2 by market cap (behind Novo Nordisk, which I assume is flying high thanks to the semaglutide craze). Considering that #3 is ASML, I'm not sure this ranking especially supports your narrative.
That BioNTech is pretty cool too.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/973297/largest-european-...
Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace
* Lucid - bankrupt. Nobody really needed another LISP startup.
* Rethink Robotics - bankrupt. Their "cobots" were not very useful.
* iRobot - in trouble.
Amazon and iRobot had some integration. "Alexa, tell Roomba to vacuum in front of the counter", says the iRobot site. Did that actually work?
It made more sense for Amazon, giving Amazon a mobile spy in everyone's house. Amazon's last attempt at that, their indoor drone, never shipped.[1]
I would think Lucid was quite successful with their Lisp. A bunch of companies based their Lisp on Lucid CL (IBM, SUN, DEC, HP, ...).
However, I also don't think it's success can be attributed to Brooks either. He's not very good for much of anything, except making himself be known as a famous roboticist. The company was successful due to other folks there. It is failing for the same reason.
Brooks was a fine figurehead, but that doesn't make a successful company.
> On 6 July 2023, the Commission opened an in-depth investigation to assess if Amazon's acquisition of iRobot may
> (i) restrict competition in the market for the manufacturing and supply of RVCs; and
> (ii) allow Amazon to strengthen its position in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and/or other data-related markets.
> As a result of this in-depth investigation, the Commission is concerned that Amazon may restrict competition in the European Economic Area (‘EEA')-wide and/or national markets for RVCs, by hampering rival RVC suppliers' ability to effectively compete.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
The key insight I took away was, the FTC doesn't want to approve M&A from large cap corporations, period.
iRobot has not innovated their products in any meaningful way in over a decade.
But then again, they make some weird claims further down like:
It’s normal for a robot to not re-dock from time to time.
This company is doing the reverse, putting self driving tech in vacuum bot...
Yeah, I was looking for a robot vacuum a couple years ago and figured surely Roomba was the top of the line. Nope, not even close. The big killer, like you mentioned, is not having Lidar, so instead the Roomba has to bounce off of walls and obstacles repeatedly in order to map the room.
I ended up buying a Dreametech Z10 Pro, which I combined with a rooted firmware and Valetudo. No more phoning home to China!
To be fair, though, I don't really care about the speed of vacuuming operations. It's easy to schedule it when I'm out of the house, and it's not like I'm paying the robot an hourly wage.
I have a few iRobot vacuums that are several years old and never get used due to ineffectiveness. It is easier to spend 5 minutes manually vacuuming vs letting the iRobot wander around randomly for an hour and still not clean well.
They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money.
Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics.
At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.
In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions
> Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook [...] Robot would share test users’ data in a sprawling, global data supply chain, where everything (and every person) captured by the devices’ front-facing cameras could be seen, and perhaps annotated, by low-paid contractors outside the United States who could screenshot and share images at their will. [...] These workers then shared at least 15 images—including shots of a minor and of a woman sitting on the toilet—to social media groups where they gathered to talk shop.
To be fair, when the photo of a woman taking a shit was shared on facebook, her face was blurred.
Once something is online there's also the (less important but perhaps more likely) risk they'll send software updates that remove features, add adverts, force you to set up an account, and other nonsense like that.
> Just last year one of their contractors posted a picture taken by a vacuum of a woman going to the bathroom.
It's not just a floor plan, it's a video overview of everything in your living space.
Most robo-vacs don't have cameras, but lidar/IR sensors so all they get is a 2D map of your floorplan, not video footage.
There was a funny video on social media, of a home surveillance camera capturing the pet taking a dump in the middle of the living room, and then the Roomba smearing it everywhere as it did its rounds. If you're a pet owner who's companion can do their business in your house, having the robovac smear it everywhere is a nightmare you'd want to avoid at all cost, and that can only be solved using cameras.
One of the reason I never connected my Neato is that I had no interest in having a map of my flat uploaded to the company's servers.
Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"
The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
You still need to use their apps to control the robots, and the apps send the commands to the robot only through their proprietary clouds instead of directly. You can't tell me with a straight face that means privacy.
If it has no camera and no microphone, the worst case leak is way better than what iRobot has already been caught doing:
(The toilette videos) https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Given that I use roughly the same number of cloud and government services as other people, and live in a city, to me this is privacy. Without cameras or microphones it falls within my tolerance for information that third parties know about me given the risk of those third parties abusing that data (either directly or via hackers).
Sorry to break the bad news to you but your personal standard for privacy is way out of line with what the vast vast majority of people consider privacy nowadays. Up to you if you want to spend your life living in anger at that or not.
I'm not living in anger, I'm just not comfy sharing my data with Chinese companies and their random cloud services. I think that applies to most people actually.
Yes the ship has long sailed on the online privacy of the Average Joe who's already knees deep in Google, Meta, Tinder, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, but that doesn't mean I should just bend over to more of those from China as well.
Privacy is not binary, as in you either have it or you don't, but you can actively control and limit how much you give away once you're educated on the subject and willing to invest a few clicks through cookie banners, ad blockers, etc.
You're probably not an Uighur.
Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.
My Roborock S7 is light years ahead of my girlfriends iRobot, which just drives around running into everything, gets stuck pretty much every time it runs.
Meanwhile the Roborock maps my whole home and plans a route. I trust it enough to have it set to run every week automatically without intervention. The only work I do is to empty it and add water to the mop tank.
I have had the same experience with an i3+, which is just a vacuum but with a self-empty base. This i3+ originally didn't have room mapping but they added it after I purchased it. It goes home to charge and empty itself and cleans in a reasonable pattern.
I've previously owned the 350 series and some other similar one and they were more toy than utility.
This is my first one with a self-empty base and I'm surprised how much I like it. I don't think the pre-mapping self-empty units would have worked very well for me because they would usually get stuck, but I've been quite impressed at how well the j7 manages to avoid that.
It does have an annoying quirk that it won't run if it's too dark, so I have to schedule it a little carefully or leave the lights on and schedule them to turn off. But I'm really happy with it overall.
Maybe someone else will buy them to extract the last few $$s before turning out the lights. sigh
IMO there's no valid reason to allow a company the size of Amazon to make acquisitions, and instead the conversation should be about urgently trying to break Amazon up.
TBH, it looks like the worst possible outcome.
Seems like the EC just declared that Amazon is no longer allowed to make any acquisitions of companies that make products. At the very least they left a pretty high bar for Amazon to get over for any future acquisitions.
Does that seem contradictory? Consider that their innovations, what they're known for, lies in robotic morphology. iRobot's Cool Stuff Museum in their HQ has some groundbreaking robots which still are awesome (like a ocean buoy robot powered by the waves). They cut their teeth doing research grants and developing military robots. Their ethos was rooted in service; when 9/11 happened, they packed up a prototype robot and drove to Ground Zero to use that robot to search for survivors in the rubble. Still, their military robots were controlled by humans, and the original Roombas turned at random angles to fully clean a room.
Around 8 years ago, iRobot spun off their military and commercial robot divisions into independent companies (Endeavor Robotics and Ava Robotics, respectively; Endeavor was eventually acquired by FLIR) to focus exclusively on the consumer market. The consumer robotics industry was shifting, so iRobot needed to change. They bought Evolution Robotics to acquire computer vision IP and started doing research in that area. Advanced software capabilities were now important, so they shipped vSLAM (monocular SLAM representing state using pose graphs; they've published quite a few papers on this), persistent mapping, automatic room segmentation, and much more. They kept researching new consumer robots, including a home security robot which didn't make it out of the lab.
The thing is, consumer robots will ALWAYS be a luxury item. Nobody NEEDS a Roomba, and the iRobot folks understood that reality. So, iRobot leaned into that and worked to make the Roomba the premium option: a refined industrial design language with their main products appealed better to the high-end market, and they released an autoevac Roomba. I'm guessing that their primary market segment saturated, so they figured they'd release new physical products, but that puts them in direct competition with Dyson (who utterly failed to produce a good robot vacuum cleaner, mind you), so good luck there. I don't believe iRobot ever resorted to selling their customer data, which I'm sure Chinese robotics companies regularly do to increase revenue.
I also think iRobot's failure to launch their robot lawnmower really hurt them, probably hurting morale than anything else. Tons of people worked on that project, and the technology stack was genuinely impressive for seven years ago (using UWB beacons placed in the yard for localization and mapping). UWB was still an emerging technology in 2017 (still a few years before AirTags released). It makes me sad they couldn't ship it in the US, since the technology was better than virtually all other robot lawnmowers on the market.
iRobot manufactures their robots in China, but if I remember correctly, that's exclusively because the Chinese restrict exports on key electrical components like resistors. There was a desire to onshore manufacturing, but because the Chinese cornered the market, it was basically impossible to make the costs work out.
The bottom line is, the robot vacuum market is basically a solved problem, and there's a very good reason that floor cleaning robots continue to be the only viable consumer robot product.
I have fond memories of those good and kind iRoboteers. I wish iRobot all the best as they move forward and try to find a well-constrained everyday problem which can be solved by a low-cost robot.
Well, it was not! It had similar effectiveness to the Eufy, but lacked manual controls. It also refused to go places the Eufy would (like a dark carpet) and constantly tried to return home after only a cursory clean.
That kind of turned me off on Roomba. Not saying this is why they might be having trouble, but it reflects my experience and feelings toward them.
Has anyone heard about them? It apparently offers complete privacy by doing all computes on device.
Might it have included the same significant layoffs, or OEMing cheaper Chinese hardware while keeping the brand?
“As a consumer I am proud, delighted and outright tickled pink that this acquisition has failed as having competition in the market will, in the long term, result in better products and lower prices”
I don’t really know why this deal was blocked, the competition seems to be doing pretty good.
I suspect the problem here is a dominant retail player buying a big manufacturer
China, where the government promotes local monopolies and sets unreasonable hurdles to foreign competitors? That China?
Is it about owning every home device? Maybe they'll turn the vacuum into a security robot to integrate with Ring /s
Are those people for real?
Mr. Zapolsky may want to seek out a new career...
In comedy.
Freedom is slavery.
Acquisition is competition.