They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US.
Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.
This is a good article to describe the viewpoint of Chinese iRobot competitor https://kr-asia.com/at-usd-90-per-unit-seauto-is-quietly-swe...
Too bad our American leaders sold us out.
Roborock and Eufy (and other competitors) clearly either stole or reverse-engineered the tech.
If the IP had enough value then I’m sure Vorwerk would’ve pursued it in court.
But here we are.
Also, I recall Neato was often purchased and cannibalized by researchers for its lidar.
This was all cutting edge 10+ years ago. Even today, the features it supported offline then is just matched at best today in 2025/2026.
Not exceeded; and often crippled when offline.
What made cloudless Neato amazing was how many real-life edge cases it handled well. That’s where the innovation was.
It’s the integration of the vacuum and sensors along with great software that allowed it to handle furniture shifts and creeping up to stairs without being confused.
I think of it this way: Tesla’s core tech were batteries and electric motors. Nothing groundbreaking. But integrating the core tech as a vehicle took real effort and trial-and-error; then more, in order to make a manufacturing pipeline.
Sorry if I sound bitter. I fell in love with the product on my first purchase and was mortified when the market utterly failed to reward them for the innovation.
[1] at least 30 years ago, now many of them do also another paid work (not Vorwerk-related) on top of unpaid house chores.
Zero creep factor (ignoring later cloud offering)..
Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.
I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
Example: I buy an iPhone over the competition because it's a superior experience. Their walled-garden (RIP) made for a less appealing attack vector than Android, their commitment to privacy is real (a reflection of Tim Cook), and how they as a company project those values against government entities are all positives.
Before then, I never imagined buying Apple products; and always believed they were overpriced (in many respects, yes) but there are other harder-to-quantify benefits.
Meanwhile cheap roborocks had no arbitrary limitations and more honest marketing.
I miss the optimism that this company used to have, but I won't miss the entity that they became.
Biggest issue has been the flood of cheap chinese units on the market - like GoPro, they had nowhere to go, and got beat on price once feature parity was achieved (which didn't take that long).
Roomba was living off of name recognition for most of that period and was far behind in adopting any of it.
Robot arms are obvious next step. Tidying up kids toys would be god sent, but unless speed improves my kids will DDOS it in seconds.
Just got a Mova z60, it's shocking how much progress has been made even in the last 5 years compared to my old lidar Roborock. The z60 can even hurdle over small barriers.
As I understand the only countries where one could barely pull that off would be Korea or Japan, and the local makers are mostly giving up as they lose too much on cost.
Bosch/Siemens are far larger than those, but they outsourced a lot. But even here, significant parts of the higher-end stuff is still made outside China.
Miele (at a more premium price point) production is even more concentrated in Germany. https://m.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm
(Edit: No replies after 8 hours, but of course they then came in quickly after Europe woke up..)
How many US homes have a Bosch/Miele washer/dryer vs LG/Samsung? (Outside of NYC).
You do pay premium for the quality. It is worth it though. My parents' Siemens Washer-Dryer combo is still strong after 15 years. A couple parts needed to be changed last year but after the replacement the machine works very well now.
On Miele, they sure seem to make a sizeable effort to keep as much as they can in Germany, including the motors, electronics etc.
They seem to expand vacuum cleaner factories in China as well, but it could be the best of both world with a company dedicated to push the local ecosystem as much as they can, and go beyond when absolutely needed.
Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.
Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.
Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".
It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.
By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
THe Chinese seem to be extremely good at taking western products and just layering on tons of incremental improvements, which make their versions that much better. It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.
I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas?
Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.
Nah, they just had access to more capital. That hasn't been true in a while tho.
And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).
Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.