Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan | Hacker News Reader

Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

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249 pointsconnor11528198 comments

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.

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.

That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.

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.

The innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.

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.

Well it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.

Hardware is not like software. A general purpose humanoid cleaning robot will be superior to a robot vacuum but it will always cost an order of magnitude more. This is different from software where the cost exponentially decreases and you can do the computer in the cloud.

I'm not sure advancements in AI and advancements in vacuum cleaners are at similar stages in terms of R&D. I'd be very wary of trying to apply lessons from one to the other.

It's a vacuum cleaner. All you want it to do is suck.

But not at navigation.

It does seem like that upon reading the article, but it’s not what the title of the article suggests.

Or perhaps would have sucked more where it needed to, and sucked less where it didn't.

And the commenter above is highlighting the article's hypothesis about why they never got better.

Yet they were about far more than just vacuums!

In the 2000s, no one was doing what they were doing.

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.

It just doesn’t seem like these other vacuum robotics companies spend so much money on research and development.

I’m sure they could have built more advanced robots, etc. If they had focused on research, but when virtually every competitor is cheaper and offers better technology. It seems like their competitors just applied something off the shelf and not some grand big brain advancement.

Missing the point.

iRobot was far more than vacuums until they weren't.

Read the article. The author spells it out.

I lived it. I read about them and bought a Roomba back when they first sold them. They had so much in the pipeline, consumer and otherwise. Hell, they even had a STEM kit programmable Roomba.

History repeats itself because people forget.

It just says that they sold off their defense robot division and launched a consumer products company.

They just aren’t consumer centric. The neato was so much better than the Roomba and that was so long 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.

You could stick a tracker on it

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.

One of the first things I did with my robot vacuum cleaner was open it up and yank out its speaker.

Genius! Why I didn’t think of this!

> 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.

* Surprised Pikachu face *

Sucked not the ideal pejorative for a vacuum

"We have not yet begun to truly suck."

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

Sucking is a good state for a vacuum. If Roomba sucked well enough, it wouldn't have gone bankrupt.

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.

what law and licensing prevented iRobot to adopt Lidar? Given Lidar is used everywhere already.

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."

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 there’d be technological transfer since it was always China’s 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 didn’t think the Chinese could be real players in tech, or didn’t care because short-term profit was more attractive.

So it was profits then, and if you’re asking “what sort of VC deals were they shackled by”, it’s profits now. So the point of the article still stands, Wall Street screwed them over.

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.

> I think American companies would be more successful and higher quality if the regulation and IP policy we embraced were reciprocal

The problem is that US patent law stopped technological advancement. Why innovate if you can buy some patents, hire talented lawyers, and have them do their magic? It's strange that Chinese products changed from "cheap knock-offs" to "global leadership in innovation" and nobody stopped and asked themselves what exactly made US companies just give up on innovation.

> No one ever forced any company to work with China.

"Forced" is a strong word here, but company's do need to compete or die. If your competitors are manufacturing in China and selling widgets at a price less than what an American factory can produce them for, what choices do they realistically have?

To expect merchants to get together and act according to some greater good is a pipe dream. Government should have stepped in and prevented the offshoring of American industry through policy

Yes, such are capitalism’s incentives, I’m afraid.

But this could have been managed. FDR managed it, other governments somewhat managed it with policy in times of war, like WW2.

The US had the technology edge for DECADES. More industrialization would lead to more inovation and more jobs. They could invest in factories and the like, and even marketing, since “american made” has always been a fine talking point for companies. But it was cheaper in the short term to ship it to China and just not care about the future.

The governments didn’t care, the companies (owners, shareholders) certainly didn’t care, and as a result, decades later, they’re stuck with fascism. Which I don’t think they care about either.

They all suck. (No pun intended)

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.

> To be honest the Roomba sucked

I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse!

We’re 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 I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer.

Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing - I’ve never had others - but I love my Roomba.

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.

I think a lot of people who have pets or kids who are outside a lot and some rooms with hard floors would be pleasantly surprised at how good even a really mediocre mopping does when it's done often enough.

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.

Are there privacy issues with the data being exfiltrated?

I don't care if the CCP has my floorplan

"I don't care if they spy on my, I have nothing to hide."

What would they possibly do with my floorplan? It isn't like I am zuck where there might be risk of commandos breaking into my compound... Chances are that floorplan is in some city hall database that they already breached anyhow.

Same. I bought a roomba in covid and it's still kicking. No repairs at all just new brushes and filters when they get dirty.

Felt bad they went under as I would likely have purchased more of them forever. But maybe that's why they died? Kinda like appliances that last forever the company doesn't have financial incentives to make them last longer or are outcompeted by less reliable ones selling more often.

I have one I bought in 2008. My parents still use it. Replace batteries and filters. Works fine.

Gets stuck on cords and in corners. So does the one I bought in September 2025.

I see what you did there...

The top comment completely misses the point.

iRobot was remarkably innovative until they were enshittified decades before the term was coined.

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.

> 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.

There are no laws requiring break up of big companies!!

There are laws around breaking up monopolies, which is a completely different concept.

The way we used to enforce those laws before the mid-70s was much closer to “big companies get broken up” than it is now.

The modern standard for how and when we intervene is not necessarily the correct one.

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.

Which specific laws are you thinking of?

> 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.

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.

> They didn't because the purchase price would be lower

He said that alright, but what's his source of that information?

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.

> One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with.

That’s 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 wasn’t completely demolished in World War Two.

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.

Saying their arguments are bad but the dog ate your response isn't exactly convincing either.

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.

>>>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?

>"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?"

Feel free to use a word counter.

The post above yours has about 286 words after the sentence you quoted. Quite ironic for you to criticize the grandparent when you're being even lazier.

Here's how you can find the relevant comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.

What is the relationship between the first half of your comment and the commentary about W2 workers?

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.

That’s unhelpfully reductive: There are zero companies making smartphones in the US, too.

> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.

IOW, he doesn't share your partisan views.

Matt Stoller is one of those "left MAGA" grifters who is only trusted by the most ignorant and gullible fraction of either side (left or MAGA). No one with a clue has anything but contempt for his "intellectual" output.

Nothing in the response to my comment is remotely true ... it's all obvious projection.

> 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".

The ask for information on pretty much every big acquisition. How else do you expect them to decide if they should try to stop it or not?

"We are pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed transaction."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

We know the FTC blocked the deal. What is this quote supposed to be showing us?

The 'we' is doing a lot of work there. 'You' might know, but many do not and explicitly have different views. An example thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330028

Oops, I just assumed everyone knows who Lina Khan is and would infer the rest because I'm such a big fanboy!

I wasn’t aware. It’s kind of useful to imagine a world where those products and the backing of Amazon. I’m not familiar with the market, but I can imagine availability of cheap competitors was the proximate cause of this company’s demise.

You know Lina Khan lead FTC blocked the deal, but if you check the thread, huge amount of folks aren’t aware of this fact. As an owner of 2 iRobot Roomba I feel so “protected” now, they may become a brick or spy of a foreign company.

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.

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.

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 wasn’t great vacuum and got hung up on too much stuff).

Regular brushing at least once weekly. Husky owner here. 2 roombas 2 dysons

I just want one that removes the “gotta declutter all the floors and hide anything and everything that could possibly get stuck in the roller” prerequisite step completely. I’ve 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.

> 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 what’s the alternative to roller brush?

Yeah, what is the deal with roller brush design? I don't have pets but do have long hair and apparently it is not as firmly attached to my head as I'd like it to be.

With the Eufy I had the brush needed to be cleared of hair fairly often, and that clearing took a bit of work. Often I had to use a utility knife to cut the hair out.

My Roomba, on the other hand, almost never gets hair caught in the brushes, and if it does it easily pulls right off by hand.

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.

It could probably be vaguely useful in the kitchen/dining room/mudroom if I had pets/kids. As it is, a broom vac takes just a few minutes. Maybe if I had more day to day mess, I'd feel differently.

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.

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.

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.

Your point was most of my read on the article.

Yet the root problem seems structural: the misplaced incentives of the quarterly earnings-driven stock market. Short term gains most often win over long term innovation.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44XYQepBF7g

The patent expiry sealed the deal.

Why not let Amazon take a stab at turning things around, then? It's better that they fail? I don't get it.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

> Why the price would be lower?

Renegotiate the deal by threatening to walk away - or actually walking away[1] and buying the pieces from the bankruptcy sale.

1. Which Musk tried and failed to do when Twitter sued for specific performance. I suspect a company that's going out of business is far less fiesty.

But they can do that regardless of what arguments the company makes to the antitrust authorities.

If the buyer is publicly listed, they have to consider their own share price,that is - the perception of their shareholders. The buyer will be punished for overpaying for a company circling the drain, they will also be punished from waling away from purchasing a seemingly healthy company at a good price.

The buyer and purchaser have to agree on which of the 2 options they publicly present to their shareholders and regulators - Amazon wouldn't be fooled because they had access to the financials and had its own judgement on viability (which may not be material Amazon's plans). However, the approach would decide the corresponding offer, and typically wouldn't be a retrospective decision, but would lock-in the higher or lower from the start.

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.

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.

Apple == IBM?

Apple is innovating plenty.

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 Furman’s 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 “egregious and abusive use of shareholder capital” 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.

> Thing is, if you slash research

And if you dump your defence contracts you may have trouble paying for research.

I'd be interested in learning about how the US military uses Roombas (assuming it's not classified)

In the article it's mentioned. They have built robotic stuff to clear rubble for example.

Those vacuums are stronger than people realize.

Sucking taxpayer money into a black hole, of course.

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.

>There's no way to accomplish this now except to stay private.

cue all the lamentations about how evil private equity is.

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.

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.

https://media.irobot.com/2016-02-04-iRobot-Announces-Sale-of...

It's crazy that the Dodge brothers destroyed the company/shareholder relationship for every contemporary and future US-based corporation and then died.

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.

Here is where the pressure needs to be placed:

>To reverse this strategy, a more assertive antitrust regime is necessary, but it’s not enough. We also have to reduce the many other public levers of support for elevated returns on capital. Only then will it make sense for companies like iRobot to invest in robots instead of share buybacks.

Call your state senators and let them know that enforcing anti-trust legislation and undoing citizens united need to be the primary focus

Roomba screwed up for sure, but they found a way out with Amazon until US consumer "protection" shut it down.

"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal."

How did they shut it down?

"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from iRobot, in what’s known as a “second request” and an indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-invest...

IRobot says it was the EU which killed the deal: https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...

The article claims EU didn't challenge the deal, only requested information about the market and possible unfair practices.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

Preparing all the requested information can be expensive. It is likely enough to kill many deals.

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?

i don't know what information is ask for, or what format is needed but I would assume it all needs to be rewritten - likely censoring information not asked for they want to not share.

Last time France allowed a huge merger/acquisition without asking to read the books, it was Alstom/GE, and GE books were so cooked it isn't even funny. Lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of the tech edge got lost, and now China is close to be a market leader.

So personally I think that finance guys should move their head from their asses and allow for inquiries, because their lies and deceit are damaging the society they live in. Maybe we should hold board members and C-suite all responsible when books are cooked, and maybe, when they're proven trustworthy, the red tape might decrease.

The article subheading:

> Amazon's proposed acquisition of iRobot has no path to regulatory approval in the European Union ...

In other words, they didn’t shut it down.

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.

Indeed. Statement here: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

A routine request for information is not shutting down a merger and presenting it as such is not good faith communication.

So, that is common and doesn't mean they are going to shut down a deal. E.g., also in 2022 they made a "second request" for the Broadcom acquisition of VMWare and that one went through.

This is such a bad faith, and frankly dishonest take on the situation.

As you know, Khan’s FTC worried it wouldn’t be able to prevent Amazon’s 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.

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.

That's only an option if the FTC can rewind time. Can they?

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).

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.

If we’re arguing about strategic decisions made a decade ago in this context, aren’t 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 “Wall Street” is always wrong.

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?

That's not what a good job is

Thanks, that's very helpful.

I mean, read the article? That's what it's about.

...except it's not.

> 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

...or "owned and neglected by Amazon right now". I'm not confident Amazon can maintain their IoT stuff adequately. Take their Alexa stuff. They have been having large problems with the Alexa mobile apps for months now.

For example the device list often shows up as either empty or the devices say an error occurred if you try to use them. Sometimes repeatedly trying will finally succeed and then they all work at least until next time you use the app.

The back end knows about the devices, and you can operate them all by voice just fine, through the app or an Echo device, so it looks like they just screwed up something in the app.

When I first hit this it wasn't working for so long that I assumed it must be a problem just affecting me because if it was widespread surely they would have fixed it. Eventually I described it to an LLM and it gave me links to a whole bunch of discussion on Reddit and other forums of people having the same problem, spanning something like the last year.

The Chinese company buying them is a robot vacuum company, and was already a manufacturer and supplier for iRobot. As it currently stands I'm more confident that they can keep my Roomba working than Amazon can.

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.

Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268854

How Lina Khan Killed iRobot

> 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.

when and how did she do that exactly?

"On January 31, 2024, one of the FTC’s Commissioners spoke at an antitrust conference in Brussels and said the FTC had been prepared to block the transaction."

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/05012...

"We are pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed transaction... The Commission’s investigation revealed significant concerns about the transaction’s potential competitive effects. The FTC will not hesitate to take action in enforcing the antitrust laws to ensure that competition remains robust."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

"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."

https://www.investing.com/news/economy/amazon-roombaparent-i...

> not every company needs to do deep tech innovation, and not every company should.

Yet everyone complains how they got slashed by their competition, and that is primarily because they didn’t innovate. Their product wasn’t better.

> 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.

No, you fixate on 1% of the iRobot story. The real issue is that this wall-street mindset made the company a complete sell out, they squeezed every penny, stopped innovating, offshored manufacturing to China, and now they reaped the harvest of what they sowed.

Point a finger to Lina Khan and four of them point back. It’s the unsustainable economic games of the 1% that killed this company, just like many others.

> “In my trips to Wall Street,” Dyer told the panel, “one of my analyst friends took me to lunch one day and said, ‘Joe, you have to get iRobot out of the defense business. It’s killing your stock price.’ And I countered by saying ‘Well, what about the importance of DARPA and leading-edge technology? What about the stability that sometimes comes from the defense industry? What about patriotism?’ And his response was, ‘Joe, what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?’”

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?

What is the current AI/data center mega-boom if not forgoing short-term extraction for long-term value creation?

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.)

The stocks are inflated because Wall Street believes current $$$$$ capital investments will create massive long-term value!!

> 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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

As a lowly retail investor, I'm only investing in AI because everyone else is investing in AI. I hope for a greater fool to dump my AI stocks on before the music stops. I am sure plenty of Wall Street sees it the same way.

We're certainly seeing short term value at companies who grew profits by replacing workers with cheap AI tools. But the true cost of those AI tools is still being paid by investors, not customers. (Not to mention the indirect costs being paid by society, from the rising cost of RAM & electricity to global warming.)

In the long term these AI companies will need to raise their prices substantially if they're to break even. Will the value still be there for their customers when its no longer cheap?

And if AI puts enough people permanently out of work, the GDP will drop, leading to demand for any product made with AI dropping too. It is an industry that could eventually eat itself.

> What is the current AI/data center mega-boom

Short term extraction.

The long term value is in AI research not scaling LLMs.

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).

It's interesting that Rod Brooks has been erased from the history of Roomba. He's not even mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

I see him (Rodney) in both the Roomba and iRobot articles.

The Roomba is not in the Rodney Brooks article.

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)"

Outstanding article. Our current goals and incentives are not sustainable.

I don’t 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, it’s not Wall Street’s fault the government doesn’t pay iRobot enough for research (nor should it).

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.

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.

You should try reading the article, it mentions that too.

It only mentions a one sided view presuming an investor’s intentions. There is no numerical analysis on whether or not iRobot’s spending on various efforts was yielding or likely to yield a return.

“what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?”

This question, asked by the person wanting to not put capital into investing further in the company’s 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 I’m not sure what system of economics was on display in this case, but it doesn’t look like capitalism. Theft? That seems closer.

Rent extraction, beloved of economists from Smith to Marx.

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 I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances

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.

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.

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).

Did you read the article? Amazon wasn't "prevented" from acquiring, they decided against proceeding:

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.

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.

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

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.

> But maybe I’m 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.

Why aren't any American firms interested in buying it cheap?

Because Lina Khan will block it as long as iRobot still has value? Her entire vision is just destroy corporate values.

Linda Khan left the FTC in September 2024, so your statement I a bit outdated.

"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.

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".

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.

Wall Street actors almost universally love to describe the market as a singular entity, so they can hardly complain righteously.

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.

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.

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