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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They just aren’t consumer centric. The neato was so much better than the Roomba and that was so long ago
In the 2000s, no one was doing what they were doing.
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.
Gets stuck on cords and in corners. So does the one I bought in September 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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."
I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.
iRobot was remarkably innovative until they were enshittified decades before the term was coined.