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Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

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Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#121

Post by macNchz »

throw-qqqqq wrote: post #102
daft_pink wrote: post #5

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.

> 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…

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.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#122

Post by throwaway382948 »

ajkjk wrote: post #108
throwaway382948 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ac…

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.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#123

Post by enraged_camel »

echelon wrote: post #36
ghaff wrote: post #22

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 le…

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.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#124

Post by BurningFrog »

themafia wrote: post #110
arjie wrote: post #90

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 F…

> 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"…

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

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

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#125

Post by phantasmish »

BurningFrog wrote: post #124
themafia wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

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.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#126

Post by [deleted] »

arjie wrote: post #90

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 F…

[deleted]

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#127

Post by mh- »

4nonverbal-alit wrote: post #82
bogwog wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#129

Post by avianlyric »

arjie wrote: post #90

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 F…

> 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.

Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

#130

Post by ineedasername »

“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.

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