131–140 of 213 posts
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.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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…
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 alread…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 alread…
Saying their arguments are bad but the dog ate your response isn't exactly convincing either.
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.
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.
Not solely because of their size, specifically.
But size is coincident with attributes that are in fact anti-competitive.
> “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,…
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).
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?