Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
141–150 of 213 posts
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#142Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#143Roombas 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.
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.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#144Roombas 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…
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?
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#145Hard 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
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#146To 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…
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#147This 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.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#148This 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.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
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.
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.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#150The 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…