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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

#191

Post by crazygringo »

satellite2 wrote: post #179
crazygringo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#192

Post by crazygringo »

ajkjk wrote: post #185
crazygringo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#193

Post by ghaff »

cameldrv wrote: post #143
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.

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…

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.

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

#194

Post by fluidcruft »

rootusrootus wrote: post #21
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.

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

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

#195

Post by e40 »

asdff wrote: post #146
throw-qqqqq wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

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

#196

Post by BurningFrog »

CPLX wrote: post #136
BurningFrog wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no laws requiring break up of big companies!! There are laws around breaking up monopolies, which is a completely different concept.

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?

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

#197

Post by daft_pink »

km144 wrote: post #6
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.

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.

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.

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

#198

Post by hashstring »

crazygringo wrote: post #67

> 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 spa…

> 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.

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

#199

Post by overfeed »

gizmondo wrote: post #186
overfeed wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#200

Post by sleight42 »

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.

The top comment completely misses the point.

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

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