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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

#201

Post by sleight42 »

daft_pink wrote: post #197
km144 wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Missing the point.

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.

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

#202

Post by sleight42 »

Grosvenor wrote: post #37
km144 wrote: post #6

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.

Yet they were about far more than just vacuums!

In the 2000s, no one was doing what they were doing.

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

#203

Post by sleight42 »

MarkusQ wrote: post #79

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.

Your point was most of my read on the article.

Yet the root problem seems structural: the misplaced incentives of the quarterly earnings-driven stock market. Short term gains most often win over long term innovation.

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

#204

Post by dustinmr »

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 have one I bought in 2008. My parents still use it. Replace batteries and filters. Works fine.

Gets stuck on cords and in corners. So does the one I bought in September 2025.

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

#205

Post by Jaygles »

malvim wrote: post #68
observationist wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much difference was made by the Chinese competitors being able to use whatever IP they wanted, and Roomba being constrained by law and licensing, and not being able to enforce their own IP? What were the consequences of having to engage with China for manufacturing, effectively giving them the capability to clone any R&D on the fly, without having to figure things out themselves? How much did regulation and taxat…

No one ever forced any company to work with China. They all went to China over decades because it was cheaper and made more profits, knowing full well there’d be technological transfer since it was always China’s goal and even explicit in contracts and agreements. 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 coul…

> No one ever forced any company to work with China.

"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

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

#207

Post by daft_pink »

sleight42 wrote: post #201
daft_pink wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Missing the point. 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.

It just says that they sold off their defense robot division and launched a consumer products company.

They just aren’t consumer centric. The neato was so much better than the Roomba and that was so long ago

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

#208

Post by asdff »

e40 wrote: post #195
asdff wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't care if the CCP has my floorplan
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