Hard 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
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Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
31–40 of 213 posts
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#32"Wall Street" is one entity, which first ruined the Roomba, then wanted to buy it, then blamed Lina Khan for not being allowed to buy it. Makes sense.
It is a single entity that contains multitudes. Some of those multitudes have contradictory intentions.
Just like you. When it happens to a person we call it "cancer".
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#33Hard 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
Did you read the article? Amazon wasn't "prevented" from acquiring, they decided against proceeding: > The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.
Khan had already accused them of abusing monopoly power and filed a lawsuit against them, and had a history of blocking acquisitions. At this time she also had a lawsuit in place seeking to undo the nearly decade old acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp.
The smart thing to do in that environment isn't to push the issue so that years later someone can't write that there wasn't an official challenge. It's to read the room and abandon the deal.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#34Roomba screwed up for sure, but they found a way out with Amazon until US consumer "protection" shut it down.
"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal." How did they shut it down?
"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from iRobot, in what’s known as a “second request” and an indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials."
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-invest...
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#35To 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.
Did your Roombas also yelled in the middle of the night "PLEASE CHARGE ROOMBA!!!" every few minutes with no way to disable that behavior?
I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#36Roombas 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 lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills. The Anker team nails user friendliness and design, though.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#37To 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.
That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#38> “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,…
What is the current AI/data center mega-boom if not forgoing short-term extraction for long-term value creation?
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal." How did they shut it down?
"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from iRobot, in what’s known as a “second request” and an indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials." https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-invest...
IRobot says it was the EU which killed the deal: https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...
Re: Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal." How did they shut it down?
"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from iRobot, in what’s known as a “second request” and an indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials." https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-invest...
In other words, they didn’t shut it down.