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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.
From the article: Under a trade regime overseen by men like Furman, the company offshored production, thus teaching its future rivals in China how to make robot cleaners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"We were prevented from building a proper Windows phone because we already had such large market share on desktop, and already had an anti-trust against us so our hands were tied"
It's just an argument that creates a Kafka trap
Earlier 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...
"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".
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.
> In the mid-2010s, during Furman’s tenure running economic policy under Obama, the company sold its defense business, offshored production, and slashed research, a result of pressure from financiers on Wall Street.
> Mesdag engaged in a proxy fight to wrest control of the company from its engineering founders, accusing one of its founders and iRobot Chairman Colin Angle of engaging in “egregious and abusive use of shareholder capital” for investing in research.
Yes Roomba sucks at this point. We get it. Thing is, if you slash research... that's what eventually becomes of your product.
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.
> “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?
(I'm also not sure if putting a significant % of the population out of work will create long term value to society.)
As you know, Khan’s FTC worried it wouldn’t be able to prevent Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in court, so instead it dragged out approval, which it never granted, while continuously threatening to block.
Simultaneously, her FTC openly worked with the EU to convince the EU to use its more expansive antitrust regime to get the EU to block the deal. That dragged the shot clock for the deal lower and lower (deals have backend dates contractually agreed to, after which the parties no longer are committed to work towards closing the deal and can walk).
Even as the EU was challenging the deal and the shot clock was approaching zero, her FTC was STILL not granting approval and threatened to block and drag it out another year in U.S. courts, all the way until Amazon threw in the towel.
After the deal collapsed, the FTC celebrated and took credit.
The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now.
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.