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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#531

Post by IAmBroom »

tguvot wrote: post #71
dzhiurgis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> non-mop vacuum Such a good point. Vacuum wars website has no way to filter out vacuums without mop (my house is mostly carpet, I do want a good product but they are all with mops nowadays). It's such a common issue with sites like this. It's either all products or products WITH this feature. No way to find products WITHOUT this feature. Anyway quite happy with my Mova which is a rebranded Dreame.

my house is actually mostly tiles/hardwood (at least areas that are accessible for roomba). but i want it just to be vacuumed. polished tiles will always have some water marks after washing and require pass with floor buffer to buff it out. i also don't want to deal with with clean/dirty water (yeah, i know that are now few models that you can hookup to drain/water supply. but it's not exactly trivial to arrange in c…

> what i really want, is dock integrated with central vacuum.

I have two dogs that shed HEAVILY. I fear to even turn my robovacuum on, since getting them.

I NEED THIS!!!

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#532

Post by ragazzina »

jasonkester wrote: post #502
anymouse123456 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced. Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I guess Rodney Br…

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world. As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will…

>I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.

Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#533

Post by basilgohar »

cs702 wrote: post #254

According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a] Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too. The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobil…

I appreciate the alarm. However, I don't know if we should feel China having this is less safe than an America, European, or other country. I think we have seen that whatever alleged rights to privacy and data protection we have are becoming more-and-more meaningless as the corporatocracy of the US manifests itself more.

I mean to say, this should not be any more alarming than if, say, Oracle, Microsoft, or Amazon bought Roomba vs. any random Chinese company.

I say this not to say that China has no human rights issues to worry about, but rather, that the US and other Western countries have just as many concerning human rights issues (including privacy, freedom of speech suppression, and police state) that we're just more familiar with and used to, compared to the Other that is China.

Basically, 6 of one, a half dozen of the other.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#534

Post by IAmBroom »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #510

People worried about Chinese ownership of their Roombas, but completely OK with Alexa and Google devices in their homes.

I don't want lead in my tapwater, but regularly pour poisonous liquids over ice for drinking.

Not all dangerous things are the same thing.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#535

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

jasonkester wrote: post #502
anymouse123456 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced. Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I guess Rodney Br…

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous. I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world. As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will…

Isn't that basically the reason patents exist? If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#536

Post by Shacklz »

aurareturn wrote: post #142
simonjgreen wrote: post #81

This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.

It is complacency or is China just accelerating? It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China. Ford themselves said…

> It is complacency or is China just accelerating?

Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#537

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Aurornis wrote: post #476
DevX101 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad it was blocked. Amazon gives law enforcement and ICE access to Ring camera footage. I have no doubt they’d eventually be letting cops spy inside our homes with these vacuum cleaners.

So you’d prefer we send access to China? The comment above was pointing out that we blocked the acquisition that would have kept it in the country.

The US government is more likely to be a threat to my personal freedom than the Chinese.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#538

Post by dylan604 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #522
dylan604 wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough, but when people are having sexy time, they are not really likely to be running the roomba. Having that thing running is the opposite of sexy. When the thing is parked on the base station, it is facing the wall. So exactly how frequently do people think a roomba is running to be capturing all of this explicit footage? To be clear, I'm not saying footage can't be captured, but some o…

> they are not really likely to be running the roomba. You seem to assume that they have somehow physically disabled access to any kind of remote activation. That seems extremely unlikely given the overall selling points of the roomba. The roomba doesn't have to "run" in order to be using its microphone, which as noted is likely the more valuable data acquisition source here.

Maybe read the comment I was replying to before replying with something unrealted? "I'll wage a campaign to flood the Internet with pics of your half dressed wife unless you....".

Turning on a microphone is not going to capture the required pics for this blackmail campaign.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#539

Post by IAmBroom »

wewxjfq wrote: post #336
jack_tripper wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too. Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west. Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all mea…

> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate". Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany w…

miki123211 made almost that exact claim in a sibling comment to yours, and is presumably a westerner.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#540

Post by Cyph0n »

IAmBroom wrote: post #507
root_axis wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, the new company could say "turn on microphone for all vacuums in the DC area and send transcripts to us" The old company could have done the same thing. I recognize that China is a u.s. geopolitical adversary, but when it comes to politics domestic adversaries are just as ruthless.

The old company wasn't a domestic political adversary; it was a capitalist corporation. I'm not making moral comparisons; I'm just saying that the motivations of the PRRC and Coca-Cola are different.

It was a capitalist corporation beholden to demands by domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

And just because a corporation is based in China doesn’t automatically make it some kind of government managed communist entity.

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