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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

#61

Post by orwin »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #39
xnx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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-...

The article claims EU didn't challenge the deal, only requested information about the market and possible unfair practices.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

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

#63

Post by bluGill »

orwin wrote: post #61
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRobot says it was the EU which killed the deal: https://media.irobot.com/2024-01-29-Amazon-and-iRobot-agree-...

The article claims EU didn't challenge the deal, only requested information about the market and possible unfair practices. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

Preparing all the requested information can be expensive. It is likely enough to kill many deals.

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

#64

Post by azurezyq »

observationist wrote: post #58
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.

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…

what law and licensing prevented iRobot to adopt Lidar? Given Lidar is used everywhere already.

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

#65

Post by drob518 »

echelon wrote: post #36
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.

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 le…

Which does best with pets? We have a German shepherd that sheds like crazy. We vacuum every week and it will often fill a Dyson canister vac. We empty it every time we vacuum. We had a Roomba back in 2002 or so, but it was little more than a novelty (just wasn’t great vacuum and got hung up on too much stuff).

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

#67

Post by crazygringo »

> 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 space robots is fun and cool, but if it's not producing profit or clearly leading to better consumer products that make money, then it's not the right company to be doing it. Plenty of other companies will do it better -- it makes sense to have one set of companies relying on grants and defense contracts that innovate and that do fundamental research and aren't taking investor money, and another set of companies that take lots of investor money and focus on consumer products without expensive R&D. The idea that they have to be the same companies is silly.

The real story here is not about shutting down R&D -- that makes sense. 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.

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

#68

Post by malvim »

observationist wrote: post #58
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.

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 could be real players in tech, or didn’t care because short-term profit was more attractive.

So it was profits then, and if you’re asking “what sort of VC deals were they shackled by”, it’s profits now. So the point of the article still stands, Wall Street screwed them over.

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

#69

Post by malvim »

like_any_other wrote: post #41
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.

> better chinese competitors. 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.

* Surprised Pikachu face *

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

#70

Post by fellowniusmonk »

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.

Explore vs exploit?

Let's run an expierement where we just run exploit forever, let's restrucute the private sector, our countries moral baselines and eventually our executive leadership to be maximally exploitive, lets do that for about 45 years and see where it lands us -Some greed is good guys in the 80s probably.

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