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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#671

Post by margalabargala »

kqr wrote: post #630
margalabargala wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're really the first, you should be able to get about a 20 year head start. That's an opinion, and not one I agree with. If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades. Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example. It's asinine…

> Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.

Oh, I know.

The fact that it takes decades for that to come about is harmful to society.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#672

Post by ralferoo »

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.

Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.

I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.

In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#674

Post by NewsaHackO »

Xelbair wrote: post #223
moooo99 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would happily overpay 3-4x for the good vacuum without the cloud and the need to do some hacking with valetudo, with an official service and support for the device. Yet nobody is willing to take the money. They'd rather go bankrupt.. I feel like you are over estimating market demand based on your own preferences. Been there, done that. Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybers…

>Most techies under estimate how little normal folks care about privacy, cybersecurity and stuff like that. No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.. and there's this weird idea of owning thing you were sold, i know - its' a bit weird. Just like when you go buy some food you don't have to…

>No, we just think that this security nightmare should be regulated, and companies should be forced to keep sane security standards and not abuse data gathered from users.

But that is orthogonal to the goals of many governments, as I'm sure they have access to most of them either by official or unofficial channels/backdoors.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#675

Post by abustamam »

I got a Roomba Combo J7+ (auto empty, mopping) a few years back. Spent $700+ on it. A few years into ownership it ran over cat vomit, got it warranty replaced. And then just recently it decided to stop going home — it makes its way to the dock but stops shy of actually charging. I could get some module replaced but it's no longer under warranty, and I really don't want to deal with a dying company.

I've been seeing a lot of ads and talk about Roborock, and ChatGPT highly suggested that I upgrade to a Roborock Qrevo based on my household needs. I just don't want to spend $700+ on a new vac that will brick itself in a few years. Anyone have any recommendations? I see a lot of Roborock recommendations in the comments, but also Dream and Eufy so now I'm just overwhelmed.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#676

Post by GenerWork »

coldpie wrote: post #576
qwerpy wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American with a strong personal interest (kids) in keeping the country strong and competitive in the future, it seems bizarre to cheer for our largest adversary to gain advantages over us.

I also would have preferred to keep it in the country, but the fact is that Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is. Hence "Of those two choices... I pick China." I would love for there to have been more than those two options, but this is where we ended up after decades of not enforcing anti-trust law, thanks in no small part to Amazon.

>Amazon does more harm and is a larger threat to Americans and your children than China is

Yeah, I'm going to need some examples as to how Amazon is worse than China.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#677

Post by lionkor »

kleiba wrote: post #413
lionkor wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of modern appliances connect to the Internet, have multiple computers inside that need updates, maintenance, maybe subscription payments, and that need to phone home everything they see, hear and do.

Huh, why is that? Admittedly, I only own older appliances, but somehow they don't require updates. Subscription payments? For household devices you own ? I suspect "phoning home" is a good incentive for manufacturers, but why would anyone buy such a device then?

Not buying them means usually having a good understanding what "smart" means, or why having an app as a requirement is silly. The mean consumer has no idea what any of that means, they sometimes even lack the technical vocabulary needed to put into words what annoys them.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#678

Post by margalabargala »

Cyph0n wrote: post #540
IAmBroom wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you live in the US, it is better for you if the home robots with microphones are controlled by the US than the US' geopolitical rival.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#679

Post by echelon »

rockemsockem wrote: post #668
echelon wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so angry at this. I want Amazon and Google to be broken up, but not in this category or along with these lines. This wasn't going to create some household appliance monopoly. Amazon has plenty of competition, and Roomba was already behind the curve. Now America is out of this market category. A category we invented. This felt like our last toehold in consumer robotics.

Maybe one day you'll realize the contradictions in this post and think about how you cheered for things that led to this. I doubt it though

There are no contractions when you look at how unfair market advantages are being played to harm healthy incumbents.

Amazon helped dismantle the entertainment industry. Full stop.

It doesn't mean Amazon's home appliance and home automation product lines or platforms are harming competition. There is robust competition in this sector.

Amazon offers "free" entertainment, subsidizes the cost of series that rival HBO's Game of Thrones production costs using unrelated business units, market those movies and shows for free in the Amazon app, on their website, emblazoned on their delivery vehicles and on every item of packaging. Other companies have to pay hundreds of millions to match this. There is eyeball opportunity cost for consumers, and Amazon is flooding the zone with their free wares. This is a markedly unfair advantage.

Amazon moves US union jobs overseas and trains up low cost crews in Eastern Europe. They buy up once successful studios on the cheap because they all tried to catch up with the stupid steaming game.

Theatrical box office receipts are the biggest revenue driver for studios by a wide margin. Individually, studios could have countered Netflix and Disney by pulling licensing. Amazon in the mix threatened this, because they had existing content licenses and also controlled home media releases. The studios felt cornered by tech giants basically salting the earth. They had to give up healthy Box Office proceeds and exclusivity to chase streaming and defend their access to eyeballs as best they could.

You've heard of Disney eating the mid market film? Amazon ate everything. It left no oxygen in the fish bowl.

Amazon's entertainment business needs to be spun off.

All of that can be true and completely unrelated to Roomba. Nothing should have prevented their purchase of iRobot. That was insanity.

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