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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#731

Post by kleiba »

IAmBroom wrote: post #516
kleiba wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Dunno, but welcome to the world post-IOT. You've apparently been off the web and out of stores for over a decade. Home Depot sells a bluetooth-connected shower head (just the head - it doesn't turn the water on). There are smart thermostats that are wifi connected so you can change the temperature of your house from anywhere in the world... for reasons...

You're right, I'm trying hard to practice digital detox as much as I can. Unfortunately, for job and family reasons I cannot give up an internet connection at home, but I have never owned a mobile phone in my life.

It often feels strange when I peak out my head into the real world as it exists today.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#732

Post by imp0cat »

maxglute wrote: post #664
trinix912 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, but my experience with Roomba has been that it picks up far less than 80% of the dirt, I'd say more around 50%. I can just use a classic vacuum once a week and actually do a good job, plus not have to worry about a noisy robot pulling cabled stuff of my desk. Perhaps these Chinese ones actually do a good job? iRobot hasn't really done anything about that for quite a while so I'm not at all surprised by th…

TBH after a while I optimized things around robovac, or tidiness levels. I have hardwood floors, woven carpets, just stuff where vacs pick thing sup very effectively. I don't know if Chinese ones are any better in terms of performance, suction levels only matter when you're on carpet and then it heavily depends how worn out or well maintained your brush head is which is where cheap consumables start to matter. For me…

    how worn out or well maintained your brush head i
This. Especially if you try different suplliers, the quality can vary wildly.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#733

Post by ErroneousBosh »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #621
mensetmanusman wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.

Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA? People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world

Manufacturer of what, exactly, though?

What do you export? What do you sell?

Food? Nope, illegal in most of the world.

Cars? Nope, uncompetitive in most of the world. "High end" American cars lack even basic features fitted to poverty-spec cars in the EU, like heated windscreens.

Computers? I'm typing this on a computer assembled in Scotland onto a Latvian-made chassis using a Chinese-made motherboard populated with Korean memory chips and an Israeli microprocessor.

What does the US actually make and sell, any more?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#734

Post by CamperBob2 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #643
CamperBob2 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA? People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

>Who is the Chinese Intel? Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM and RiscV chips. SMIC being a foundry. > The Chinese Microsoft? Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance. >The Chinese Boeing? Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets. >The Chinese NVIDIA? Huawei makes AI GPUs. >People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could…

If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?

Because it's easier than actually trying, as witnessed by this very story.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#735

Post by expedition32 »

bell-cot wrote: post #319
expedition32 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that we are running into the same problem that the British had with China in the 19th century: China doesn't need or want anything from the West, they do not trust the West and they certainly do not want to rely on the West. The last time the British came up with the ingenuous opium plan. But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.

Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with…

I am not blaming the Western powers at all and neither did the communists. China was weak and they only had themselves to blame for it.

And of course the Chinese don't give a shit about Western interests. It is the duty of any Chinese government to take care of their own first.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#736

Post by margalabargala »

mattthebaker wrote: post #725
margalabargala wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I know. The fact that it takes decades for that to come about is harmful to society.

You would prefer the inventor to be basically ensured of financial destruction and disincentivized in the first place, sounds great for society.

Skill issue. That just sounds like you're bad at inventing things and running businesses.

Lots of places sell unique/novel things that are not patented, successfullyn

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#737

Post by starryex »

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…

Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders.

You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.

Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.

So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.

You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.

I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#738

Post by kqr »

margalabargala wrote: post #671
kqr wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree. I'd assume that's a holdover from a time when innovation moved slower.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#739

Post by lossyalgo »

SoftTalker wrote: post #585
IAmBroom wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your" here means "anyone". The inside of a lawmaker's house? A general's? A CEO's? Why would anyone ever want insider information, including possible blackmail evidence, from them?

People like that have a cleaning service, they don't do their own housework. And ironically, the cleaning service is far better equipped to plant surveillance devices or exfiltrate information than a robot vacuum gadget.

Why not both?

Also I would assume it's a lot more dangerous and expensive to send someone in when you can just put an innocuous robot into a room which has cameras and microphones that can watch + listen 24/7 and auto-recharges when the battery is low (unlike surveillance devices).

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