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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#781

Post by numpad0 »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #591
jasonkester wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder why nobody has tried to beat the Chinese companies at their own game. The whole schtick is: take a product that people like, vertically integrate and drive down costs. This is like the purest form of capitalism.

The real whole shtick is run economy in closed cycle to keep currency weak. Or the good old 1930s trade bloc economy. They're not just good at optimizing costs, they charge appropriately in CNY and inappropriately in USD. Workers don't care about obscene undervaluation in USD so long that they have bacon on the table after few hours of work.

It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#782

Post by MangoToupe »

zdragnar wrote: post #274
p0pularopinion wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look. Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this. Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significan…

Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules. It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.

The WTO never did much to benefit anyone but capital anyway; I say China is humanity's champion here.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#783

Post by coldpie »

stogot wrote: post #779
coldpie wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all pretty hand wavey and abstract, not very convincing (for example, I'm pretty sure China is not committing a genocide in the US, and Western IP law is arguably not worth much respect anyway). I'm not saying China is without problems, I'm just saying they're less harmful to Americans than Amazon is.

You’re claiming that documented and active IP theft and anti-democracy and enemy-action doctrine is handwavy and better than a tax paying business that supports democracy and that is not trying to undermine the west? You’re wrong

I similarly can't understand how you can look at the US over the last 10-20 years and think the US's biggest threat is some country on the other side of the planet who makes the stuff that we ask them to make, and not the billionaires and megacorps who control every aspect of our economic and political system which directly lead to the situation we are in now. The call is coming from inside the house, man :)

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#784

Post by sersi »

rpcope1 wrote: post #469
foobarian wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promise didn't pan out for us. You have to prepare and cordon off the floor, and the unit gets stuck half the time. Somehow it's exactly the right height to get wedged under furniture.

My wife got one to try and automate away the vacuuming. We went through the same thing, and it still needs to be babysit anyways. For the sheer amount of time and frustration of basically all robot vacuums, it has been easier to just get a nice Kenmore upright bagged vacuum and do it yourself anyways (and the results are basically always way nicer).

We've had the Chinese dreame with valetudo (so fully disconnected from the cloud), it works honestly very well. Doesn't get stuck, avoids my son's toys rather effectively and just works. I run it when we leave home. There's honestly no reason why roomba didn't make something equivalent to the dreame, they could have competed with the Chinese manufacturers on feature and by allowing users to easily disconnect from the cloud. They didn't because the company was completely mismanaged and their products barely evolved.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#785

Post by qiqitori »

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…

> American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.

Why does China have a bunch of electronics companies? Because people outsourced all their manufacturing to China. So all non-China has left, barely, is the hardware design. Cool, so let's outsource that too? So all non-China has left is, oops?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#786

Post by Saline9515 »

tguvot wrote: post #728
Saline9515 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You fix this by doing a cycle of vacuuming first. Robots allow you to clean frequently to prevent large buildups. It's the same as if you were cleaning by hand. I have tiles as well and no dirty water marks.

i have robot running daily. it will never pick up 100% of everything. because if it would have picked up 100% there would be no need in mopping. when i did robot shopping year ago, based on reviews and feedback it (vacuum before mopping) doesn't always work and the more polished your floor is, the worst the outcome

No, mopping is not for dust, but rather for sweaty/greasy/sticky matter that accumulates and can't be recovered by vacuuming. This is why proper cleaning is vacuuming + mopping, and it was like this before the invention of the cleaning robot.

You can also mix a non-foaming detergent with the distilled water to have an even more thorough cleaning (or just ask the robot to pass more than once). Robot mops are typically rougher to compensate for the lack of detergent, though.

It's the same for professional car cleaning - it's done with distilled water. If what you said was true, it would be impossible to clean cars as they are much more polished than tiles.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#787

Post by AndrewKemendo »

mattmaroon wrote: post #647
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that an option I’m not aware of? Do chinese police even carry firearms? edit: most don’t ( https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries... ) So, given that, I would choose 100/100 times to deal with Chinese police over the US ICE/police murder squads if I had an option

No I was pointing out the absurdity of your comment. Cops are called to respond to violent crimes in America, Chinese people aren’t (presumably the response time would be far too long) so even if they were identical people, you’d expect a lot more police shootings than ones by Chinese citizens on the streets of America. The Chinese government may not need its law enforcement officers to carry guns (that’s great but t…

My dude I spied on the Chinese for a decade I know more about the Chinese than you’ll ever understand

Let me be clear, the Han don’t care about anybody but the Han that’s a fact. What they do to Tibetans, Uighurs and Muslims is horrible and those repressions shouldn’t exist.

However they pale and comparison into the historical horrific conditions of nonstop genocide from 1650 more or less until present day if you include the global war on terror and the modern prisoner slave market encoded into the constitution (13th amendment)

If you wanna go all the way back to the cultural revolution then absolutely fine but my argument there is going to be that’s no different than any of the culls that the United States or any other country have done. So they don’t get a pass but they aren’t worse

Ultimately all you have to do is put up the “death toll” from state action both inside the nation and outside the nation to compare numbers. I’ll let you go ahead and do that exercise.

No that the communist party has only ruled in China for less than 100 years but the same structure in America which has been completely depraved since the founders of the country were alive and actively shaping the politics of the US is coming up on 350 years ago.

I mean for Christ sake we bought the southern United States from France in order to maintain our slave plantations as the French were getting rid of all their slave holdings worldwide. And then after the Civil War which was supposed to solve that ethical burden they completely gutted the entire process of reconstruction in order to prevent the full completion of it because the population was so racist they did not want to do it. As a black person in America I will tell you the slave population in jails is higher than it ever was anywhere else.

If that’s not a disqualification on its own of any type of ethical foundations I don’t know what is.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#788

Post by secondcoming »

mrguyorama wrote: post #648
secondcoming wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.

So? The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US! On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places. Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things! People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymor…

I'm not American.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#789

Post by azemetre »

ch4s3 wrote: post #494
coldpie wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Enforcing anti-trust law is critical for healthy markets. Healthy markets support technological progress through competition.

How is Chinese market consolidation a healthier market outcome here?

It's not US government's job to help bad business leaders, they should do a better job of running their companies than using them as a slush fund.

This company would have probably flourished if it had workplace democracy but instead it was a centrally planned dictatorship and failed.

Maybe that is the real lesson here.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#790

Post by tguvot »

Saline9515 wrote: post #786
tguvot wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have robot running daily. it will never pick up 100% of everything. because if it would have picked up 100% there would be no need in mopping. when i did robot shopping year ago, based on reviews and feedback it (vacuum before mopping) doesn't always work and the more polished your floor is, the worst the outcome

No, mopping is not for dust, but rather for sweaty/greasy/sticky matter that accumulates and can't be recovered by vacuuming. This is why proper cleaning is vacuuming + mopping, and it was like this before the invention of the cleaning robot. You can also mix a non-foaming detergent with the distilled water to have an even more thorough cleaning (or just ask the robot to pass more than once). Robot mops are typically…

so it's going back to square 1: sweaty/grease/sticky matter not going to be picked up 100% by mop after it was diluted by water. distilled water or not distilled water.

this is why floor buffers exist. to buff the floor so it will be nice and shiny.

professional car cleaning usually made with deionized water. much easier than bringing distillery. but even with usual water on my car there will be usually no marks after wiping it with towel.

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