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.
I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse!
We’re had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer.
Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing - I’ve never had others - but I love my Roomba.
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.
I had an ancient-ish Roomba (620, 11 years ago). The repairability was amazing. This was from back when there was little competition, but just 2 years ago I could still get every part replaced. Only screws, nothing else. It was beautiful. I got a new vacuum/mop now, vastly better functionality, in exchange for the cloud, but I'm glad my old one lives one at my parents.
I've read it's way worse nowadays, but if they stayed at their quality from back then, I'd have probably paid more for an offline workable repairable vacuum.
That's a good reminder I need to go track down my roborock, it got stuck somewhere again. There's a map thankfully which helps me figure out where to look.
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 taxation and red tape play into Roomba's inability to compete?
What sort of VC deals were they shackled by, in order to siphon off the data and abuse it for third party marketing, and other forms of enshittification?
There's a lot that American companies have been held back by. Some of it is actually good, consumer protective and well crafted, but it won't work if you allow other players in the same market to ignore the regulations and restrictions without consequences. Other policy is just stupid and self destructive, and other policies border on malignant, deliberately giving foreign companies significant advantages, directly and indirectly, without any other purpose.
American companies are way too easily forced into a race to the bottom dynamic, resulting in failure and huge wastes of money and effort.
The article makes the case that iRobot mismanaged their business at the behest of investors. Suppose one grants that this mismanagement occurred[0]. Then years into the mismanagement, Amazon offers to buy them. At this point, whatever path the company has been doomed to by mismanagement has already been taken.
In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made. So the FTC decisions must then be seen in this light. Therefore, the case made by this article is made in the context that a dominant player in an industry has made decisions that slowly but surely doom them and seeing the imminent doom, they have found an acquirer who might be able to rescue them.
The FTC is operating in a universe conditional on iRobot already having done what they've done. Consequently, even if you can blame iRobot for getting into the situation, you must also blame the FTC for closing off their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off to the Chinese.
As for the other thing about neither the FTC nor the EU actually bringing any proceedings against Amazon or iRobot and simply requesting information: this seems either naïve or a misrepresentation of how governments act to end deals. It's not that convincing to me that organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies are "just asking for information".
One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with. They employ the same tactics. Every immigrant knows to be rightfully fearful of the white, pink, blue, and yellow slips and the RFE notices they receive. A simple "Request For Evidence". A common strategy back home in India, too.
I suppose the reason those in the West are less aware of these things is that the standard bureaucracy mostly works if you're a domestic W-2 employee. Interactions with the government are few and generally functional. So they come to believe that the government is a highly honest machine: if it asks for X, it does not indicate anything more than a request for X. Those interacting with the more politicised parts of Western government find that they strategically employ the usual tactics that Indian bureaucracies wield routinely at the lowest level.
Overall, therefore, I don't find this convincing. Looking at the other things that Matt Stoller writes, I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.
0: Businesses are hard. You operate in the fog of war. We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.
> closing off their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off to the Chinese.
There was only one escape route? And it happened to be the one they selected themselves? That seems dubious.
> organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies
We literally have laws which _require_ them to do this. This isn't ideological targeting it's the consequence of the "due care clause" of the constitution. You should ask why previous iterations of the FTC have ignored this responsibility not why the one in question actually tried to live up to it.
> A simple "Request For Evidence".
These are publicly traded corporations not hapless individuals.
> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.
You've tried to obscure yours but I suspect the same thing of you.
> You operate in the fog of war.
This is goalpost shifting to the level of propaganda. You operate in a market. If you fail your assets will be auctioned off. The death of a corporation is a natural consequence of the system we've developed. It's required. It caries none of the weight of the death of an individual or of war.
> We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.
> In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made.
This seems contradictory. We could easily be telling a different tale if the 2010s played out differently; however, as you say, one cannot go back.
He does address the issue. He said there are provisions that allowed the merger if iRobot had admitted they were on the verge of bankruptcy. They didn't because the purchase price would be lower, hence less for shareholders and the CEO, etc wouldn't have big payoffs. In a word, greed.
> As for the other thing about neither the FTC nor the EU actually bringing any proceedings against Amazon or iRobot and simply requesting information: this seems either naïve or a misrepresentation of how governments act to end deals. It's not that convincing to me that organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies are "just asking for information".
The ask for information on pretty much every big acquisition. How else do you expect them to decide if they should try to stop it or not?
> One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with.
That’s probably because both the US and Indian systems of government and state bureaucracies both originated in the UK (with significant alterations, but still fundamentally forks of the UK systems). Even chunks of the EU bureaucracy are based on UK customs and rules in places, a consequence of the UK being the only Western European country that wasn’t completely demolished in World War Two.
Matt Stoller is often just trivially wrong. Like his arguments, and often "facts", rarely survive any sort of even mild scrutiny.
At one point i wrote a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of where either his facts or his arguments were just wrong, for like 10 of his articles, but i eventually gave up.
He doesn't even really try. I just decided i'm not the target audience. The target audience is either people who already agree with Matt Stoller and want to feel like they are right, or people who can't be bothered to do even a trivial amount of research.
If we look just at 2022, then allowing the Chinese to foreclose on iRobot vs Amazon buying it is basically just a question of who owns the name "Roomba"; there were zero companies making robot vacuums in the US, and the result is still zero companies doing so.
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.
I have one and it's OK for my kitchen with hardwood floors. I have a lot of stairs in my house. In a couple of places, there are just one or two stairs going up or down between rooms, but obviously the Roomba can't do it. Because of that, it's based in the kitchen and mostly stays there. With a bunch of little kids, it's quicker than sweeping the floor every night, and I just keep the cords out of its way.
If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my knowledge.
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 lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills. The Anker team nails user friendliness and design, though.
In many cases (I suspect this is one of them) there is room for multiple bad guys. Why couldn't the FTC, Roomba Management, Wall Street, China, etc. all be at fault? Seems like it fits the evidence nicely.
Maybe this is naive on my part but I find an argument like "the EU and FTC raised their metaphorical eyebrows at us and so we had to fold rather than merge" sort of pathetic.
I think the idea of Amazon buying Roomba causing monopoly concerns is kinda weird. But I also think it's absurd for anyone to blame the FTC for this. Amazon had enough leverage and money to take on the FTC over this, and probably could have made the FTC look laughable in the process, if they pushed antitrust. The fact that they didn't says everything about the actual value of Roomba.
Yet the root problem seems structural: the misplaced incentives of the quarterly earnings-driven stock market. Short term gains most often win over long term innovation.
One thing I keep repeating is that Roomba subreddit was managed by the company and would ban people for life is they were to share any bad experiences or anything negative about the product.
This is a fantastic video essay on iRobot's strategy/leadership mistakes. The company was distracted and stubbornly out of tune with what consumers wanted:
This is literally what's happening to Apple right now. Instead of focusing on innovation and research, they're just skimming their 30%. Works out great for the share price until something like LLMs come along, and oops you have no innovation muscle left.
Not every company needs to participate in making llms. It isn't like apple consumers are going to ignore the smell that keeps them from android and pc and samsung headphones currently.
A huge fraction of the knee-jerk reactions here seem to miss the key point that the post is trying to get across:
> In the mid-2010s, during Furman’s tenure running economic policy under Obama, the company sold its defense business, offshored production, and slashed research, a result of pressure from financiers on Wall Street.
> Mesdag engaged in a proxy fight to wrest control of the company from its engineering founders, accusing one of its founders and iRobot Chairman Colin Angle of engaging in “egregious and abusive use of shareholder capital” for investing in research.
Yes Roomba sucks at this point. We get it. Thing is, if you slash research... that's what eventually becomes of your product.
This is what's wrong with investing overall: 1Q future blindness.
We'd have almost nothing if it weren't for university partnerships and corporate R&D way back when. There's no way to accomplish this now except to stay private.
Their research wasn't on vacuum cleaners. It was building robots for the military and space. That's exactly what investors were complaining about -- the research wasn't leading to better vacuum cleaners. It was a distraction and not what investors wanted their money being used for.
It's crazy that the Dodge brothers destroyed the company/shareholder relationship for every contemporary and future US-based corporation and then died.
>To reverse this strategy, a more assertive antitrust regime is necessary, but it’s not enough. We also have to reduce the many other public levers of support for elevated returns on capital. Only then will it make sense for companies like iRobot to invest in robots instead of share buybacks.
Call your state senators and let them know that enforcing anti-trust legislation and undoing citizens united need to be the primary focus
This is such a bad faith, and frankly dishonest take on the situation.
As you know, Khan’s FTC worried it wouldn’t be able to prevent Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in court, so instead it dragged out approval, which it never granted, while continuously threatening to block.
Simultaneously, her FTC openly worked with the EU to convince the EU to use its more expansive antitrust regime to get the EU to block the deal. That dragged the shot clock for the deal lower and lower (deals have backend dates contractually agreed to, after which the parties no longer are committed to work towards closing the deal and can walk).
Even as the EU was challenging the deal and the shot clock was approaching zero, her FTC was STILL not granting approval and threatened to block and drag it out another year in U.S. courts, all the way until Amazon threw in the towel.
After the deal collapsed, the FTC celebrated and took credit.
The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now.
The point is that "sold to Amazon" or "sold to chinese competitors" being the only options is a false narrative. There was also the "do a good job" option which is being conveniently omitted by people who want to blame the FTC.
> The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now
...or "owned and neglected by Amazon right now". I'm not confident Amazon can maintain their IoT stuff adequately. Take their Alexa stuff. They have been having large problems with the Alexa mobile apps for months now.
For example the device list often shows up as either empty or the devices say an error occurred if you try to use them. Sometimes repeatedly trying will finally succeed and then they all work at least until next time you use the app.
The back end knows about the devices, and you can operate them all by voice just fine, through the app or an Echo device, so it looks like they just screwed up something in the app.
When I first hit this it wasn't working for so long that I assumed it must be a problem just affecting me because if it was widespread surely they would have fixed it. Eventually I described it to an LLM and it gave me links to a whole bunch of discussion on Reddit and other forums of people having the same problem, spanning something like the last year.
The Chinese company buying them is a robot vacuum company, and was already a manufacturer and supplier for iRobot. As it currently stands I'm more confident that they can keep my Roomba working than Amazon can.
I think that the difficulty is that Chinese companies both don't respect IP, but also move much faster than U.S. companies in the consumer electronics space. Part of the speed advantage is being physically close, linguistically close, and culturally close to the factories that are actually making the products, but there are other advantages as well.
> 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.
> not every company needs to do deep tech innovation, and not every company should.
Yet everyone complains how they got slashed by their competition, and that is primarily because they didn’t innovate. Their product wasn’t better.
> 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.
No, you fixate on 1% of the iRobot story. The real issue is that this wall-street mindset made the company a complete sell out, they squeezed every penny, stopped innovating, offshored manufacturing to China, and now they reaped the harvest of what they sowed.
Point a finger to Lina Khan and four of them point back. It’s the unsustainable economic games of the 1% that killed this company, just like many others.
> “In my trips to Wall Street,” Dyer told the panel, “one of my analyst friends took me to lunch one day and said, ‘Joe, you have to get iRobot out of the defense business. It’s killing your stock price.’ And I countered by saying ‘Well, what about the importance of DARPA and leading-edge technology? What about the stability that sometimes comes from the defense industry? What about patriotism?’ And his response was, ‘Joe, what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?’”
I find this article a pretty compelling critique of the extractive incentives of Wall Street and a good argument for government stepping in from time to time to adjust those incentives. Where is the societal good in the engine of capitalism prioritizing short-term extraction over long-term value creation?
It's also wrong to think that company performance has anything to do with stock prices nowadays, anyway. Look at Oracle, supposedly an established company with a predictable runway for future earnings, jumping 40% (40%!) and then shedding that jump over the following months.
Or... wait for it... Gamestop. Not just what happened in 2021. What happened in 2024. What's happening now. (Compare its market cap to its cash, and then how it compares to competitors, and then price-to-earnings, and then again to competitors).
Look at the market as-a-whole. Falling earnings, stock prices going up.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that iRobot was simply just marked for death. Any company not named Apple that is manufacturing in China, Wall Street has decided that they're going to face headwinds from IP theft and competitors backed by the full faith and force of the Chinese Communist Party, and they get busy squeezing every ounce of value out, potential be damned (because, as far as traders and shareholders are concerned, such companies already are).
I don’t see evidence that iRobot vacuums would have been competitive with Chinese ones, simply because the moat does not exist (there is no secret sauce that makes it difficult to make a competing product).
As for the rest of the article, it’s not Wall Street’s fault the government doesn’t pay iRobot enough for research (nor should it).
“what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?”
This question, asked by the person wanting to not put capital into investing further in the company’s lucrative core competency, instead favoring dividends depriving capital and a slow death milking a product facing ever steeper competition.
Capitalism has some awful failure modes, but I’m not sure what system of economics was on display in this case, but it doesn’t look like capitalism. Theft? That seems closer.
Hard for me to understand how the consumer was protected by preventing Amazon from acquiring them. Only for Chinese firm to get for cheap in bankruptcy. But maybe I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances
Possibly an unintended consequence. Those abound in our governing systems as you're rightfully complaining about.
On the other hand, competition is good for consumers and letting Microsoft and Amazon use unfair tactics to crush the competition or their large revenues to just buy up all competition isn't good either. That is part of the problem today in that practically every industry is a monopoly or near total monopoly (maybe there are 2-3 firms colluding). There are no incentives to innovate or keep prices competitive in such a gilded-age system. There was a reason we broke up all the robber barons. There is also the hazard when you have businesses that are so large that they effectively control everything and the government can no longer regulate them. High inflation is at least partly coming from this lack of competition. There is also the issue of the money supply where we degrade our currency to make it easier to service the debt. That is also a really big component here.
Not sure how you could construe U.S. anti-trust actions as socialist. They prevented Amazon from acquiring iRobot. That is government intervention in the free market, but that is not the same thing as socialism. In fact you could argue a socialist administration would have wanted the merger (large firms tend to make labor organizing more tractable since there is only one employer to negotiate with).
The foundational minds in Capitalism called for the need for government controls on it to keep markets healthy. It is LITERALLY Capitalism to have government oversight and intervention.
> But maybe I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances
Socialism is when the government owns businesses or entire industries.
Regulation is when the government has rules that companies have to play by.
The FTC is involved in regulation, not socialism.
Not all anti-capitalist actions are socialism. Not all socialism is anticapitalist.
You can disagree with a lot of things that the US government did under Biden. None of them were socialism. The closest recent example we have of socialism is the US government taking a 10% ownership stake in Intel. Which happened under Trump.
The previous best examples were all during the fall-out of the great financial crisis as part of TARP.
In retrospect, I think TARP was ultimately a pretty capitalist-friendly form of socialism. I am less sure about the Intel stake.
Thank you for this article. It explains a phenomenon where many robotics and AI companies are actually failing in the current era. I learned so much from the reporting.
daft_pink|2 months ago
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.
km144|2 months ago
throw-qqqqq|2 months ago
I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse!
We’re had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer.
Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing - I’ve never had others - but I love my Roomba.
like_any_other|2 months ago
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.
Semaphor|2 months ago
I've read it's way worse nowadays, but if they stayed at their quality from back then, I'd have probably paid more for an offline workable repairable vacuum.
vincefutr23|2 months ago
rootusrootus|2 months ago
observationist|2 months ago
How much did regulation and taxation and red tape play into Roomba's inability to compete?
What sort of VC deals were they shackled by, in order to siphon off the data and abuse it for third party marketing, and other forms of enshittification?
There's a lot that American companies have been held back by. Some of it is actually good, consumer protective and well crafted, but it won't work if you allow other players in the same market to ignore the regulations and restrictions without consequences. Other policy is just stupid and self destructive, and other policies border on malignant, deliberately giving foreign companies significant advantages, directly and indirectly, without any other purpose.
American companies are way too easily forced into a race to the bottom dynamic, resulting in failure and huge wastes of money and effort.
dpc_01234|2 months ago
I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.
iwontberude|2 months ago
caycep|2 months ago
sleight42|2 months ago
iRobot was remarkably innovative until they were enshittified decades before the term was coined.
goodolddays9090|2 months ago
[deleted]
arjie|2 months ago
In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made. So the FTC decisions must then be seen in this light. Therefore, the case made by this article is made in the context that a dominant player in an industry has made decisions that slowly but surely doom them and seeing the imminent doom, they have found an acquirer who might be able to rescue them.
The FTC is operating in a universe conditional on iRobot already having done what they've done. Consequently, even if you can blame iRobot for getting into the situation, you must also blame the FTC for closing off their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off to the Chinese.
As for the other thing about neither the FTC nor the EU actually bringing any proceedings against Amazon or iRobot and simply requesting information: this seems either naïve or a misrepresentation of how governments act to end deals. It's not that convincing to me that organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies are "just asking for information".
One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with. They employ the same tactics. Every immigrant knows to be rightfully fearful of the white, pink, blue, and yellow slips and the RFE notices they receive. A simple "Request For Evidence". A common strategy back home in India, too.
I suppose the reason those in the West are less aware of these things is that the standard bureaucracy mostly works if you're a domestic W-2 employee. Interactions with the government are few and generally functional. So they come to believe that the government is a highly honest machine: if it asks for X, it does not indicate anything more than a request for X. Those interacting with the more politicised parts of Western government find that they strategically employ the usual tactics that Indian bureaucracies wield routinely at the lowest level.
Overall, therefore, I don't find this convincing. Looking at the other things that Matt Stoller writes, I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.
0: Businesses are hard. You operate in the fog of war. We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.
themafia|2 months ago
There was only one escape route? And it happened to be the one they selected themselves? That seems dubious.
> organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies
We literally have laws which _require_ them to do this. This isn't ideological targeting it's the consequence of the "due care clause" of the constitution. You should ask why previous iterations of the FTC have ignored this responsibility not why the one in question actually tried to live up to it.
> A simple "Request For Evidence".
These are publicly traded corporations not hapless individuals.
> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.
You've tried to obscure yours but I suspect the same thing of you.
> You operate in the fog of war.
This is goalpost shifting to the level of propaganda. You operate in a market. If you fail your assets will be auctioned off. The death of a corporation is a natural consequence of the system we've developed. It's required. It caries none of the weight of the death of an individual or of war.
> We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.
> In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made.
This seems contradictory. We could easily be telling a different tale if the 2010s played out differently; however, as you say, one cannot go back.
freefrog1234aa|2 months ago
tzs|2 months ago
The ask for information on pretty much every big acquisition. How else do you expect them to decide if they should try to stop it or not?
avianlyric|2 months ago
That’s probably because both the US and Indian systems of government and state bureaucracies both originated in the UK (with significant alterations, but still fundamentally forks of the UK systems). Even chunks of the EU bureaucracy are based on UK customs and rules in places, a consequence of the UK being the only Western European country that wasn’t completely demolished in World War Two.
jibal|2 months ago
IOW, he doesn't share your partisan views.
2OEH8eoCRo0|2 months ago
groundzeros2015|2 months ago
DannyBee|2 months ago
At one point i wrote a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of where either his facts or his arguments were just wrong, for like 10 of his articles, but i eventually gave up.
He doesn't even really try. I just decided i'm not the target audience. The target audience is either people who already agree with Matt Stoller and want to feel like they are right, or people who can't be bothered to do even a trivial amount of research.
He's definitely not convincing anyone else.
aidenn0|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
rsanek|2 months ago
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
zaptheimpaler|2 months ago
ghaff|2 months ago
cameldrv|2 months ago
If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my knowledge.
echelon|2 months ago
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 lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills. The Anker team nails user friendliness and design, though.
MarkusQ|2 months ago
In many cases (I suspect this is one of them) there is room for multiple bad guys. Why couldn't the FTC, Roomba Management, Wall Street, China, etc. all be at fault? Seems like it fits the evidence nicely.
derbOac|2 months ago
I think the idea of Amazon buying Roomba causing monopoly concerns is kinda weird. But I also think it's absurd for anyone to blame the FTC for this. Amazon had enough leverage and money to take on the FTC over this, and probably could have made the FTC look laughable in the process, if they pushed antitrust. The fact that they didn't says everything about the actual value of Roomba.
sleight42|2 months ago
Yet the root problem seems structural: the misplaced incentives of the quarterly earnings-driven stock market. Short term gains most often win over long term innovation.
itopaloglu83|2 months ago
echelon|2 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44XYQepBF7g
The patent expiry sealed the deal.
caesil|2 months ago
star-glider|2 months ago
asdff|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
brcmthrowaway|2 months ago
dyauspitr|2 months ago
tekacs|2 months ago
> In the mid-2010s, during Furman’s tenure running economic policy under Obama, the company sold its defense business, offshored production, and slashed research, a result of pressure from financiers on Wall Street.
> Mesdag engaged in a proxy fight to wrest control of the company from its engineering founders, accusing one of its founders and iRobot Chairman Colin Angle of engaging in “egregious and abusive use of shareholder capital” for investing in research.
Yes Roomba sucks at this point. We get it. Thing is, if you slash research... that's what eventually becomes of your product.
imglorp|2 months ago
We'd have almost nothing if it weren't for university partnerships and corporate R&D way back when. There's no way to accomplish this now except to stay private.
crazygringo|2 months ago
JumpCrisscross|2 months ago
And if you dump your defence contracts you may have trouble paying for research.
underlipton|2 months ago
goodolddays9090|2 months ago
[deleted]
trinsic2|2 months ago
>To reverse this strategy, a more assertive antitrust regime is necessary, but it’s not enough. We also have to reduce the many other public levers of support for elevated returns on capital. Only then will it make sense for companies like iRobot to invest in robots instead of share buybacks.
Call your state senators and let them know that enforcing anti-trust legislation and undoing citizens united need to be the primary focus
xnx|2 months ago
BeetleB|2 months ago
How did they shut it down?
goodolddays9090|2 months ago
[deleted]
hodder|2 months ago
As you know, Khan’s FTC worried it wouldn’t be able to prevent Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in court, so instead it dragged out approval, which it never granted, while continuously threatening to block.
Simultaneously, her FTC openly worked with the EU to convince the EU to use its more expansive antitrust regime to get the EU to block the deal. That dragged the shot clock for the deal lower and lower (deals have backend dates contractually agreed to, after which the parties no longer are committed to work towards closing the deal and can walk).
Even as the EU was challenging the deal and the shot clock was approaching zero, her FTC was STILL not granting approval and threatened to block and drag it out another year in U.S. courts, all the way until Amazon threw in the towel.
After the deal collapsed, the FTC celebrated and took credit.
The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now.
ajkjk|2 months ago
tzs|2 months ago
...or "owned and neglected by Amazon right now". I'm not confident Amazon can maintain their IoT stuff adequately. Take their Alexa stuff. They have been having large problems with the Alexa mobile apps for months now.
For example the device list often shows up as either empty or the devices say an error occurred if you try to use them. Sometimes repeatedly trying will finally succeed and then they all work at least until next time you use the app.
The back end knows about the devices, and you can operate them all by voice just fine, through the app or an Echo device, so it looks like they just screwed up something in the app.
When I first hit this it wasn't working for so long that I assumed it must be a problem just affecting me because if it was widespread surely they would have fixed it. Eventually I described it to an LLM and it gave me links to a whole bunch of discussion on Reddit and other forums of people having the same problem, spanning something like the last year.
The Chinese company buying them is a robot vacuum company, and was already a manufacturer and supplier for iRobot. As it currently stands I'm more confident that they can keep my Roomba working than Amazon can.
cameldrv|2 months ago
ChrisArchitect|2 months ago
Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268854
yftsui|2 months ago
How Lina Khan Killed iRobot
crazygringo|2 months ago
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.
hashstring|2 months ago
Yet everyone complains how they got slashed by their competition, and that is primarily because they didn’t innovate. Their product wasn’t better.
> 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.
No, you fixate on 1% of the iRobot story. The real issue is that this wall-street mindset made the company a complete sell out, they squeezed every penny, stopped innovating, offshored manufacturing to China, and now they reaped the harvest of what they sowed.
Point a finger to Lina Khan and four of them point back. It’s the unsustainable economic games of the 1% that killed this company, just like many others.
y0eswddl|2 months ago
km144|2 months ago
I find this article a pretty compelling critique of the extractive incentives of Wall Street and a good argument for government stepping in from time to time to adjust those incentives. Where is the societal good in the engine of capitalism prioritizing short-term extraction over long-term value creation?
frmersdog|2 months ago
Or... wait for it... Gamestop. Not just what happened in 2021. What happened in 2024. What's happening now. (Compare its market cap to its cash, and then how it compares to competitors, and then price-to-earnings, and then again to competitors).
Look at the market as-a-whole. Falling earnings, stock prices going up.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that iRobot was simply just marked for death. Any company not named Apple that is manufacturing in China, Wall Street has decided that they're going to face headwinds from IP theft and competitors backed by the full faith and force of the Chinese Communist Party, and they get busy squeezing every ounce of value out, potential be damned (because, as far as traders and shareholders are concerned, such companies already are).
twoodfin|2 months ago
Animats|2 months ago
JKCalhoun|2 months ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|2 months ago
lotsofpulp|2 months ago
As for the rest of the article, it’s not Wall Street’s fault the government doesn’t pay iRobot enough for research (nor should it).
ineedasername|2 months ago
This question, asked by the person wanting to not put capital into investing further in the company’s lucrative core competency, instead favoring dividends depriving capital and a slow death milking a product facing ever steeper competition.
Capitalism has some awful failure modes, but I’m not sure what system of economics was on display in this case, but it doesn’t look like capitalism. Theft? That seems closer.
disgruntledphd2|2 months ago
BeetleB|2 months ago
[deleted]
geodel|2 months ago
[deleted]
monero-xmr|2 months ago
7thaccount|2 months ago
On the other hand, competition is good for consumers and letting Microsoft and Amazon use unfair tactics to crush the competition or their large revenues to just buy up all competition isn't good either. That is part of the problem today in that practically every industry is a monopoly or near total monopoly (maybe there are 2-3 firms colluding). There are no incentives to innovate or keep prices competitive in such a gilded-age system. There was a reason we broke up all the robber barons. There is also the hazard when you have businesses that are so large that they effectively control everything and the government can no longer regulate them. High inflation is at least partly coming from this lack of competition. There is also the issue of the money supply where we degrade our currency to make it easier to service the debt. That is also a really big component here.
csb6|2 months ago
_DeadFred_|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
bryanlarsen|2 months ago
The FTC properly weighted known bads more highly than potential bads.
triceratops|2 months ago
NietzscheanNull|2 months ago
> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.
moregrist|2 months ago
Socialism is when the government owns businesses or entire industries.
Regulation is when the government has rules that companies have to play by.
The FTC is involved in regulation, not socialism.
Not all anti-capitalist actions are socialism. Not all socialism is anticapitalist.
You can disagree with a lot of things that the US government did under Biden. None of them were socialism. The closest recent example we have of socialism is the US government taking a 10% ownership stake in Intel. Which happened under Trump.
The previous best examples were all during the fall-out of the great financial crisis as part of TARP.
In retrospect, I think TARP was ultimately a pretty capitalist-friendly form of socialism. I am less sure about the Intel stake.
tk781|2 months ago
[deleted]
amadeuspagel|2 months ago
margalabargala|2 months ago
Just like you. When it happens to a person we call it "cancer".
kittikitti|2 months ago