[pilingual]

Roomba was originally written in Lisp.

In the pandemic I bought the cheapest one, and it worked very well. It had a handle so I could pick it up, responsive buttons, and intuitive tones.

A few years later I bought one that automatically suctioned debris into a home base. That one had no handle, required reset frequently, and had tones that made you guess which Japanese train station it just arrived at.

Something went wrong at that company, and I don't think competition is an excuse.

[driscoll42]

When Roomba thought it was about to be acquired by Amazon, it did lay off 10% of its staff - https://www.therobotreport.com/irobot-laying-off-10-of-staff.... and after the deal was canceled, it was disclosed that they had reduced R&D and focused on margin improvements, and there was some brain drain as people left Roomba as it was in a 18 month limbo - https://www.verdict.co.uk/irobot-to-cut-over-a-third-of-its-.... And of course all this self inflicted pain only hurt them doubly as the Amazon deal fell through. If they had acted as if they weren't going to be acquired they might be fine, but they tried to maximize the shareholder revenue.

[rwmj]

I wonder if Amazon did that deliberately.

Back in the day (about 2002) I was working at an education software company which was trying to get itself acquired by Microsoft. MSFT came in and told us our software didn't conform to all these "standards" in the educational software space. Standards which, coincidentally, Microsoft themselves had written. These pseudo-standards did absolutely nothing to help our customers, and were pure bureaucracy and very very complicated to implement.

I'd recently read Charles Ferguson's book about how his company was acquired by MSFT, and recognized this part of their standard operating procedure, along with extreme and invasive due diligence where they spend a lot of time working out if you're stupid/pliable enough to jump through these hoops while buying themselves time to work out if they can clone your product. I tried to warn management (yes, really - even bought them copies of the book) but naturally no one would listen, and reading a book was too much like hard work. At some point MSFT simply ceased returning management's calls, and rolled out a similar product a while later.

The company imploded not long after, not for this reason in particular, but it was part of a general pattern of incompetence and mismanagement.

[HPsquared]

Poor risk management!

[steveBK123]

Agreed, putting aside the low cost competition, failed Amazon acquisition, etc.. the core product just literally got worse.

I had over a ~10 year period purchased 3 roombas. Generally I purchased in the upper half of current product range at each purchase time.

The most reliable, problem-free, longest lasting Roomba was the first initially purchased one. Every new one with more sensors/cameras/features worked worse. Cleaned worse, got stuck more often, was less easily fixed when in a bad state, etc. They got so bad I just stopped using them all together about a year ago.

Every time I purchased a newer Dyson cordless by comparison, the product seemed better than the last generation.

[ghaff]

I have to believe that cordless broom vacs have put a dent in robovacs generally as well. When I looked at robovacs last, I came to the conclusion that my house wasn't great for them and that a broom vac I could just pull off the wall and run in a couple heavily trafficked locations for a few minutes was really just fine. The issue previously was that it was sort of a pain to pull out my plug in canister vac--so I mostly didn't. (I have a housekeeper every 3 to 4 weeks.)