Wall Street Ruined the Roomba and Then Blamed Lina Khan

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.

Sucked not the ideal pejorative for a vacuum

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.

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.

Did your Roombas also yelled in the middle of the night "PLEASE CHARGE ROOMBA!!!" every few minutes with no way to disable that behavior?

I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.

> better chinese competitors.

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.

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Roombas have always been terrible.

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.

It is a single entity that contains multitudes. Some of those multitudes have contradictory intentions.

Just like you. When it happens to a person we call it "cancer".

"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal."

How did they shut it down?

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I see him (Rodney) in both the Roomba and iRobot articles.

> Thing is, if you slash research

And if you dump your defence contracts you may have trouble paying for research.

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What is the current AI/data center mega-boom if not forgoing short-term extraction for long-term value creation?

Why not let Amazon take a stab at turning things around, then? It's better that they fail? I don't get it.

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.

At the time the former was a known bad, and the latter was a potential bad.

The FTC properly weighted known bads more highly than potential bads.

Did you read the article? Amazon wasn't "prevented" from acquiring, they decided against proceeding:

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.

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.

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).