Troubled robot vacuum-cleaner maker iRobot, abandoned by Amazon after regulators effectively doomed the web giant’s takeover offer, has warned investors it may not survive the next 12 months.
Hmm so this entire trick of setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps appears to be not a viable strategy if anti trust law is enforced?
Edit: apparently this company was set up before sell to mega corp craze got kicked off. I don’t think changes the thesis but this case study doesn’t support it with the strength I suggested
Hmm as if last 30 years of corpo behavior has been essentially to maintain mega corp dominance via captured regulators and legislators
We got the capitalism alright but where is the free market at, daddy?
Don’t worry, the new strategy is to string a company along with talks of a buyout, then when their cash runs out and they declare bankruptcy, to buy all the assets on fire sale.
Owners of the take over target shoulda worked harder and maybe ate less avocado toast?
setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps
iRobot was originally founded all the way back in 1990 and have sold quite a lot of Roomba vacuums, advancing innovation in home automation along the way. I don’t think anyone can ever say that they set up this company for a quick flip corpo pump and dump.
Well damn… How did they run the company into the ground?
Let me guess cheap Chinese robots sold on amazon?
Thank you providing additional context.
Honestly I think they suffer a little from early-mover disadvantage.
“Cheap Chinese” and all the associations that come with that is a little reductive in this case. Roborock vacuums are not actually cheap - they are extraordinarily well-made, featureful, and a good value compared to iRobot.
Decades ago, iRobot probably spent millions in R&D just to arrive at navigation algorithms that were worse than what you can get with open-source libraries today. They also spent the marketing dollars to convince people these robots were safe and effective. They weren’t always, so there were some ups and downs in that.
Nowadays the supporting technologies are all much more advanced (and cheaper) and the market for these robots has been created already and is very robust. Companies like Roborock just have to come in and build a good product and they’ll see much faster returns than iRobot did for all those years. They can go straight to lidar, which was probably prohibitive for iRobot for many years, leading iRobot to invest heavily in other technologies which are now a generation behind.
So in addition to their decades of tech legacy. iRobot is burdened with the expectations of longtime investors who want a big cashout, just as they are getting eaten alive by all this new competition. They pinned their hopes on a big exit and are now holding the bag. It’s not surprising that this all left them in trouble.
We need decent European alternatives for robot vaccuums.
We need open source alternatives
I’ll just put this right here…
Valetudo, though an absolutely amazing software, is no the replacement I was meaning. I meant we need a fully open source robot, from software to hardware, and that can be adapted. Of course there’s always blobs which are not open source, but that’s the case already for many things
Not trying to make this sound like nyah, nyah or anything…
But here’s where I’m glad I never got into that genre of “robotic” assistants. Happy to clean my floors by hand, thank you.
Wonder what kind of illumination this situation might be shining on the current “AI assistant” craze…?? 🤷♂️ 🤷♂️
My robo cleaner is just not connected to the internet… No app, no one can kill it remotely…
IMO, this thing was one of my best investments ever. Saved me days of time…
