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.
It just doesn’t seem like these other vacuum robotics companies spend so much money on research and development.
I’m sure they could have built more advanced robots, etc. If they had focused on research, but when virtually every competitor is cheaper and offers better technology. It seems like their competitors just applied something off the shelf and not some grand big brain advancement.
iRobot was far more than vacuums until they weren't.
Read the article. The author spells it out.
I lived it. I read about them and bought a Roomba back when they first sold them. They had so much in the pipeline, consumer and otherwise. Hell, they even had a STEM kit programmable Roomba.
Let's run an expierement where we just run exploit forever, let's restrucute the private sector, our countries moral baselines and eventually our executive leadership to be maximally exploitive, lets do that for about 45 years and see where it lands us -Some greed is good guys in the 80s probably.
The innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.
Exactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum technology then maybe this article would have a point. But they were building stuff for the military and for space, and there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in better vacuum cleaners.
Well it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.
Hardware is not like software. A general purpose humanoid cleaning robot will be superior to a robot vacuum but it will always cost an order of magnitude more. This is different from software where the cost exponentially decreases and you can do the computer in the cloud.
I'm not sure advancements in AI and advancements in vacuum cleaners are at similar stages in terms of R&D. I'd be very wary of trying to apply lessons from one to the other.
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.
The main thing is with the chinese ones you get lidar and a cached map from that lidar run (so you can send it to clean specific areas) and they cost maybe a third or less what roomba charges, at least when I was in the market.
Same. I bought a roomba in covid and it's still kicking. No repairs at all just new brushes and filters when they get dirty.
Felt bad they went under as I would likely have purchased more of them forever. But maybe that's why they died? Kinda like appliances that last forever the company doesn't have financial incentives to make them last longer or are outcompeted by less reliable ones selling more often.
I also have a 980 that's going strong. A number of parts replaced over time, so refreshingly repairable. My mother in law has had a whole lineup of Chinese robot vacuums in the time we've owned Roomba and they haven't seemed miraculously more effective. Ours does get stuck occasionally, but it runs every day so...it's not a huge deal if it doesn't finish on any given day.
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.
Growing up, local morning radio shows were no longer allowed to say "that sucked" so they all switched to "that vacuumed". The ridiculousness of being offended by idioms like this amuses me
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.
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.
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.
No one ever forced any company to work with China. They all went to China over decades because it was cheaper and made more profits, knowing full well there’d be technological transfer since it was always China’s goal and even explicit in contracts and agreements.
Being surprised now that profits became technology transfer and China is now a real competitor is useless. They knew it, just didn’t think the Chinese could be real players in tech, or didn’t care because short-term profit was more attractive.
So it was profits then, and if you’re asking “what sort of VC deals were they shackled by”, it’s profits now. So the point of the article still stands, Wall Street screwed them over.
> No one ever forced any company to work with China.
"Forced" is a strong word here, but company's do need to compete or die. If your competitors are manufacturing in China and selling widgets at a price less than what an American factory can produce them for, what choices do they realistically have?
To expect merchants to get together and act according to some greater good is a pipe dream. Government should have stepped in and prevented the offshoring of American industry through policy
Oh, for sure, I'm just highlighting that it's not like they're playing on a level field. The US marketplace is self defeating with asymmetric regulations, unenforceable patent and IP knowledge transfer with countries like China that just ignore it, effectively, with zero accountability. It's not all external though, they could have had a much better leadership team and used all sorts of things in their favor early on to really capture the market, despite anything and everything else that happened. Apathy, VC-style race to the bottom dynamics, probably went public too soon, and didn't build momentum and a culture of high quality R&D (a whole lot of drama every time they considered using private data and monetizing on their intimate in-home access.)
They also missed out on AI getting good - by the time transformers came around and people realized they'd be really useful for stuff like Roombas, it was too late, and with shareholders just looking to cash out and minimize their losses toward the end, there's not a lot that could have been done to save it. Even if they'd gone to Amazon, there wasn't a lot left that had value beyond the branding, imo.
I think American companies would be more successful and higher quality if the regulation and IP policy we embraced were reciprocal. As it stands, unless you're Apple or Samsung or a giant, you have to win the CCP PR lottery for any sort of accountability with Chinese companies. Most of the time they're going to ignore you, because there's no downside. It's only in those cases where there are political ramifications, individuals being embarassed, or they feel a need to trot out a "look how conscientious and good faith we are in the international markets!" piece useful for other wheeling and dealing.
> I think American companies would be more successful and higher quality if the regulation and IP policy we embraced were reciprocal
The problem is that US patent law stopped technological advancement. Why innovate if you can buy some patents, hire talented lawyers, and have them do their magic? It's strange that Chinese products changed from "cheap knock-offs" to "global leadership in innovation" and nobody stopped and asked themselves what exactly made US companies just give up on innovation.
It's not any particular feature - it's the licensing and royalties paid on tech patented and owned by other parties in the US, or by parties the US recognizes. Since that's not reciprocal, it's a drag on any US company, or company that respects US jurisdiction.
Put enough sticky notes on a Tour De France rider and you'll eventually guarantee their loss. That's the one-sided policy problem with the US, internally. Now if other riders are doping and using secret electric motors, but the stickied up rider can't cheat in the same way, then you just guarantee their loss, even if it's only a little degrading.
We need a better, more accountable, and more transparent international trade framework. Something that shuts out bad faith players that use slave labor, child labor, exploitative wages, things like that, and appropriately scales tariffs and other mechanisms to penalize the violations appropriately.
I'd much rather the playing field be entirely fair and even than do the current US thing of "well, we're going to impose a lot of moralistic and patronizing rules on ourselves, but allow anyone anywhere else to ignore those rules, because it makes for good political theater back home, and it makes shareholders happy."
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.