Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-wall-street-ruined-the-roomba

by connor11528 • 7 months ago

249 198 7 months ago

2OEH8eoCRo04• 7 months ago

Outstanding article. Our current goals and incentives are not sustainable.

lotsofpulp3• 7 months ago

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).

2OEH8eoCRo04• 7 months ago

As the article states they were more than vacuums- they also did defense work and research. They gutted that for higher short term gains. Offshoring to China also likely helped China learn to build their own.

echelon2• 7 months ago

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44XYQepBF7g

The patent expiry sealed the deal.

caesil• 7 months ago

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

KerrAvon• 7 months ago

couple things

- tbh, I think the Amazon deal doesn't matter much in the long run. The damage had been done earlier.

- why give Bezos any more free money? He's already rich enough.

BeetleB2• 7 months ago

Why not let Amazon take a stab at turning things around, then?

The point the article is making is that iRobot's bad decisions are the reason the company was failing. Blaming regulators for a poor acquisition outcome may be fair, but they were a very minor part of the outcome.

lkramer• 7 months ago

According to the article, there is a defence invoking that exact sentiment if a merger is about to be blocked, bu iRobot decided not to invoke it (likely because it would have caused the price to be lower).

daft_pink3• 7 months ago

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.

km1442• 7 months ago

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.

Grosvenor• 7 months ago

That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.

fellowniusmonk• 7 months ago

Explore vs exploit?

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.

daft_pink3• 7 months ago

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.

rootusrootus• 7 months ago

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.

fluidcruft• 7 months ago

You could stick a tracker on it

dpc_01234• 7 months ago

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.

bhaney• 7 months ago

One of the first things I did with my robot vacuum cleaner was open it up and yank out its speaker.

like_any_other• 7 months ago

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.

malvim3• 7 months ago

* Surprised Pikachu face *

vincefutr23• 7 months ago

Sucked not the ideal pejorative for a vacuum

ulrashida• 7 months ago

"We have not yet begun to truly suck."

dylan604• 7 months ago

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

seanmcdirmid• 7 months ago

Sucking is a good state for a vacuum. If Roomba sucked well enough, it wouldn't have gone bankrupt.

observationist3• 7 months ago

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.

azurezyq• 7 months ago

what law and licensing prevented iRobot to adopt Lidar? Given Lidar is used everywhere already.

malvim3• 7 months ago

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.

iwontberude• 7 months ago

They all suck. (No pun intended)

Semaphor• 7 months ago

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.

throw-qqqqq• 7 months ago

To be honest the Roomba sucked

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.

macNchz• 7 months ago

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.

asdff4• 7 months ago

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.

johnsmith1840• 7 months ago

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.

dustinmr• 7 months ago

I have one I bought in 2008. My parents still use it. Replace batteries and filters. Works fine.

Gets stuck on cords and in corners. So does the one I bought in September 2025.

caycep• 7 months ago

I see what you did there...

sleight424• 7 months ago

The top comment completely misses the point.

iRobot was remarkably innovative until they were enshittified decades before the term was coined.

monero-xmr• 7 months ago

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

7thaccount• 7 months ago

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.

bryanlarsen• 7 months ago

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.

csb6• 7 months ago

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).

NietzscheanNull• 7 months ago

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.

adamsb62• 7 months ago

Khan had already accused them of abusing monopoly power and filed a lawsuit against them, and had a history of blocking acquisitions. At this time she also had a lawsuit in place seeking to undo the nearly decade old acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp.

The smart thing to do in that environment isn't to push the issue so that years later someone can't write that there wasn't an official challenge. It's to read the room and abandon the deal.

_DeadFred_• 7 months ago

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.

moregrist• 7 months ago

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.

triceratops• 7 months ago

Why aren't any American firms interested in buying it cheap?

yftsui3• 7 months ago

Because Lina Khan will block it as long as iRobot still has value? Her entire vision is just destroy corporate values.

xnx2• 7 months ago

Roomba screwed up for sure, but they found a way out with Amazon until US consumer "protection" shut it down.

BeetleB2• 7 months ago

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

How did they shut it down?

xnx2• 7 months ago

"On Monday, the FTC requested more information from both companies about the $1.7 billion deal, according to an investor filing from iRobot, in what’s known as a “second request” and an indicator of deeper scrutiny by antitrust officials."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/20/tech/roomba-amazon-ftc-invest...

kittikitti• 7 months ago

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.

amadeuspagel2• 7 months ago

"Wall Street" is one entity, which first ruined the Roomba, then wanted to buy it, then blamed Lina Khan for not being allowed to buy it. Makes sense.

margalabargala• 7 months ago

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".

ToValueFunfetti• 7 months ago

Typically we don't say that someone with cancer is slowly committing suicide. Technically correct, perhaps, but it needlessly applies central autonomy where it doesn't really exist.

ghaff2• 7 months ago

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.

echelon2• 7 months ago

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.

drob518• 7 months ago

Which does best with pets? We have a German shepherd that sheds like crazy. We vacuum every week and it will often fill a Dyson canister vac. We empty it every time we vacuum. We had a Roomba back in 2002 or so, but it was little more than a novelty (just wasn’t great vacuum and got hung up on too much stuff).

enraged_camel• 7 months ago

I just want one that removes the “gotta declutter all the floors and hide anything and everything that could possibly get stuck in the roller” prerequisite step completely. I’ve tried literally five different brands (including the top Chinese ones) and they all scream a variation of MAIN BRUSH JAMMED after running for a while.

klabb3• 7 months ago

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.

FWIW there are 3p replacements that are super cheap for roller brush, side brush, filters, bags etc. As for detergent for the mop, I first thought I was smart to buy 3p detergents meant for robot vacuums because they were cheaper. Turns out they clogged the tubes which was tricky to fix, but I did it. After that I bought Eufys original, and lo and behold, it was much more concentrated, which meant it was actually significantly cheaper than the 3p ones (and smells better).

Navigation is spot on. Obstacle avoidance sucks though (to be fair my floor is patterned stone - hard to see anything) and cat toys sometimes get stuck in the roller brush.

Btw what’s the alternative to roller brush?

tzs4• 7 months ago

Yeah, what is the deal with roller brush design? I don't have pets but do have long hair and apparently it is not as firmly attached to my head as I'd like it to be.

With the Eufy I had the brush needed to be cleared of hair fairly often, and that clearing took a bit of work. Often I had to use a utility knife to cut the hair out.

My Roomba, on the other hand, almost never gets hair caught in the brushes, and if it does it easily pulls right off by hand.

cameldrv2• 7 months ago

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.

ghaff2• 7 months ago

It could probably be vaguely useful in the kitchen/dining room/mudroom if I had pets/kids. As it is, a broom vac takes just a few minutes. Maybe if I had more day to day mess, I'd feel differently.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268854

Animats2• 7 months ago

It's interesting that Rod Brooks has been erased from the history of Roomba. He's not even mentioned in the Wikipedia article.

JKCalhoun• 7 months ago

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

Animats2• 7 months ago

The Roomba is not in the Rodney Brooks article.

km1442• 7 months ago

“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?

twoodfin4• 7 months ago

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

randerson2• 7 months ago

Given how many people are getting rich from the inflated stock prices of every AI-adjacent company right now, including the ones with no obvious path to profitability, I could make the argument that they're already in a short term extraction phase.

(I'm also not sure if putting a significant % of the population out of work will create long term value to society.)

re-thc3• 7 months ago

What is the current AI/data center mega-boom

Short term extraction.

The long term value is in AI research not scaling LLMs.

frmersdog• 7 months ago

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).

tekacs• 7 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross• 7 months ago

Thing is, if you slash research

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

bogwog• 7 months ago

I'd be interested in learning about how the US military uses Roombas (assuming it's not classified)

imglorp• 7 months ago

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.

gruez• 7 months ago

There's no way to accomplish this now except to stay private.

cue all the lamentations about how evil private equity is.

JackFr• 7 months ago

A company who does cutting edge R&D for defense contracts and and consumer small appliances is destined for trouble. They are two very different lines of business. While you might make an argument about synergy, the problem stems from the investors who are investing in two very different lines of business. Ultimately one of them was going to win. The failure to realize that offshoring would turn suppliers into competitors is a known issue in the consumer small appliance world and it looks like they were not ready.

Interestingly enough the R&D portion that was sold off, became Endeavor Robotics which was sold to Teledyne FLIR Systems and seems to be doing fine.

themafia2• 7 months ago

Well, they took most of that money, and then just bought back their own stock. It's something more than just 1Q blindness and failure to understand the importance of research.

https://media.irobot.com/2016-02-04-iRobot-Announces-Sale-of...

underlipton• 7 months ago

It's crazy that the Dodge brothers destroyed the company/shareholder relationship for every contemporary and future US-based corporation and then died.

crazygringo8• 7 months ago

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.

hodder• 7 months ago

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.

ajkjk4• 7 months ago

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.

throwaway3829482• 7 months ago

That's only an option if the FTC can rewind time. Can they?

twoodfin4• 7 months ago

If we’re arguing about strategic decisions made a decade ago in this context, aren’t we really arguing about whether any company should ever fail?

This is Matt Stoller throwing a bunch of dust in the air because he wants to have been right when he was glad Khan shut down the merger, and then right again when the husk of iRobot sold out to the Chinese. Because Matt is always right, and “Wall Street” is always wrong.

crazygringo8• 7 months ago

Sorry, can you explain the "do a good job" option in more detail please? How should they have been run differently to generate more profit?

tzs4• 7 months ago

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.

crazygringo8• 7 months ago

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.

y0eswddl• 7 months ago

when and how did she do that exactly?

crazygringo8• 7 months ago

"On January 31, 2024, one of the FTC’s Commissioners spoke at an antitrust conference in Brussels and said the FTC had been prepared to block the transaction."

https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/05012...

"We are pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed transaction... The Commission’s investigation revealed significant concerns about the transaction’s potential competitive effects. The FTC will not hesitate to take action in enforcing the antitrust laws to ensure that competition remains robust."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

"Amazon and robot vacuum maker iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) said Monday they would end their plans to merge in the face of opposition from EU and U.S. antitrust regulators."

https://www.investing.com/news/economy/amazon-roombaparent-i...

hashstring• 7 months ago

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.

MarkusQ• 7 months ago

Not every story needs to have a bad guy.

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.

itopaloglu83• 7 months ago

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.

derbOac• 7 months ago

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.

sleight424• 7 months ago

Your point was most of my read on the article.

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.

arjie2• 7 months ago

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.

themafia2• 7 months ago

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.

BurningFrog2• 7 months ago

There are no laws requiring break up of big companies!!

There are laws around breaking up monopolies, which is a completely different concept.

freefrog1234aa• 7 months ago

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.

gizmondo3• 7 months ago

They didn't because the purchase price would be lower

He said that alright, but what's his source of that information?

avianlyric• 7 months ago

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.

DannyBee3• 7 months ago

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.

He's definitely not convincing anyone else.

azemetre• 7 months ago

Saying their arguments are bad but the dog ate your response isn't exactly convincing either.

2OEH8eoCRo04• 7 months ago

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

groundzeros2015• 7 months ago

What is the relationship between the first half of your comment and the commentary about W2 workers?

aidenn0• 7 months ago

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.

twoodfin4• 7 months ago

That’s unhelpfully reductive: There are zero companies making smartphones in the US, too.

jibal3• 7 months ago

I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.

IOW, he doesn't share your partisan views.

concinds• 7 months ago

Matt Stoller is one of those "left MAGA" grifters who is only trusted by the most ignorant and gullible fraction of either side (left or MAGA). No one with a clue has anything but contempt for his "intellectual" output.

jibal3• 7 months ago

Nothing in the response to my comment is remotely true ... it's all obvious projection.

tzs4• 7 months ago

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?

rsanek• 7 months ago

"We are pleased that Amazon and iRobot have abandoned their proposed transaction."

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

zaptheimpaler2• 7 months ago

We know the FTC blocked the deal. What is this quote supposed to be showing us?

renewiltord• 7 months ago

The 'we' is doing a lot of work there. 'You' might know, but many do not and explicitly have different views. An example thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330028

piker• 7 months ago

I wasn’t aware. It’s kind of useful to imagine a world where those products and the backing of Amazon. I’m not familiar with the market, but I can imagine availability of cheap competitors was the proximate cause of this company’s demise.

yftsui3• 7 months ago

You know Lina Khan lead FTC blocked the deal, but if you check the thread, huge amount of folks aren’t aware of this fact. As an owner of 2 iRobot Roomba I feel so “protected” now, they may become a brick or spy of a foreign company.

ineedasername• 7 months ago

“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.

disgruntledphd2• 7 months ago

Rent extraction, beloved of economists from Smith to Marx.

star-glider• 7 months ago

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.

asdff4• 7 months ago

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.

brcmthrowaway• 7 months ago

Apple == IBM?

dyauspitr• 7 months ago

Apple is innovating plenty.

cameldrv2• 7 months ago

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.

trinsic2• 7 months ago

Here is where the pressure needs to be placed:

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

yftsui3• 7 months ago

How Lina Khan Killed iRobot

Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

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