Roomba is exactly what happens when you make a good product, get a good lead and then fill the company with MBAs and think you'll coast along on name alone instead of innovations.
Nobody buys Roombas because everything else is way better with way more features. They don't even come up in discussions any more, because they can not compete with Dreame, Roborock or any other vacuum with lidar, step up ability, mopping, and now robotic hands.
This exactly. My four-year-old i9 effectively does not work. It can't complete a single run without getting stuck on something, complaining about the container being full (it's not), complaining about the base being full (it's not), not being able to empty the container into the base (and making a huge racket with the repeated attempts), or many other things. If I fix one of the issues, it'll soon find something else to complain about.
After twenty years of owning robot vacuums, this is the worst one yet.
I switched to a Roborock a few months ago, and so far, this is genuinely the first robot vacuum I've owned that works 99% of the time. It barely ever gets stuck on things and requires very little maintenance. The maintenance it does require is easy to do and clearly explained.
Perhaps it'll start to break down in a year or so, but so far, so good.
I've got a roborock s6 from 2019 and it's still going very well. I I've had it dismantled a few times, once when the cat pissed on it, once to clean the vacuum motor, and most recently when one of the wheels got clogged. It's really easy to replace individual parts, this is how consumer electronics should be.
Unfortunately I've read the later models are harder to repair, and I would like to upgrade for the better mopping and self emptying.
I have a Roomba that used to be able to detect cords and roll over them, but at some point it ceased to do that -- and jobs would consistent failed due to it getting stuck.
I'm too lazy to tidy up my cords just for a robot vacuum to run. Would be great if there was one that was intelligent enough to simply avoid cords and other hazards.
So far I’ve had a Roomba, a Eufy and now a Roborock. The Eufy was quiet but was tearing up our trim and furniture so it got retired. The Roomba tore up trim/furniture, was incredibly loud and it was extremely expensive for having no special add-ons. The Roborock is laser guided, clearly mapped our house to gain efficiency, empties itself and is reasonably quiet - cost about $500. Roomba with some of those and arguably lesser features is several hundred dollars more. iRobot is getting the outcome it built for itself.
>Roomba is exactly what happens when you make a good product, get a good lead and then fill the company with MBAs and think you'll coast along on name alone instead of innovations.
Same with the big German car brands. They put MBAs at the helm in the 90's who outsourced all their tech innovation development to suppliers to lower costs thinking their history, prestige and brand names alone will carry them into the future, and now the Chinese are out-innovating them.
Similar with Intel. When you reach that point it's often too late to turn it round as you're now a sclerotic bloated organization, full off people who coasted and failed upwards for decades and made sure to hire other people just like them.
It is about taste. I still like german car brands. They learn with each iteration. Even the volume knobs returned. Materials are nice. But for sure the other brands are more gimmicky.
My mother in laws Jetta she got brand new a few years ago needs an engine after something like 10 years, both mechanical and electrical. Dies randomly like something electrical. Consumes a quart of oil every few hundred miles and getting worse. This thing was driven regularly but lightly (several times per week but few miles) by a little old lady who took it right to the dealer for any little thing. Oil changes and other maintainance strictly and religeously on schedule and performed by the dealer. The quote for the engine was ridiculous too but I don't remember what it was exactly because I only heard 2nd hand and I wasn't taking notes in prep for a post like this. But they are getting another car rather than fix this one. The rest of the car is in excellent condition, so it's not like some beater, yet it's still not worth doing the engine.
You can see right through my 97 4runner from all the rust and it's running and working fine. Does not drink oil. I neglect the piss out of it. I haven't changed the oil filter in probably 3 years, just add a new quart once or twice a year, probably 5 to 10k miles. It has needed repairs. I put a new starter in a few years ago. Pulled the injectors and had them rebuilt a couple years ago (basically they just clean them and put new screens and o-rings on them). couple hundred bucks each time.
Anecdata, sure. All anyone has is their own experiance.
I think VW are unreliable and expensive to repair and nice looking.
Inefficiency basically. Burn more fuel for the amount of work output, because of heavier parts, simpler designs, less magic.
I prefer such things so I am not damning them for this, it just is the unfortunate reality. It's a trade-off.
A simple example is adding a turbo increases both power and efficiency, at the cost of more parts, shorter mtbf, and less robustness. Ie aside from just more parts to wear out sooner, the system is less rugged even when new and perfect, more easily incapacitated by a spec of dust, in a machine that doesn't live in a chip fab clean room.
(Lately, I saw on the internet this video about cars and their suspension in comparison. And it felt like a throwback to the 2000. The one car that goes over the rails like its flying. Been there, done that. Did not go into the mass market for reasons. But reminds me, how good competition is, maybe old ideas will be tried again and this time the ppl want it.)
I bought a robot vacuum for the first time last fall. When searching for an appliance and reading test reports, it quickly became clear that I had the most faith in Chinese manufacturers in this product category - what a paradigm shift! And this despite the fact that well-known German brands such as Kärcher and Vorwerk also offer such appliances - when it comes to “classic” vacuum cleaners and household appliances in general, it would never have occurred to me to swap the reputation and quality of these brands for Chinese competitors. Times are changing, German manufacturers are simply left behind when it comes to such new innovations. (I'm German, hence my initial preference for German manufacturers - it's probably similar to iRobot for Americans)
When the iRobot servers go down, it will be a brick, so now is the time to reverse the protocols and figure out how to control it over the local subnet. Besides, there is no justification for connecting it to the public internet, which is an unnecessary DOS risk and moderate privacy risk. I buy no hardware that requires a persistent service to function. I made an exception for this, and now must pay the hackers price.
I can't be sure about the latest models, but my two iRobot products - a Roomba 650 and a Braava 380t - don't have Wi-Fi connectivity to begin with.
The Roomba has physical buttons on it, which allow you to set a cleaning schedule if you so choose. There's also a small LED display, and a speaker that "says" what's wrong.
The Braava, by contrast, is a dumb-as-bricks device with two buttons - "mop" (which uses mop-like motions) and "sweep" (which uses broom-like motions).
Do they bump into stuff? Yep. Do I call them "dumbass" as I watch them clean? Sure do. But they're otherwise perfectly capable little single-function devices that don't try to do anything more than they really need to do.
What are the odds you can even do that without extensive hardware modifications? If they have hardcoded URLs for the API and the certificates for that, how would you intercept that?
Without rewriting the storage in the robot itself, which would be hard for most people.
My Roomba 530 from 2008(?) still goes strong, even if it looks like a war victim after bumping into too many objects. I've replaced the battery with a nonstandard lithium-ion, did a regrease, and replaced the bristles a few times. It always worked good enough for a midweek cat hair cleaning cycle but could never replace the full vacuum.
We were looking to replace the poor thing in 2017 or so, and found iRobot wanted WiFi connection to upload our floor plans to the cloud. No way, was our reaction, so we bought some aftermarket parts and revived it. I do wonder how well its scratched surface still detects walls.
That's a shame. I have a 600 series and have replace many of it's parts - it's eminently repairable. Maybe that's part of the problem though - if I can repair it, I have no motivation to purchase a replacement device no matter how much "AI" it might have.
/me goes off to buy a bunch of spares from irobot whilst I can
I have an i7 and I've been replacing parts on it for ~5 years now. It'd be a shame to have to get into something else, it really has done a great job of cleaning the house. Like another comment said, I might have to go buy a bunch of spare parts in case they do go under.
I have bought more than 10 Roomba's (all used) over many years. I have slowly moved them around for different jobs, older 5,6,700 series made their way to clean the garage, while newer I, S models are working the upper levels of flooring and carpets.
In the last 5-10 years it looks to me like they had two competing teams internally producing different models. The I,J series compared to the S series, are very different. The mops scooba vs braava.
I really like their designs and repairability but if I had to update I would probably try one of the roborocks they seem to be a lot better.
Every single major player in the space has this feature. Some of the better ones also give you the ability plug directly into your water lines so you never have to refill or dump the mop water.
Explain what you think it means because you have a lot of grammatical errors in all of your posts, there are many vacuums with central bases that deposit their dirt, you don't have to dump them for months, and they are trivial to find in any cursory search of good robovacs.
There's no problems explaining stuff if English isn't your first language, but you don't get to be snarky because of your mistakes.
Question was about robot vacuum that has base hooked up to inlet of central vacuum. Not central base that sucks dirt out of robot and stores it in its own tiny bag.
Two completely different things.
Before criticizing other people grammar, i'll suggest you to invest some effort in practicing reading comprehension. It will greatly help you to keep conversation topical
So you think the the question was about a bad idea that nobody would make because there are central bases with powerful vacuums (one could almost call them central vacuums with an inlet that connects) that suck up the dirt with months of storage. My base is probably the loudest appliance in my house when it is sucking out the dirt with its powerful vacuum.
Nobody makes robot vacuums that hook up to your car or TV either. You are free to buy a hand vac or stick vac for the few places in your home the bot can't reach because it does not make sense to have a bigger vacuum anymore.
Also are you a troll account? The LLM summarized your first three pages of posts
Looking at their writing style, there are several characteristics that stand out:
Occasional missing articles ("a", "the")
Some subject-verb agreement issues
Certain sentence structure patterns that differ from native English
Specific vocabulary choices and phrasing
Their comments about Ukraine suggest some familiarity with the region, particularly in how they discuss specific Ukrainian military events with detail. There's also a comment mentioning Israeli press and Israeli IRS, suggesting possible familiarity with Israel.
While I can't definitively determine their native language, their writing patterns could be consistent with a Slavic language background like Russian or possibly Hebrew. The way they structure some sentences and occasional grammar patterns align with these language families.
Your answer was on the other side completely wrong. and now , you just double down on it instead of admitting that you failed to read and understand question .
Also vacuuming and mopping are the quickest and easiest parts of the whole house cleaning process so it is not like it is saving yourself so much time anyway.
I do not have one, but as a pet owner, it is a tempting proposition. The task might be low effort, but it is enough that I do not want to handle it daily (or even weekly). Having a robot do a daily okay-ish job without intervention is worth something.
> Just a few years ago, iRobot, best known as the maker of the Roomba, was riding high, with annual revenue topping $1 billion; Amazon bid $1.7 billion to add it to the e-commerce giant’s home technology business. But that deal fell through, and now the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company has reported plunging revenue and steep losses, and recently warned investors of “substantial doubt” about its “ability to continue as a going concern.” With its share price down drastically, it’s now worth about $100 billion. How did the creator of the iconic round robot vacuum—which has sold more than 50 million units—get into this mess?
I cannot comprehend these valuations, US$1 billion is a lot of revenue but just because it's an appliance with a bit of technology/software in the products it pushes to P/E > 100, and a P/E of 100 is seen as a "low"? For an appliances company?
The financial markets are extremely broken, anything that peddles being "tech of <placeholder>" becomes an absurdity. A P/E of 30-40 for an appliances maker would be very, very good.
I -think- the $100 billion is a typo. I -think- it's suppose to be ~$100 million.
Anyhow, I don't think its wrong to say (as the article does) that iRobot failed to focus on its core market, but it's also really unfair to iRobot to say should not have attempted to compete in the new product categories (...you just need to look at the product websites for the competitors cited in the article to see that iRobot isn't alone in trying).
Fundamentally, iRobot is competing in a commodity market. That's what home automation/electronics will be. I think you hit it right on the head - this is just another form of appliance.
In the rare event that robovacs manage to traverse the treacherous rug tassels, their algorithm should cause them to stay on that rug and finish it before exiting.
This is one of the clearest example of overzealous regulation leading to the West losing one of its strongest household robot brands to Chinese upstarts.
Robot was not in a particularly financial good shape beforehand, but at least had models that could compete against the Chinese competitors. Because it was running out of cash, it tried to get acquired by Amazon for $1.4B. This was, by no means, an ideal deal, but it would have put the company on stable financial footing, and let it continue as a brand (similar to Alexa or Ring).
However, European and FTC regulators prevented the deal, saying that this was an invasion of home privacy by the big-bad Amazon. Fast forwards three years and today, all of the robot vacuums you buy today are Chinese-made and iRobot is about to declare bankruptcy. We traded off home privacy from Amazon to an upstart Chinese company and lost a leading $1.4B company. Great. I don't know about you, but I trust Amazon more with my data than a Chinese company.
Companies don't have a right to life. Nor would selling to Amazon guarantee the product had any future -- Amazon may pick apart the pieces they want and kill the robot anyway.
And you can choose to not trust Amazon as well as $random$ Chinese company to your data. It's still possible to get an upright vacuum or broom.
Ring is a shell of its former self, has implemented a bunch of things nobody wants, has bricked other products, was giving away camera data to anyone in the government that asked, among other terrible things. It is a brand to be avoided and is never recommended anymore in the smart home community.
We would actually be better off if Ring had died as a company instead of being sold to Amazon.
Roomba is exactly what happens when you make a good product, get a good lead and then fill the company with MBAs and think you'll coast along on name alone instead of innovations.
Nobody buys Roombas because everything else is way better with way more features. They don't even come up in discussions any more, because they can not compete with Dreame, Roborock or any other vacuum with lidar, step up ability, mopping, and now robotic hands.
Not only are competitors products better and cheaper but iRobots products actually got worse over time.
My first roomba was 2017 and I subsequently got 2 more with more supposed sensors and recognition abilities 2020-2023 and they are just awful.
Just the basics of starting, cleaning, and returning to base to charge are handled worse than my 2017 model.
This exactly. My four-year-old i9 effectively does not work. It can't complete a single run without getting stuck on something, complaining about the container being full (it's not), complaining about the base being full (it's not), not being able to empty the container into the base (and making a huge racket with the repeated attempts), or many other things. If I fix one of the issues, it'll soon find something else to complain about.
After twenty years of owning robot vacuums, this is the worst one yet.
I switched to a Roborock a few months ago, and so far, this is genuinely the first robot vacuum I've owned that works 99% of the time. It barely ever gets stuck on things and requires very little maintenance. The maintenance it does require is easy to do and clearly explained.
Perhaps it'll start to break down in a year or so, but so far, so good.
I've got a roborock s6 from 2019 and it's still going very well. I I've had it dismantled a few times, once when the cat pissed on it, once to clean the vacuum motor, and most recently when one of the wheels got clogged. It's really easy to replace individual parts, this is how consumer electronics should be.
Unfortunately I've read the later models are harder to repair, and I would like to upgrade for the better mopping and self emptying.
Does your Roborock get stuck on electrical cords?
I have a Roomba that used to be able to detect cords and roll over them, but at some point it ceased to do that -- and jobs would consistent failed due to it getting stuck.
I'm too lazy to tidy up my cords just for a robot vacuum to run. Would be great if there was one that was intelligent enough to simply avoid cords and other hazards.
It depends. Chords lying on the ground: no. It takes a picture of them and sends it to me to calmly inform me what a slob I am.
But I have a hairdryer that's attached to a wall and whose cord dangles down, and it does sometimes run into that one.
So far I’ve had a Roomba, a Eufy and now a Roborock. The Eufy was quiet but was tearing up our trim and furniture so it got retired. The Roomba tore up trim/furniture, was incredibly loud and it was extremely expensive for having no special add-ons. The Roborock is laser guided, clearly mapped our house to gain efficiency, empties itself and is reasonably quiet - cost about $500. Roomba with some of those and arguably lesser features is several hundred dollars more. iRobot is getting the outcome it built for itself.
>Roomba is exactly what happens when you make a good product, get a good lead and then fill the company with MBAs and think you'll coast along on name alone instead of innovations.
Same with the big German car brands. They put MBAs at the helm in the 90's who outsourced all their tech innovation development to suppliers to lower costs thinking their history, prestige and brand names alone will carry them into the future, and now the Chinese are out-innovating them.
Similar with Intel. When you reach that point it's often too late to turn it round as you're now a sclerotic bloated organization, full off people who coasted and failed upwards for decades and made sure to hire other people just like them.
It is about taste. I still like german car brands. They learn with each iteration. Even the volume knobs returned. Materials are nice. But for sure the other brands are more gimmicky.
My mother in laws Jetta she got brand new a few years ago needs an engine after something like 10 years, both mechanical and electrical. Dies randomly like something electrical. Consumes a quart of oil every few hundred miles and getting worse. This thing was driven regularly but lightly (several times per week but few miles) by a little old lady who took it right to the dealer for any little thing. Oil changes and other maintainance strictly and religeously on schedule and performed by the dealer. The quote for the engine was ridiculous too but I don't remember what it was exactly because I only heard 2nd hand and I wasn't taking notes in prep for a post like this. But they are getting another car rather than fix this one. The rest of the car is in excellent condition, so it's not like some beater, yet it's still not worth doing the engine.
You can see right through my 97 4runner from all the rust and it's running and working fine. Does not drink oil. I neglect the piss out of it. I haven't changed the oil filter in probably 3 years, just add a new quart once or twice a year, probably 5 to 10k miles. It has needed repairs. I put a new starter in a few years ago. Pulled the injectors and had them rebuilt a couple years ago (basically they just clean them and put new screens and o-rings on them). couple hundred bucks each time.
Anecdata, sure. All anyone has is their own experiance.
I think VW are unreliable and expensive to repair and nice looking.
So what is the secret to making an engine that runs forever ? Chevy small blocks were like that. Novas and Malibus just needed regular maintenance.
Inefficiency basically. Burn more fuel for the amount of work output, because of heavier parts, simpler designs, less magic.
I prefer such things so I am not damning them for this, it just is the unfortunate reality. It's a trade-off.
A simple example is adding a turbo increases both power and efficiency, at the cost of more parts, shorter mtbf, and less robustness. Ie aside from just more parts to wear out sooner, the system is less rugged even when new and perfect, more easily incapacitated by a spec of dust, in a machine that doesn't live in a chip fab clean room.
I wouldn't call a volume knob as innovation though. I'm talking more about about battery tech, suspension, self driving, general software and UX, etc
Fair. But for me thats not a distinctor.
(Lately, I saw on the internet this video about cars and their suspension in comparison. And it felt like a throwback to the 2000. The one car that goes over the rails like its flying. Been there, done that. Did not go into the mass market for reasons. But reminds me, how good competition is, maybe old ideas will be tried again and this time the ppl want it.)
i bought month ago roomba j9+ because I wanted robot vacuum without mopping
I bought a robot vacuum for the first time last fall. When searching for an appliance and reading test reports, it quickly became clear that I had the most faith in Chinese manufacturers in this product category - what a paradigm shift! And this despite the fact that well-known German brands such as Kärcher and Vorwerk also offer such appliances - when it comes to “classic” vacuum cleaners and household appliances in general, it would never have occurred to me to swap the reputation and quality of these brands for Chinese competitors. Times are changing, German manufacturers are simply left behind when it comes to such new innovations. (I'm German, hence my initial preference for German manufacturers - it's probably similar to iRobot for Americans)
When the iRobot servers go down, it will be a brick, so now is the time to reverse the protocols and figure out how to control it over the local subnet. Besides, there is no justification for connecting it to the public internet, which is an unnecessary DOS risk and moderate privacy risk. I buy no hardware that requires a persistent service to function. I made an exception for this, and now must pay the hackers price.
If you really want zero network theres always Valetudo, https://valetudo.cloud/
But most of the vacuums want internet access for setup, but then work completely fine being blocked from the internet after.
I can't be sure about the latest models, but my two iRobot products - a Roomba 650 and a Braava 380t - don't have Wi-Fi connectivity to begin with.
The Roomba has physical buttons on it, which allow you to set a cleaning schedule if you so choose. There's also a small LED display, and a speaker that "says" what's wrong.
The Braava, by contrast, is a dumb-as-bricks device with two buttons - "mop" (which uses mop-like motions) and "sweep" (which uses broom-like motions).
Do they bump into stuff? Yep. Do I call them "dumbass" as I watch them clean? Sure do. But they're otherwise perfectly capable little single-function devices that don't try to do anything more than they really need to do.
What are the odds you can even do that without extensive hardware modifications? If they have hardcoded URLs for the API and the certificates for that, how would you intercept that?
Without rewriting the storage in the robot itself, which would be hard for most people.
My Roomba 530 from 2008(?) still goes strong, even if it looks like a war victim after bumping into too many objects. I've replaced the battery with a nonstandard lithium-ion, did a regrease, and replaced the bristles a few times. It always worked good enough for a midweek cat hair cleaning cycle but could never replace the full vacuum.
We were looking to replace the poor thing in 2017 or so, and found iRobot wanted WiFi connection to upload our floor plans to the cloud. No way, was our reaction, so we bought some aftermarket parts and revived it. I do wonder how well its scratched surface still detects walls.
How much of the issue is long replacement cycles? No wonder companies introduce planned obsolescence.
If they sold replacement parts and batteries we'd be fine and they're have their recurring revenue.
That's a shame. I have a 600 series and have replace many of it's parts - it's eminently repairable. Maybe that's part of the problem though - if I can repair it, I have no motivation to purchase a replacement device no matter how much "AI" it might have.
/me goes off to buy a bunch of spares from irobot whilst I can
I have an i7 and I've been replacing parts on it for ~5 years now. It'd be a shame to have to get into something else, it really has done a great job of cleaning the house. Like another comment said, I might have to go buy a bunch of spare parts in case they do go under.
I have bought more than 10 Roomba's (all used) over many years. I have slowly moved them around for different jobs, older 5,6,700 series made their way to clean the garage, while newer I, S models are working the upper levels of flooring and carpets.
In the last 5-10 years it looks to me like they had two competing teams internally producing different models. The I,J series compared to the S series, are very different. The mops scooba vs braava. I really like their designs and repairability but if I had to update I would probably try one of the roborocks they seem to be a lot better.
> With its share price down drastically, it’s now worth about $100 billion.
Typo in the article? A company worth $100 billion must be doing something right I'd say
Yeah, "billion" should be "million" in that sentence.
Anyway market cap is a fiction loosely related to worth, if at all.
Stock high at $137 2021/02/08, currently $2.18.
"A company worth $100 billion must be doing something right I'd say" I'd say you're wrong.
They’re talking about cheap Chinese alternatives, implying that Roombas are made in the U.S.—but in reality, Roombas are manufactured in Malaysia.
Has anyone made a Roomba (or clone) yet that plugs into a central vac inlet?
Every single major player in the space has this feature. Some of the better ones also give you the ability plug directly into your water lines so you never have to refill or dump the mop water.
show me one that plugs into central vacuum
We aren't genAI.
well, whoever i was responding to, was most definitely hallucinating answer. so chances are that he is at least llm
Explain what you think it means because you have a lot of grammatical errors in all of your posts, there are many vacuums with central bases that deposit their dirt, you don't have to dump them for months, and they are trivial to find in any cursory search of good robovacs.
There's no problems explaining stuff if English isn't your first language, but you don't get to be snarky because of your mistakes.
Question was about robot vacuum that has base hooked up to inlet of central vacuum. Not central base that sucks dirt out of robot and stores it in its own tiny bag.
Two completely different things.
Before criticizing other people grammar, i'll suggest you to invest some effort in practicing reading comprehension. It will greatly help you to keep conversation topical
So you think the the question was about a bad idea that nobody would make because there are central bases with powerful vacuums (one could almost call them central vacuums with an inlet that connects) that suck up the dirt with months of storage. My base is probably the loudest appliance in my house when it is sucking out the dirt with its powerful vacuum.
Nobody makes robot vacuums that hook up to your car or TV either. You are free to buy a hand vac or stick vac for the few places in your home the bot can't reach because it does not make sense to have a bigger vacuum anymore.
Also are you a troll account? The LLM summarized your first three pages of posts
Looking at their writing style, there are several characteristics that stand out:
Occasional missing articles ("a", "the") Some subject-verb agreement issues Certain sentence structure patterns that differ from native English Specific vocabulary choices and phrasing
Their comments about Ukraine suggest some familiarity with the region, particularly in how they discuss specific Ukrainian military events with detail. There's also a comment mentioning Israeli press and Israeli IRS, suggesting possible familiarity with Israel. While I can't definitively determine their native language, their writing patterns could be consistent with a Slavic language background like Russian or possibly Hebrew. The way they structure some sentences and occasional grammar patterns align with these language families.
Question was great.
Your answer was on the other side completely wrong. and now , you just double down on it instead of admitting that you failed to read and understand question .
It would be nice if you didn’t have to reconfigure your whole home to make sense for disc shaped robotic vacuuming.
This.
Also vacuuming and mopping are the quickest and easiest parts of the whole house cleaning process so it is not like it is saving yourself so much time anyway.
I do not have one, but as a pet owner, it is a tempting proposition. The task might be low effort, but it is enough that I do not want to handle it daily (or even weekly). Having a robot do a daily okay-ish job without intervention is worth something.
Wait why..? Most vacuums sold now make it easy to create no-go zones. The only thing I occasionally have to deal with is loose cables wreaking havoc
> Just a few years ago, iRobot, best known as the maker of the Roomba, was riding high, with annual revenue topping $1 billion; Amazon bid $1.7 billion to add it to the e-commerce giant’s home technology business. But that deal fell through, and now the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company has reported plunging revenue and steep losses, and recently warned investors of “substantial doubt” about its “ability to continue as a going concern.” With its share price down drastically, it’s now worth about $100 billion. How did the creator of the iconic round robot vacuum—which has sold more than 50 million units—get into this mess?
I cannot comprehend these valuations, US$1 billion is a lot of revenue but just because it's an appliance with a bit of technology/software in the products it pushes to P/E > 100, and a P/E of 100 is seen as a "low"? For an appliances company?
The financial markets are extremely broken, anything that peddles being "tech of <placeholder>" becomes an absurdity. A P/E of 30-40 for an appliances maker would be very, very good.
I -think- the $100 billion is a typo. I -think- it's suppose to be ~$100 million.
Anyhow, I don't think its wrong to say (as the article does) that iRobot failed to focus on its core market, but it's also really unfair to iRobot to say should not have attempted to compete in the new product categories (...you just need to look at the product websites for the competitors cited in the article to see that iRobot isn't alone in trying).
Fundamentally, iRobot is competing in a commodity market. That's what home automation/electronics will be. I think you hit it right on the head - this is just another form of appliance.
Fuck.
Thank you, I should have checked it myself instead of just trusting the article... Doh moment.
I think they meant $100 million. The current market cap is ~$67 million
Seems like currently consumer robotics companies are being valued like consumer electronics. Having AI doesn’t help the valuation.
Roombas are incompatible with good taste (otherwise known as Persian or oriental woven rugs with tassles)
In the rare event that robovacs manage to traverse the treacherous rug tassels, their algorithm should cause them to stay on that rug and finish it before exiting.
This is one of the clearest example of overzealous regulation leading to the West losing one of its strongest household robot brands to Chinese upstarts.
Robot was not in a particularly financial good shape beforehand, but at least had models that could compete against the Chinese competitors. Because it was running out of cash, it tried to get acquired by Amazon for $1.4B. This was, by no means, an ideal deal, but it would have put the company on stable financial footing, and let it continue as a brand (similar to Alexa or Ring).
However, European and FTC regulators prevented the deal, saying that this was an invasion of home privacy by the big-bad Amazon. Fast forwards three years and today, all of the robot vacuums you buy today are Chinese-made and iRobot is about to declare bankruptcy. We traded off home privacy from Amazon to an upstart Chinese company and lost a leading $1.4B company. Great. I don't know about you, but I trust Amazon more with my data than a Chinese company.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-irobot-abandon-... https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23379036/amazon-irobot-ro...
Companies don't have a right to life. Nor would selling to Amazon guarantee the product had any future -- Amazon may pick apart the pieces they want and kill the robot anyway.
And you can choose to not trust Amazon as well as $random$ Chinese company to your data. It's still possible to get an upright vacuum or broom.
Ring is a shell of its former self, has implemented a bunch of things nobody wants, has bricked other products, was giving away camera data to anyone in the government that asked, among other terrible things. It is a brand to be avoided and is never recommended anymore in the smart home community.
We would actually be better off if Ring had died as a company instead of being sold to Amazon.
I don't understand - how was overzealous regulation the thing that held back iRobot?