At what point should an acquisition be allowed on the sake of something being able to continue to exist and possibly save jobs? Sure there would have almost guaranteed be job cuts with the acquisition due to redundancy, but would it have been the same amount?
However on the flip side, it feels like iRobot has been stagnating for years and entering some weird categories. I still fail to see why they entered the air purifier market and them selling a stick vacuum next to their iRobot is sure one way to say "our expensive robot doesn't do everything we claim it does".
I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing. It is shocking how much better it is, when it was in the middle of a clean and I could tell it to go start a different clean and it just did it? It didn't complain or anything, I shouldn't be surprised by this but after the experience with iRobot feeling like it stands in my way every time this felt like magic.
It genuinely makes me sad to see iRobot not be what they used to be, it feels like they got complacent with Roomba.
IMO, probably never. I think this would open too many shenanigans of running a possible acquisition into the ground or attempt to lobby whatever government agency would regulate this.
At some point, to make rules easy to enforce, you have to absorb some collateral damage.
> I finally ditched my iRobot for a Roborock a couple months ago and it's been amazing.
I'm not saying those two sentences are totally incompatible, but Roborock's home page at https://us.roborock.com/ is basically half divided between "Robot Vacuums" and "Cordless Vacuum Cleaners"
Look at what Kroger is doing with Albertson's for an example. If that merger fails, it's very likely Albertson's will go bankrupt because the shareholders looted the company of all their assets to ensure it can only survive if it's acquired
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/11/03/albertson...
The cloud companies will count as TBTF too for the same reason. Although it's harder to see how Amazon might get into a "we'll have to switch the datacenters off tomorrow unless we get bailed out" financial position", since it's easier for them to trade as a going concern, if there was a risk of that happening they would definitely get a bailout.
Also, remember that the bailouts were in almost all cases loans.
But what actually happens now is that iRobot lays off its core staff in a desperate attempt to avoid insolvency. The regulators could wish all they want that iRoomba stay a competitive player in this space, but businesses don't run on wishes and rainbows.
Bought two sharks for $300 each. Not quite as good, but so much cheaper. And doesn’t require bags.
I like the simplicity.
The early ones were noteworthy for being novel, but (IMO as an early adopter) weren’t very good at cleaning. About ten years later I experienced someone else’s (then) modern Roomba, and it was still essentially the same crappy product, randomly banging into walls and struggling with carpet edges.
When the Roborock appeared with LIDAR, it was like the future in comparison, and frankly what Roomba should have already delivered years before.
When an established company with a big market share and opportunity for a technology lead is so out-innovated, it suggests that something is fundamentally rotten.
LIDAR is indeed a game changer, but Roborock was far from the first manufacturer to use it in botvacs.
The first Roborock with LIDAR was released in 2019 and I remember getting a Neato botvac with LIDAR in the early 2010s.
LIDAR is clearly superior. There’s a reason every reasonable competitor is using it, even on very cheap models.
I’d be happy to go back to them but I’m not touching them again until they have LIDAR.
For example, see Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space station tech and then Sierra Space's tech. I don't have any inside knowledge, but I'd imagine the path Sierra is on is likely one similar to the above strategy.
I love my Roomba, it’s been truly a life-changing invention for me and my go-to mental construct for how robots can improve our lives and how good design can be very simple yet effective. But I probably bought it used on eBay and I continue to buy batteries every 5-10 years for it on eBay when it needs a new one.
For a household product that runs autonomously throughout my house and interacts with many surfaces, and with small kids in the house, I want a reputable supplier, not just whiz bang features and a slick app.
Maybe Roborock is that, but there is so much opacity when dealing with Chinese companies even in cases where the govt is not involved.
If the company is on the verge of closing, clearly there is something wrong with the business model. So for it to actually save jobs they have to first have the 1.7 billion that Amazon was going to pay and then have enough capital and a business reason that makes the acquisition make sense.
There are not many companies like that out there, particularly for a company like iRobot. There was synergy between iRobot and Amazon.
I am not advocating for a monopoly, but clearly another company wasn't stepping up to take amazon's place.
What happens if they get taken over by Amazon? Investors get a big exit, and employees hold on to their jobs for a bit longer (before the inevitable layoff). Amazon then uses its massive retail power to push an inferior product and edge out the smaller companies doing better work and competing on merit, leaving the space worse for everyone.
1. Prove you can do something amazing 2. Raise a bunch of capital to scale it, betting on future revenue 3. Deliver! Great product, stellar growth, soaring revenue, re-invest in product 4. Flood of copycat competitors, drives up acquisition costs, eliminates higher price point, revenue tanks 5. Pivot. Try to sell another story, build the start of another product leap, loose traction in a new way, pivot. 6. Seek an acquisition before the music ends 7. FTC
In other words, product development (esp. app + hardware) is expensive, difficult, and constantly changing.
We don’t have a capitalist system competing on product merit but acquisition arbitrage. In almost all cases the inferior product wins.
Only if your definition of capitalism includes a robust antitrust component (which mine does, but I know I differ from the mean here).
Never? The entire point of private companies is that they take risk on themselves. If we have to bail them out we might as well just nationalize them. See: the entire american airline industry.
Amazon bought Eero, yet I haven’t seen other WiFi router companies go out of business.
Amazon bought Ring, then a competitor was so successful that Amazon bought Blink.
This notion that Amazon’s acquisition would put competitors out of business seems to be a weird dream. Especially when it is known an easier path to “unfairly compete” would be to just create an Amazon-labeled robotic vacuum and put that on the market.
These acquisitions tend to come with huge layoffs anyway.
It seems Roomba was just selling on it's brand name.
It’s hardly a good thing that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. soak up so many businesses into their already vast portfolios.
What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies.
Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV.
Or Nest integrating with Google Home
Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo.
There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.
I was confused by this because most rankings say Volkswagen is the biggest company in Europe, but it looks like LVMH is currently #2 by market cap (behind Novo Nordisk, which I assume is flying high thanks to the semaglutide craze). Considering that #3 is ASML, I'm not sure this ranking especially supports your narrative.
That BioNTech is pretty cool too.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/973297/largest-european-...
Mao, durring the cultural revolution thought the same thing. That villages could be doing all their own metal work. No one needs a major steel or iron works so break those up and let things be produced locally.
It backfired spectacularly.
There are things that can only be done at scale (steel). There are things that you can let have more linear growth as you scale (accounting), IT.
You get very interesting things when companies get very large. Bell labs, gave us unix (that ATT gave away cause it was a monopoly). Xerox gave us the modern GUI. ML foundations emerged out of google. The funding for 23 and me came from google founders and helped push squencing (capital into that market).
Innovation tends to come from taking smart people throwing piles of money at them, and letting them do their thing.
This was the realm of the aristocracy, then the university, then the government and now it's in the hands of private business. Everyone may hate on musk but rockets that land is progress that got made because he got stupidly rich and beat the incumbants.
If you want something different, you can have that. You can start your own company, run it in the style of Mondragon (cool corp go check them out) and claw your way to the top.
I think they should be assumed harmful, and burden of proof should be on the acquirer to demonstrate public good.
Larger companies can get better deals from their suppliers. It can be a nice alternative to bankruptcy for a company which is unprofitable on its own. It would allow for integrations which would be all but impossible with separate companies.
Of course in practice it rarely works out like that. Megacorps usually do acquisitions to get rid of competition or to obtain technology. The smaller company is almost always completely gutted within a few years, to the detriment of their original customer base.
If Facebook and Google have a duopoly on online ads, and businesses in India and Saudi Arabia and Russia and Europe who want to advertise online are sending money to America, and the companies are making lots of their American employees rich - that sounds like a good thing for America?
Alexa in your vaccuum, duh.
If history is any guide, then there is negative public benefit in the vast majority of cases.
In other words, capitalism.
Generalized statements are dumb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...
Of the entire top-100, there are maaaybe 10 or 20 in a monopoly-like position, and that's mostly because they intentionally dug out a very specific niche.
Monopolies abound! /s
Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace
I wish US regulators would do better.
You have a whole bunch of Chinese companies fighting it out on the market (as the founding fathers would have wanted for US!), offering better and better products, leaving Roombas in the dust. While iRobot sleeps on their laurels, barely innovates and at best is only capable of solving their flaccid inability to compete by... being sold to a monopolist which can push it via their store. That's what they wanted.
If US would still have this kind of healthy market of multiple (smaller) companies competing on product, not IP lawsuits and patents, the government wouldn't have to enact foreign sanctions to defend the economy.
Hope it's just temporary.
The reason VC funding is drying up, big unicorns aren't going public and acquisitions are halted is that investors are actually starting to drill into the numbers now, and finding nothing but hot air.
Which should be the goal. A major acquisition should have always been seen as a last resort, only preferable to going out of business.
Startups hoping to cash out by selling to a competitor is its own kind of silliness in the first place and was largely fueled by lax regulation environments and 0% interest cash.
What ever happened to building durable businesses as an explicit goal
There's just no world in which the market leader ought to be able to buy their #1 competitor, particularly in a deal where the economics ($10b on $300m rev) only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. I have no idea what these folks were thinking.
The next up cycle in speculative behavior won't follow until after interest rates hit the floor again (inevitable).
If you work at a temporarily-not-an-unicorn, no antimonopoly institutions care about you.
I think the ecosystem is healthier for Figma and Adobe remaining separate.
"We will acquire you for 2 million shares of VOO"
or something like that. If the only reason is that it's an unorthodox way of doing a deal, I say do it anyway and forge a way into the future of M&A.
Easier to pretend they're doing it by choice rather than by force of law, which is finally able to reach them, due to the "social correction" of no longer worshiping tech companies.
Furthermore, it is just common sense. If you signed a purchase contract for $1.5 Billion, and it is now worth $0.5 billion, no rational actor would want that deal to go through.
Now maybe these companies are likely just mismanaged and the cost of North American engineering is too high? That said, it still seems like there is a structural problem here that very few hybrid software-hardware companies succeed.
I wonder how much money is burned in the economy just paying people to write EULAs, laws and service agreements to more effectively avoid liability and screw over customers vs. how many is actualy going into improving products and services?
Your call out to BYD is a good one, because it is conceivable that even western-made cars will be made non competitive in 10 years and it seems that we are sleeping through the news (or even encouraging it). I hope I'm wrong, but the road ahead is filled with challenge because the direction is fundamentally wrong, and it will take a lot of effort to reverse course, if that is even possible.
(Okay we do, see CHIPS Act, but too little too late?)
The purpose of subsiding what are zombie companies is to maximize employment to ensure internal stability. The wins these companies show are propaganda wins only and don’t make the country more competitive. Foreign manufacturing is also migrating out of China at an alarming rate as shown by falling exports and GDP growth.
None of the development in the Chinese technology sector is sustainable. These companies would never survive on their own without subsidies and are dependent on them. It’s a cascading failure waiting to happen in the Chinese economy and will likely be a global shock. At least the Americans may appear to take longer to develop winning companies but once they do they tend to be sustainable and long lasting as organic enterprises.
Edit: The American free market is working as intended because it rightly values robotic vacuums as useless devices.
This seems like a big statement, can other experts comment?
Think what goes into a hair dryer? Exterior design, looks good and functional. How you make the plastic cover, do the plastic injection molding? How you design all the internal parts, fan, motor housing, heating wire, power circuits, micro-controllers etc, and make sure everything fits. Some companies even do individual components themselves, like the brushless motor, or there is a Chinese supplier that makes them, which provides much faster time to response. Then do the testing for each component, electric, heat, water, moisture testing. Then design a mass manufacturing system with automation and human labor that achieves really high yield and low wasted materials. This is the hardest part, its easy to make a hair dryer by hand taking 100 human hours and make sure it works. It's much harder to make 1M hair dryers per month, that is going to be used in all sorts of environments and with all kind of abuse, make sure they work well for a number of years so customers don't return them, or you go bankrupt from recalls and warranty, and make sure you only have to throw out the absolute smallest number of manufacturing defects, and really control your cost structure so you still make a profit when importers are squeezing your price. Then the supply chain and logistics, shipping from suppliers and shipping to customers. Then create a number of products for different markets. China can manufacture for cheap, but people don't realize manufacture for cheap and at massive quantities is a technology itself. It's also management, business process, even company and worker culture. China doesn't have the cheapest labor cost. It's the combination of everything that produces a physical product with the level of quality, fit and finish at the price point.
This is an American company I believe considering they are taking privacy seriously
As someone who doesn’t care at all about stack ranking or any nation’s “national security”, as a consumer, more competition, and more and cheaper products is a simple and uncomplicated win.
Almost all of my favorite companies are in Shenzhen presently. I would move there if I could do so easily.
All my favorite devices were designed/engineered either in Japan or in the USA. I'd take good engineering over cheap manufacturing every time. And we could do with lower number of devices. While they are probably made in the same factory, I'd love a focus on quality instead of price.
countries compete, albeit on different rules - having a monopoly on violence and a centrally controlled money printer tends to do that - so your dream of 'just pure free market competition' can only ever be that - a dream.
I’m very weary of buying a robot vacuum with a camera from a Chinese company. I don’t fully trust iRobot, but I trust them much more than I trust Chinese brands.
I also couldn’t see myself going back to a robot vacuum without a camera. After I got kids our old Neato vacuum robot got very little use since it always required that everything was picked up off the floor.
That being said I’m quite frustrated by my new J9. It’s supposed to have a feature called SmartScrub, but it’s not in the app. The robot is also supposed to drive back to the base to refill its water tank, but it hasn’t done that a single time since we bought it a month ago. The combination of vacuuming and mopping is also a bit unfortunate since it sucks up a lot of humid air when passing over areas that it’s already mopped, causing a buildup of wet-ish dirt in the air duct.
I'll omit the competitor that I use now. I'll just say that it has a base that empties the robot dust bin, refills the clean tank, empties the dirty water tank, washes and dries the mop. And the mop actually looks like something that resembles a mop (and rotates), it's far better than the 'swiffer' kind of thing that the Braava has, or that the J9 has. I don't see the same wet dirt issue because the navigation takes care of that.
It does have a camera and the parent company is indeed Chinese.
Neato is even worse and their robots aren't much better than they were 5 years ago. They started out really strong but any improvements were marginal.
I realized I was spending 30-60 minutes debugging and manually charging our roombas for each (usually aborted) run. Once the Amazon acquisition was announced, I realized it meant that they'd inevitably send upskirt angle shots of the family to Bezos for ad targeting and forwarding to local law enforcement agencies. That was the final straw.
Supposedly, the Chinese ones are slightly better for privacy because you can MITM their backend cloud connection and point it at a local version of whatever service the robot thinks it needs in order to work.
I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work. So were the older, dumber roombas (especially the square mops from the Mint acquisition). YMMV.
The _exact_ same problem Braava has. Whenever the wheels collect a small amount of dust, they slip too much and the robot can't climb. I actually added sandpaper to the base to help with the grip. Seems like such an easy fix; it's mind boggling that the same issue is present across models, for years!
> I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work.
Yeah, although, if you have pets, even a not so reliable robot will massively cut the amount of cleaning you have to manually do.
The robot would get clogged frequently. A few parts would just stop working. Went through 2 replacements before calling it quits.
Switched to Roborock and haven’t looked back. Going on 1 yr now.
I think most of the competitors will use a camera for object detection and a LiDAR for navigation, since LiDAR is faster than VSLAM.
Seems like an easy company to replicate (and it has been too)
A foreign entity would have no obstructions to using collected information as ruthlessly as possible, whereas even a corrupt/politically-motivated/unrestrained domestic entity would have to weigh the comparatively massive risk of being implicated or exposed.
“what are they going to do with it?”
If you have valuable information or responsibilities, that could be motivation enough for foreign agents to seek leverage. If you don’t, then it’s equally fantastic to think the CIA gives a shit about you for some reason.
Don't forget – if someone unlocks your door and leaves it ajar, then anyone can get in.
Chinese companies are not well known for their cyber security practices. Even if you don't care how they could use this information (either individually, or in the aggregate across millions of people), you should also care about who else would be able to hack into the feed.
You don't want a "kia boyz" situation with a camera in your home. Imagine some kid finds an easily exploitable vulnerability and releases some software allowing anyone to tap into your camera? This has happened with security cameras already. It's even worse these days with cloud connected equipment, all you need is a vulnerability in the cloud command and control.
And, although most US agencies are not allowed to collect data from citizens in US soil, they can (and have) collected data procured from elsewhere.
The bottom line is, the same information can end up much, much closer to you.
I have a few iRobot vacuums that are several years old and never get used due to ineffectiveness. It is easier to spend 5 minutes manually vacuuming vs letting the iRobot wander around randomly for an hour and still not clean well.
They are. Xiaomi owned Roborock is years ahead of the big western competition (iRobot and Neato) in terms of cleaning chops and value for money.
Privacy though, is another matter that never gets benchmarked, but there's also no guarantee yet that the lesser western brands will pinky promise to keep your data private and not sell it to advertisers for money or leave it in some insecure S3 bucket for hackers to steal because they outsourced the SW dev work to the cheapest body shop, which is the norm in SW development for consumer electronics.
At least on most Roborock models you can root them and run them locally via Valetudo insted of their proprietary cloud, so you get the best of all worlds: cleaning, value, privacy.
The newest Roborock vacuums don’t even have cameras. On purpose. Unlike iRobot. So it seems China is actually ahead in privacy. Which is sad.
In practice, how is it to actually run Valetudo on a Roborock? I have one of the supported models but quickly noped out when I skimmed through the "short these jumpers on the PCB" part of the installation instructions
Kind of surprising, but it also got me thinking about how many of those options aren't available in western products.
Privacy is why I would never own a vacuum (or most any other device) that requires an internet connection. For me, the only benchmark required is "does it have to connect to a server somewhere to work?"
One of the reason I never connected my Neato is that I had no interest in having a map of my flat uploaded to the company's servers.
I have had the same experience with an i3+, which is just a vacuum but with a self-empty base. This i3+ originally didn't have room mapping but they added it after I purchased it. It goes home to charge and empty itself and cleans in a reasonable pattern.
I've previously owned the 350 series and some other similar one and they were more toy than utility.
My Roborock S7 is light years ahead of my girlfriends iRobot, which just drives around running into everything, gets stuck pretty much every time it runs.
Meanwhile the Roborock maps my whole home and plans a route. I trust it enough to have it set to run every week automatically without intervention. The only work I do is to empty it and add water to the mop tank.
Maybe someone else will buy them to extract the last few $$s before turning out the lights. sigh
iRobot has not innovated their products in any meaningful way in over a decade.
This company is doing the reverse, putting self driving tech in vacuum bot...
But then again, they make some weird claims further down like:
It’s normal for a robot to not re-dock from time to time.
Yeah, I was looking for a robot vacuum a couple years ago and figured surely Roomba was the top of the line. Nope, not even close. The big killer, like you mentioned, is not having Lidar, so instead the Roomba has to bounce off of walls and obstacles repeatedly in order to map the room.
I ended up buying a Dreametech Z10 Pro, which I combined with a rooted firmware and Valetudo. No more phoning home to China!
To be fair, though, I don't really care about the speed of vacuuming operations. It's easy to schedule it when I'm out of the house, and it's not like I'm paying the robot an hourly wage.
That reminds me of a certain businessman that also owns an EV company...
I don’t really know why this deal was blocked, the competition seems to be doing pretty good.
China, where the government promotes local monopolies and sets unreasonable hurdles to foreign competitors? That China?
* Lucid - bankrupt. Nobody really needed another LISP startup.
* Rethink Robotics - bankrupt. Their "cobots" were not very useful.
* iRobot - in trouble.
Amazon and iRobot had some integration. "Alexa, tell Roomba to vacuum in front of the counter", says the iRobot site. Did that actually work?
It made more sense for Amazon, giving Amazon a mobile spy in everyone's house. Amazon's last attempt at that, their indoor drone, never shipped.[1]
However, I also don't think it's success can be attributed to Brooks either. He's not very good for much of anything, except making himself be known as a famous roboticist. The company was successful due to other folks there. It is failing for the same reason.
Brooks was a fine figurehead, but that doesn't make a successful company.
I would think Lucid was quite successful with their Lisp. A bunch of companies based their Lisp on Lucid CL (IBM, SUN, DEC, HP, ...).
IMO there's no valid reason to allow a company the size of Amazon to make acquisitions, and instead the conversation should be about urgently trying to break Amazon up.
TBH, it looks like the worst possible outcome.
Are those people for real?
Mr. Zapolsky may want to seek out a new career...
In comedy.
Freedom is slavery.
Acquisition is competition.
Is it about owning every home device? Maybe they'll turn the vacuum into a security robot to integrate with Ring /s
> On 6 July 2023, the Commission opened an in-depth investigation to assess if Amazon's acquisition of iRobot may
> (i) restrict competition in the market for the manufacturing and supply of RVCs; and
> (ii) allow Amazon to strengthen its position in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and/or other data-related markets.
> As a result of this in-depth investigation, the Commission is concerned that Amazon may restrict competition in the European Economic Area (‘EEA')-wide and/or national markets for RVCs, by hampering rival RVC suppliers' ability to effectively compete.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
The key insight I took away was, the FTC doesn't want to approve M&A from large cap corporations, period.
Seems like the EC just declared that Amazon is no longer allowed to make any acquisitions of companies that make products. At the very least they left a pretty high bar for Amazon to get over for any future acquisitions.
Does that seem contradictory? Consider that their innovations, what they're known for, lies in robotic morphology. iRobot's Cool Stuff Museum in their HQ has some groundbreaking robots which still are awesome (like a ocean buoy robot powered by the waves). They cut their teeth doing research grants and developing military robots. Their ethos was rooted in service; when 9/11 happened, they packed up a prototype robot and drove to Ground Zero to use that robot to search for survivors in the rubble. Still, their military robots were controlled by humans, and the original Roombas turned at random angles to fully clean a room.
Around 8 years ago, iRobot spun off their military and commercial robot divisions into independent companies (Endeavor Robotics and Ava Robotics, respectively; Endeavor was eventually acquired by FLIR) to focus exclusively on the consumer market. The consumer robotics industry was shifting, so iRobot needed to change. They bought Evolution Robotics to acquire computer vision IP and started doing research in that area. Advanced software capabilities were now important, so they shipped vSLAM (monocular SLAM representing state using pose graphs; they've published quite a few papers on this), persistent mapping, automatic room segmentation, and much more. They kept researching new consumer robots, including a home security robot which didn't make it out of the lab.
The thing is, consumer robots will ALWAYS be a luxury item. Nobody NEEDS a Roomba, and the iRobot folks understood that reality. So, iRobot leaned into that and worked to make the Roomba the premium option: a refined industrial design language with their main products appealed better to the high-end market, and they released an autoevac Roomba. I'm guessing that their primary market segment saturated, so they figured they'd release new physical products, but that puts them in direct competition with Dyson (who utterly failed to produce a good robot vacuum cleaner, mind you), so good luck there. I don't believe iRobot ever resorted to selling their customer data, which I'm sure Chinese robotics companies regularly do to increase revenue.
I also think iRobot's failure to launch their robot lawnmower really hurt them, probably hurting morale than anything else. Tons of people worked on that project, and the technology stack was genuinely impressive for seven years ago (using UWB beacons placed in the yard for localization and mapping). UWB was still an emerging technology in 2017 (still a few years before AirTags released). It makes me sad they couldn't ship it in the US, since the technology was better than virtually all other robot lawnmowers on the market.
iRobot manufactures their robots in China, but if I remember correctly, that's exclusively because the Chinese restrict exports on key electrical components like resistors. There was a desire to onshore manufacturing, but because the Chinese cornered the market, it was basically impossible to make the costs work out.
The bottom line is, the robot vacuum market is basically a solved problem, and there's a very good reason that floor cleaning robots continue to be the only viable consumer robot product.
I have fond memories of those good and kind iRoboteers. I wish iRobot all the best as they move forward and try to find a well-constrained everyday problem which can be solved by a low-cost robot.
Well, it was not! It had similar effectiveness to the Eufy, but lacked manual controls. It also refused to go places the Eufy would (like a dark carpet) and constantly tried to return home after only a cursory clean.
That kind of turned me off on Roomba. Not saying this is why they might be having trouble, but it reflects my experience and feelings toward them.
Has anyone heard about them? It apparently offers complete privacy by doing all computes on device.
Might it have included the same significant layoffs, or OEMing cheaper Chinese hardware while keeping the brand?
“As a consumer I am proud, delighted and outright tickled pink that this acquisition has failed as having competition in the market will, in the long term, result in better products and lower prices”