Wall Street ruined the Roomba and then blamed Lina Khan

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.

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.

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.

I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.

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.

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.

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?

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.

IOW, he doesn't share your partisan views.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How did they shut it down?

...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.

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).

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).

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.

The FTC properly weighted known bads more highly than potential bads.

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

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.

Just like you. When it happens to a person we call it "cancer".