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I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.
It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.
The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.
I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.
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The promise didn't pan out for us. You have to prepare and cordon off the floor, and the unit gets stuck half the time. Somehow it's exactly the right height to get wedged under furniture.
There was a video of a iRobot store employee sweeping up at closing time. I’m not surprised they are bankrupt.
This is my take:
If the EU was concerned enough about Amazon taking them over in early 2024 to block the deal, I'm still concerned about a foreign owner in 2026...
I remember the "upgrade for pets" option, which... didn't work. After buying the maxed out version I realized that the product simply had a long, long way to go - but iRobot did nothing with it other than launch new segments like "upgrade for vision based mapping" etc.
They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.
Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.
The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.
Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
Rodney Brooks is first and foremost a scientist. I doubt that he had a hand in the operations and planning at Roomba.
Can you explain the Tim Ferris jab, what’s the story there?
Is there a connection between Tim Ferriss and Roomba, or is this just a joke about Brooks having a 4-hour workweek?
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.