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I've always wondered how iRobot hasn't been more successful. They have a cool name, brand recognition, first-mover advantage. It's been nearly 20 years since th

I've always wondered how iRobot hasn't been more successful. They have a cool name, brand recognition, first-mover advantage. It's been nearly 20 years since their IPO. I would have expected by now that robots would have taken over more household cleaning tasks, but it doesn't seem like the technology has improved much in the past two decades. I gave up on my roomba because it would always get stuck in something before it could finish cleaning. I now use a Dyson stick vac.

soco 4y ago
Maybe they were so successful that some MBA decided to maximize shareholder value by cutting on superfluous R&D?
- _ea1k 4y ago
  That seems to be the Neato story right now.
criley2 4y ago
The technology has come a long way in these years and the modern models are pretty good devices. I use a Miele canister vac for the deep cleans but I also have a Eufy and a Roborock robot vaccum, one does the random bouncing and the other uses LIDAR to map and clean intentionally, and they're both great. I run them several times a week and the amount of stuff they pull out of the carpet, rugs and off the hard floors is incredible. I would never bust out the Miele several times a week.
pelorat 4y ago
They lost because the competition is better. Roborock and Ecovacs are superior devices to any of iRobots' offerings.
theplumber 4y ago
Their robots started to suck after a while ! They are more interested in extracting more from their customers than creating better robots. Best example is their mopping robot that they try to market using a kind of "subscription" model with proprietary pads. The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.
- julianlam 4y ago
  > The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release. Are you buying multiple robots over time? Christ, and here I am thinking $1000 CAD is a lot of money.
  - theplumber 4y ago
    I will keep the roborock for a while as it seems to be mature enough and checks all/most of the boxes. I sold the old robots for 59-60% of their value. The reasons for my upgrade path was: better nav, mopping and self cleaning. Roborock does all 3, the 3rd is not perfect so I guess I will upgrade it once more (after 2 more iterations to make sure they fix properly)
  - rasz 4y ago
    Selling stuff you no longer use is a thing. Not everyone just throws stuff out, or donates to goodwill.
- malfist 4y ago
  Their mopping robot was an extreme letdown. We bought the nicer one and it has such a tiny tank that it can't clean my downstairs without needing refilling halfway through. Plus any cleaning solution besides theirs breaks the robot. Plus the cleaning pad it uses to mop needs to be replaced after every run Plus it's a lot more aggressive than the regular roomba and slams itself into things, knocking all kinds of things over. The cleaning solution is very expensive. The pads have DRM and are very expensive. The robot is very expensive. Thanks to all it's drawbacks it's not really able to be automated. So you wind up with a mop that you still have to manage, direct to run, and feed expensive soap and cleaning pads. In reality, I have the robot, and it's been plugged in for 4+ years and probably not been ran for 3+ years.
  - thethethethe 4y ago
    I have mine dry mop to keep the dust down rather than wet mopping every day. It's much less work than wet mopping, I just need to change the pad once a week. It still takes a long time to mop and gets stuck more often than my i7 but it's mostly hands free.
jeromegv 4y ago
Yeah I had a Roomba 10 years ago. It was starting to age a bit (still working! but would always get stuck). So I was thinking.. it's been a decade.. time to buy a new model, surely they improved! Nope, nothing is better, absolutely nothing. The "AI" (if we can call it that) to vacuum hasn't improved one bit. It somehow seems so suck a lot less on the carpet than the previous one. It's somewhat better to manage my cat's hair, but that's about it. Sure now I have wifi on it, to re-start it because it often stops too early before it's done. But nothing, no improvement in 10 years.. in ROBOT TECHNOLOGY!
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  Watch vacuum reviews on Vacuum Wars channel, tons of innovation, mostly not with Roombas though https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars/videos https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars/videos
- brandon272 4y ago
  Same experience. Bought a Roomba in 2008 and didn’t like it much. Bought another in 2021 and was shocked at how little it had improved in that time. It’s better, but not by much. And clearly behind the technology in some of the Chinese vacs.
petra 4y ago
It's hard to compete with China. Willing to live on lower margins, more r&d, and cheaper cost to do r&d.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > cheaper cost to do r&d. Is this a euphemism for outright IP theft?
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    They are ahead of the US when it comes to robot vacuums.
    - ctvo 4y ago
      This is a simplistic view of IP theft. The Chinese are much more advanced. Steal from Roomba at the beginning. Surpassed Roomba? Steal something from BMW that's secret Lidar navigation work. Steal something from Samsung for circuit design, steal something from Tesla, steal something from Mobileeye, etc.
  - petra 4y ago
    I meant cheaper engineers.
- juve1996 4y ago
  Also faster iteration. Back in my mechanical engineering days, we'd design prototypes and then have to wait months for them to come in (of course they were built off-shore). Doing it onshore was difficult (few could handle our requests, or they were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't scale, and terrible quality control.) Thus we'd take a long, long time to work out design issues. A Chinese company can iterate much faster because of this.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  It wasn't just China. Roomba was really slow to move mapping technology into their lower end products. There was a lot of reputational damage done by making mediocre products their primary volume sellers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 4y ago
Leaving specifics of Roomba vs. competitors aside, the basic concept just doesn't work well in a lot of situations. My house ends up having a bunch of cords and clutter. And even on the "single level" ground floor which is fairly open and fairly heavily trafficked, there are a number of small level changes between rooms because of additions over time. I'm with you. I considered a Roomba a few years back but came to the conclusion that a Dyson cordless vac essentially solved my problem by making it trivial to spend a few minutes pulling out and running a vac as opposed to hauling out a canister vac between housecleanings. My brother, on the other hand, has dogs and has a newly constructed single level house that they keep pretty free of clutter. A robo-vacuum works pretty well for them.
- zippergz 4y ago
  I've always felt like these products were mainly designed for people who live in single-level small-ish apartments, but then it's confusing because manually vacuuming those isn't very hard either. I just don't understand the market.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    It's mostly my kitchen/dining room/"mudroom" area that can use regular quick vacs between full housecleanings. But looking right now I have some shoes and other things scattered around and it's literally about 3 minutes to do a touchup with my Dyson stick vac which has been great.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    It's for wealthy people who have large homes with large open spaces. People who have enough storage that they don't have clutter on the floor. I grew up next to a neighborhood of 5000sf+ homes, and I never saw clutter in any of them. Some of them had house cleaners, but even the ones that didn't, they had storage everywhere, so everything got put away. A Roomba on every floor would be perfect for them. I moved away before Roomba existed, but I imagine a lot of them have it.
    - ghaff 4y ago
htrp 4y ago
horrible execution most likely..... the lawn mowing robot has been a joke internally since 2011
SoftTalker 4y ago
I wonder how much of it is also people like me. I work in tech, but I despise single-purpose household "gadgets." I have a vacuum cleaner and a set of working eyes. I can clean the floor in 5 or 10 minutes, rather than having a "robot" roaming the room randomly, bumping into things, and making noise for an hour. When I'm done, I store it away in a closet and don't have to look at an unsightly lump of plastic parked in a charging station. Bottom line, these cleaning robots don't solve any problem that I have, and they make my home less enjoyable to be in.
aidenn0 4y ago
As far as I can tell, first-mover advantage is a myth. The most successful products seem to rarely be the first to market.

soco 4y ago

Maybe they were so successful that some MBA decided to maximize shareholder value by cutting on superfluous R&D?

_ea1k 4y ago
That seems to be the Neato story right now.

criley2 4y ago

The technology has come a long way in these years and the modern models are pretty good devices. I use a Miele canister vac for the deep cleans but I also have a Eufy and a Roborock robot vaccum, one does the random bouncing and the other uses LIDAR to map and clean intentionally, and they're both great. I run them several times a week and the amount of stuff they pull out of the carpet, rugs and off the hard floors is incredible. I would never bust out the Miele several times a week.

pelorat 4y ago

They lost because the competition is better. Roborock and Ecovacs are superior devices to any of iRobots' offerings.

theplumber 4y ago

Their robots started to suck after a while ! They are more interested in extracting more from their customers than creating better robots. Best example is their mopping robot that they try to market using a kind of "subscription" model with proprietary pads. The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release.

julianlam 4y ago
> The chinese roborock is so much better and they get better after each release. Are you buying multiple robots over time? Christ, and here I am thinking $1000 CAD is a lot of money.
- theplumber 4y ago
  I will keep the roborock for a while as it seems to be mature enough and checks all/most of the boxes. I sold the old robots for 59-60% of their value. The reasons for my upgrade path was: better nav, mopping and self cleaning. Roborock does all 3, the 3rd is not perfect so I guess I will upgrade it once more (after 2 more iterations to make sure they fix properly)
- rasz 4y ago
  Selling stuff you no longer use is a thing. Not everyone just throws stuff out, or donates to goodwill.
malfist 4y ago
Their mopping robot was an extreme letdown. We bought the nicer one and it has such a tiny tank that it can't clean my downstairs without needing refilling halfway through. Plus any cleaning solution besides theirs breaks the robot. Plus the cleaning pad it uses to mop needs to be replaced after every run Plus it's a lot more aggressive than the regular roomba and slams itself into things, knocking all kinds of things over. The cleaning solution is very expensive. The pads have DRM and are very expensive. The robot is very expensive. Thanks to all it's drawbacks it's not really able to be automated. So you wind up with a mop that you still have to manage, direct to run, and feed expensive soap and cleaning pads. In reality, I have the robot, and it's been plugged in for 4+ years and probably not been ran for 3+ years.
- thethethethe 4y ago
  I have mine dry mop to keep the dust down rather than wet mopping every day. It's much less work than wet mopping, I just need to change the pad once a week. It still takes a long time to mop and gets stuck more often than my i7 but it's mostly hands free.

jeromegv 4y ago

Yeah I had a Roomba 10 years ago. It was starting to age a bit (still working! but would always get stuck). So I was thinking.. it's been a decade.. time to buy a new model, surely they improved! Nope, nothing is better, absolutely nothing. The "AI" (if we can call it that) to vacuum hasn't improved one bit. It somehow seems so suck a lot less on the carpet than the previous one. It's somewhat better to manage my cat's hair, but that's about it. Sure now I have wifi on it, to re-start it because it often stops too early before it's done. But nothing, no improvement in 10 years.. in ROBOT TECHNOLOGY!

bufferoverflow 4y ago
Watch vacuum reviews on Vacuum Wars channel, tons of innovation, mostly not with Roombas though https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars/videos https://youtube.com/c/VacuumWars/videos
brandon272 4y ago
Same experience. Bought a Roomba in 2008 and didn’t like it much. Bought another in 2021 and was shocked at how little it had improved in that time. It’s better, but not by much. And clearly behind the technology in some of the Chinese vacs.

petra 4y ago

It's hard to compete with China. Willing to live on lower margins, more r&d, and cheaper cost to do r&d.

ctvo 4y ago
> cheaper cost to do r&d. Is this a euphemism for outright IP theft?
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  They are ahead of the US when it comes to robot vacuums.
  - ctvo 4y ago
    This is a simplistic view of IP theft. The Chinese are much more advanced. Steal from Roomba at the beginning. Surpassed Roomba? Steal something from BMW that's secret Lidar navigation work. Steal something from Samsung for circuit design, steal something from Tesla, steal something from Mobileeye, etc.
- petra 4y ago
  I meant cheaper engineers.
juve1996 4y ago
Also faster iteration. Back in my mechanical engineering days, we'd design prototypes and then have to wait months for them to come in (of course they were built off-shore). Doing it onshore was difficult (few could handle our requests, or they were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't scale, and terrible quality control.) Thus we'd take a long, long time to work out design issues. A Chinese company can iterate much faster because of this.
_ea1k 4y ago
It wasn't just China. Roomba was really slow to move mapping technology into their lower end products. There was a lot of reputational damage done by making mediocre products their primary volume sellers.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ghaff 4y ago

Leaving specifics of Roomba vs. competitors aside, the basic concept just doesn't work well in a lot of situations. My house ends up having a bunch of cords and clutter. And even on the "single level" ground floor which is fairly open and fairly heavily trafficked, there are a number of small level changes between rooms because of additions over time. I'm with you. I considered a Roomba a few years back but came to the conclusion that a Dyson cordless vac essentially solved my problem by making it trivial to spend a few minutes pulling out and running a vac as opposed to hauling out a canister vac between housecleanings. My brother, on the other hand, has dogs and has a newly constructed single level house that they keep pretty free of clutter. A robo-vacuum works pretty well for them.

zippergz 4y ago
I've always felt like these products were mainly designed for people who live in single-level small-ish apartments, but then it's confusing because manually vacuuming those isn't very hard either. I just don't understand the market.
- ghaff 4y ago
  It's mostly my kitchen/dining room/"mudroom" area that can use regular quick vacs between full housecleanings. But looking right now I have some shoes and other things scattered around and it's literally about 3 minutes to do a touchup with my Dyson stick vac which has been great.
- jedberg 4y ago
  It's for wealthy people who have large homes with large open spaces. People who have enough storage that they don't have clutter on the floor. I grew up next to a neighborhood of 5000sf+ homes, and I never saw clutter in any of them. Some of them had house cleaners, but even the ones that didn't, they had storage everywhere, so everything got put away. A Roomba on every floor would be perfect for them. I moved away before Roomba existed, but I imagine a lot of them have it.
  - ghaff 4y ago

htrp 4y ago

horrible execution most likely..... the lawn mowing robot has been a joke internally since 2011

SoftTalker 4y ago

I wonder how much of it is also people like me. I work in tech, but I despise single-purpose household "gadgets." I have a vacuum cleaner and a set of working eyes. I can clean the floor in 5 or 10 minutes, rather than having a "robot" roaming the room randomly, bumping into things, and making noise for an hour. When I'm done, I store it away in a closet and don't have to look at an unsightly lump of plastic parked in a charging station. Bottom line, these cleaning robots don't solve any problem that I have, and they make my home less enjoyable to be in.

aidenn0 4y ago

As far as I can tell, first-mover advantage is a myth. The most successful products seem to rarely be the first to market.