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It's hard to compete with China. Willing to live on lower margins, more r&d, and cheaper cost to do r&d.
by 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 agoThey are ahead of the US when it comes to robot vacuums.
- ctvo 4y agoThis 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 agoI meant cheaper engineers.
- juve1996 4y agoAlso 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 agoIt 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.
- cellu 4y agoWell it's more about how much does the state invest. That's how innovation exist (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State)