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This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the
by simonjgreen 10mo ago
This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo agoThat seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.
- bamboozled 10mo agoLike Japan 40-50 years ago.,
- devsda 10mo agoI know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act. Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.
- LightBug1 10mo agoYeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now. I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up. They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets. It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
- 6510 10mo agoWhile I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
- djmips 10mo agoI feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
- zdragnar 10mo agoIt is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off. The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
- p0pularopinion 10mo agoI generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look. Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this. Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration). „Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
- MangoToupe 10mo agoThat's how it is today. The R&D will follow the manufacturing capacity, where it's cheaper and more efficient in every way. The west was extremely foolish to think that IP would scale beyond national markets for very long.
- mlrtime 10mo agoThat makes sense, are there any expamples of the Chinese leading in a market + R&D yet?
- typewithrhythm 10mo agoEvery category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product. Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
- anomaly_ 10mo ago
- dotancohen 10mo ago> I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product And be there no mistake, this has been Apple's formula for success for decades.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- avianlyric 10mo ago> Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete. The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further. China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit. This creates few interesting side-effects. * One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves. * Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time. * Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return. All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
- indymike 10mo ago> American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies. Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means. Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on. Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence. See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
- array_key_first 10mo agoPretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps. The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.
- cluckindan 10mo agoThe Chinese government is heavily subsidizing 3D printers by granting tax deductions up to 200%. https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-printing-is-dead/ https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
- jhanschoo 10mo agoSo why would 3D printer companies in China bother innovating rather than sit back and cash the government check?
- 6510 10mo agoBecause there are over 200 competing 3d printing companies in China.
- typewithrhythm 10mo agoWhy does anyone innovate? When I sell something I don't care if the dollars come from the end user or the subsidy, I just want more of them.
- expedition32 10mo agoBecause China is actually a capitalist free market economy not a communist one. Chinese companies compete with eachother ferociously. And Chinese society itself is dog eat dog. Everyone wants to make money.
- cluckindan 10mo agoWell, save for the part where the government directs the parts of the economy they care about.
- komali2 10mo agoBecause the owners want to get rich, not live as pensioners.
- lm28469 10mo agoSame for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
- wccrawford 10mo agoThe funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain. Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
- mosura 10mo ago> The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. Everything wrong with the western tech academic/industrial complex in two sentences.
- tbrownaw 10mo ago> didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well. I thought that was the difference between "invention" and "innovation"?
- wccrawford 10mo ago"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford. It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
- baggachipz 10mo agoChinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
- lm28469 10mo agoThey're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially. We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years. I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
- baggachipz 10mo agoTotally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say: > playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" 5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoYou're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker. The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
- nine_k 10mo agoAnybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.
- Sl1mb0 10mo ago> sits for hours playing a video game > if you are not moving, you are dead. I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.
- cout 10mo agoCamping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.
- aurareturn 10mo agoIt is complacency or is China just accelerating? It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China. Ford themselves said they need to stay in the Chinese car market no matter what - not because they think they can win in it but because they can't compete anywhere if they leave. The one tech area the US is most definitely ahead is AI - both software and hardware. The US will be ahead as long as China does not have access to EUV manufacturing yet.
- orochimaaru 10mo agoThe bigger risk specifically with roomba may be that people who have connected their roomba’s to wifi and have their floor plans mapped and possibly in the cloud. Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
- AlexandrB 10mo agoThere's very low value to the Chinese state to having detailed floor plans of a random person's house. Or even a prominent person's house. A lot of this stuff is semi-public domain regardless as many real estate listings will include a floor plan. The camera/microphone is more worrying.
- mlrtime 10mo agoAnd then the Chinese end up stealing any actual IP that may get the US company ahead by being there. Also, is it still difficult to bring profits back to the US? Damn'd if you do, dam'd if you don't.
- AlecSchueler 10mo agoWhy do American companies have to rely on artificial protections like IP in order to compete? Don't forget it's only "stealing" if you're culturally inclined to see IP as actual property, whereas in China the idea has long been that ideas are common good, even predating Marxism.
- mzhaase 10mo agoThere is also another thing where quality Chinese products are very cheap compared to western products. Since Chinese engineers are cheaper, they can live with lower margins on their products. A roomba was twice as much as a roborock that was better. Prusa MK4S is 720 EUR, the arguably better Bambu Lab A1 is 260 EUR.
- dnautics 10mo agohttps://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-printing-is-dead/ https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
- krapht 10mo agoIt wasn't labor costs that made the Roomba twice a Roborock, but manufacturing costs. Roomba teardowns basically show that iRobot was just really bad at cost-optimizing their vacuums for mass production.
- bitexploder 10mo agoYou can probably maintain your Prusa forever. The Bambu... not so much. It is a philosophy choice here and the 3D printer space is vastly more complex and nuanced for many users than an appliance that has one simple job. Yes if you /just/ want to print stuff and treat it like an appliance as a curious consumer dabbling in the space the Bambu is great. That was never Prusa's target. I don't think the comparison is very strong.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoWow I found Rohorock a bit sucky so god knows how bad a Roomba is. My theory is to make a decent robot vacuum that can compete with a human and a $50 vacuum and a cheap mop... you would need a 5k price point.
- fullstop 10mo agoI've been happy with the Roborock but I did not expect it to match the cleaning levels of a human. I can run it while I'm not there or doing other tasks, though, and it does a good enough job until I feel the need to intervene. When I was looking at getting one, the iRobot one took hours / days to map out a house and it needed the lights on to do that. The Roborock model could do this in 15 to 30 minutes, and it could do it in the dark because it used LiDAR instead of a camera. That was several years ago now, and iRobot _just_ added LiDAR to their latest models.
- kccqzy 10mo agoI have a Roborock too. It is certainly good at quickly creating a reasonably accurate map, but it just gets stuck so easily. Things like going into an enclosed corner but unable to get out. Or going into a room, cleaning the floor just behind the door such that the door shuts and now unable to leave the room. I certainly cannot run it while not at home. It will just get stuck.
- fullstop 10mo agoWe must have different layouts or settings because I can count on one hand the number of times that it's gotten stuck. Once it ate a piece of paper and jammed the main roller. The other times have been when it's managed to get itself under an area rug. If I leave a door open it doesn't touch it. On mine there are settings which tell it to avoid bumping into things.
- aqme28 10mo agoAnd if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace. I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
- micromacrofoot 10mo agoThis is the cost of taking too much funding. Roomba could have remained a modest robovac company and continued indefinitely... they still sell millions of units. American corporate leadership in partner with VCs are chasing massive paydays and absolutely wrecking the companies they're running to do it.