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I believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have sucked less.
by viscanti 10mo ago
I believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have sucked less.
- charcircuit 10mo agoThe innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.
- crazygringo 10mo agoExactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum technology then maybe this article would have a point. But they were building stuff for the military and for space, and there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in better vacuum cleaners.
- satellite2 10mo agoWell it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.
- charcircuit 10mo agoHardware is not like software. A general purpose humanoid cleaning robot will be superior to a robot vacuum but it will always cost an order of magnitude more. This is different from software where the cost exponentially decreases and you can do the computer in the cloud.
- crazygringo 10mo agoI'm not sure advancements in AI and advancements in vacuum cleaners are at similar stages in terms of R&D. I'd be very wary of trying to apply lessons from one to the other.
- randomfrogs 10mo agoIt's a vacuum cleaner. All you want it to do is suck.
- nine_k 10mo agoBut not at navigation.
- pgwhalen 10mo agoIt does seem like that upon reading the article, but it’s not what the title of the article suggests.
- justinclift 10mo agoOr perhaps would have sucked more where it needed to, and sucked less where it didn't.