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.
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.
Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.
I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.
In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.
You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.
Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.
So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.
You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.
I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.
Or - turn it into a subscription.
Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:
* is well designed
* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing
* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability
* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit
If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"?
If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act.
People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.
I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.
The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.
But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.
That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.
If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.
Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.
It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".
I remember when Apple finally cracked the idea that consumers would be willing to pay a premium for a more attractive computer. At the time, I thought they had a 2-5 year lead at best. Turns out they just kept making more and more high quality devices and not one organization has figured out how to compete with them, even now that they’re starting to lose sight of the values made them so great.
Isn't this why patents exist?
Then make a nice blog post, translate it to Chinese (hell, I'll pay a professional translator for you) and post it on the internet so that someone in Shenzen can try it.
* built a lithium refinery
* produces its own battery cells
* makes its own motors and drivetrains
* makes its own car seats
* owns and operates a fast-charging network
* sells direct, bypassing dealerships
* offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
* develops its own autopilot AIIt's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.
The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.
I think there are a lot of different reasons:
1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.
2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.
3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.
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...
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.
Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...
But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.
Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).
My wife bought the Dyson garbage anyway because she can't ignore her instagram feed.
> 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.
This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage (at least not before 2019, which was the last time I bought a Roomba).
> 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.
I'd dispute this in this case: Roombas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).
> 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.
1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof my home than vacuuming it every week for a year.
2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection (and had no plans to buy more due to the unnecessary network requirement).