Amazon terminates iRobot deal, Roomba maker to lay off 31% of staff::Amazon and iRobot said regulatory concerns made it impossible for the deal to move forward, sending the Roomba makers’ shares plummeting.
If it’s any consolation those people would have been laid off no matter what happened. That’s how we do things now apparently
iRobot said it would focus on margin improvements, reduce spending on research and development, and pause all work on “non-floorcare” products, including its air purifiers and robotic lawn mowers.
I doubt it. If you are stopping r&d and killing whole product lines, it makes sense to lay off the teams directly tied to those product lines. I’m guessing they needed Amazon to help them break into the market for areas outside of floor vacuums?
Call me a skeptic but I’d be willing to bet small amounts of money that Amazon would absolutely lay some or all of these people off after the initial onboarding.
It really depends on redundancy. Does Amazon have people that can do what iRobot staff does. For operational or sales teams maybe. If Amazon becomes the only store where you can buy a roomba, you probably lay off folks responsible for wholesale. That probably also means you lay off some marketing. But the core people that make the stuff probably have less redundancy. These layoffs are probably impacting the people that actually make and design the stuff, since they no longer or going to make all the stuff they planned. The hypothetical layoffs for acquisition would probably be smaller and impact different people at the company. And because it’s an acquisition, there may have been negotiated more favorable severance terms,
Fold home automation IP into Alexa brand, keep iRobot vacuum brand but increase data exfiltration, and put ads on all searches to increase sales, layoff the
scrubsR&D team would be the natural playbook.
They should definitely dump air purifiers. What does that have to do with robotics?
Lawn mowers however seem like a stupid drop, since a lawn is floor adjacent and the market in them is growing.
Gotta artificially drive the cost of labor down somehow. All those poor folk started getting some wild ideas that they were worth something…
iRobot had been struggling over the past few years, and now capital is expensive. They were either going to need to sell or cut back in order to right the ship.
Very sustainable
Oh, I might consider buying one again now.
Save yourself the headache and get something that works locally and doesn’t rely on their cloud and app.
Reasonably sure i can set up local control through home assistant. Haven’t looked too hard but I’ve always liked the featuresets on the roombas and the Amazon connection was the reason I haven’t done too much investigation yet.
I’ve been much happier with my Roborock than my Roomba. It definitely seems smarter.
It’s a good thing we gave Amazon Tax CUTS instead of RAISES! Otherwise they may have forced people to lose their jobs!
Huh I thought it was done a long time ago. Looks like Roomba’s back on the menu, boys!
Gotta layoff workers to save money for stock buybacks.
iRobot has rested on their laurels and patent portfolio for years while others (ie Roborock) have lapped their products. Looks like they’ll continue to decline into obscurity and count on patent troll lawsuits to survive. BTW, anyone want to buy a POS Roomba i7 that beats the hell out of furniture and baseboards while constantly getting jammed rollers?
Does it come with a self cleaning base?
I’ll give you $5 plus shipping.
I’ll give you $4, minus shipping after you get it.
Naming your robot company iRobot is Nightmare Nexus levels of disrespect
Why the fuck would you name your robotics company that?
Ya know, when I named my Red Car “Christine” it was a joke and one for my own amusement, if it were a new model of car that I was selling there are a couple of reasons I wouldn’t have done that.
