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,
They fired their whole education wing when my startup was just starting to work with them (15 or something years ago). No warning just a month after starting a new project (early stem outreach type program), fired them all.
So I don’t feel bad for iRobot. Sucks for the employees though.
Good news for us Roomba users, not so good news for employees. 😑
I don’t know if this actually good for Roomba users. Selling to Amazon, and maintaining the status quo are both bad for the user.
This isn’t a healthy company. It’s a busted company that Amazon was looking to salvage or rehabilitate.
Is it a busted company? I quickly found data for 2009-2022 and they’ve registered profit for every year till 2022 when they had their first loss. They’ve been around since the 90s.
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.
What options are there out of the box? I only know of hacking well known brands and use something like valetudo
I put a wemos d1 mini in mine since all I need to do is mash the existing Clean button. The internal MCU runs on 3.3v, the buttons are pulled low and activated by the same 3.3v rail, so all I had to do was flash it with ESPhome and wire the low side of the buttons to a gpio. I wanted to read the LED state but the multiplex scheme wasn’t worth decoding. I did use the single analog pin to measure battery voltage, and an input for the roller and blower motors.
I didn’t realize that so I just went to check on mine and the integration is errored out lol. A quick look on the forums shows that multiple people are having the same issue. When mine was working, I only had a few options like start and go home so it wasn’t that helpful anyways. The roomba app did update with room mapping abilities but I was never able to get that information into home assistant so my only option was a full clean. Maybe it’s changed since mine stopped working but I can’t wait to get something that’s better supported and put this one upstairs where it only has a few rooms to clean.
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’d be an easy battle. The last iRobot device I had was a fickle piece of junk that’d error out constantly or ignore virtual walls. I’m on my second Roborock vacuum now and am very impressed with how well they work. I gave my first one away and it’s still working great for the person I gave it to.
Huh I thought it was done a long time ago. Looks like Roomba’s back on the menu, boys!
No Amazon does not terminate the deal, the EU did. Because otherwise Amazon will have too much power over the robot industry.
And, Amazon didn’t want to give up the ‘mapping everyone’s home and tracking them’ concept.
Technically, no, iRobot and Amazon “mutually agreed” to terminate the deal, most likely cause the EU probably wasn’t going to approve, but:
- The EU was set to deliberate in mid Feb, so they didn’t (yet)
- It’s also possible that Amazon used the likely rejection of the EU as an excuse to back out of a deal they didn’t want anymore
I don’t know which one it is, but if Amazon wanted to close, they would’ve been willing to make concessions to the EU to get their approval, rather than backing out.
