> closing off their escape route and de-facto enforcing the sell-off to the Chinese.

There was only one escape route? And it happened to be the one they selected themselves? That seems dubious.

> organizations that have expressly indicated that they want to break up the big companies

We literally have laws which _require_ them to do this. This isn't ideological targeting it's the consequence of the "due care clause" of the constitution. You should ask why previous iterations of the FTC have ignored this responsibility not why the one in question actually tried to live up to it.

> A simple "Request For Evidence".

These are publicly traded corporations not hapless individuals.

> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.

You've tried to obscure yours but I suspect the same thing of you.

> You operate in the fog of war.

This is goalpost shifting to the level of propaganda. You operate in a market. If you fail your assets will be auctioned off. The death of a corporation is a natural consequence of the system we've developed. It's required. It caries none of the weight of the death of an individual or of war.

> We could easily be telling a different tale if the bet paid off.

> In 2022, one cannot go back to the 2010s and repair whatever bad business decisions have been made.

This seems contradictory. We could easily be telling a different tale if the 2010s played out differently; however, as you say, one cannot go back.

> I also suspect there is a partisan slant to this.

IOW, he doesn't share your partisan views.

> One thing I find interesting about Western governments is that they're very similar to the Indian governments that I am familiar with.

That’s probably because both the US and Indian systems of government and state bureaucracies both originated in the UK (with significant alterations, but still fundamentally forks of the UK systems). Even chunks of the EU bureaucracy are based on UK customs and rules in places, a consequence of the UK being the only Western European country that wasn’t completely demolished in World War Two.

He does address the issue. He said there are provisions that allowed the merger if iRobot had admitted they were on the verge of bankruptcy. They didn't because the purchase price would be lower, hence less for shareholders and the CEO, etc wouldn't have big payoffs. In a word, greed.

What is the relationship between the first half of your comment and the commentary about W2 workers?

If we look just at 2022, then allowing the Chinese to foreclose on iRobot vs Amazon buying it is basically just a question of who owns the name "Roomba"; there were zero companies making robot vacuums in the US, and the result is still zero companies doing so.

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.

Matt Stoller is often just trivially wrong. Like his arguments, and often "facts", rarely survive any sort of even mild scrutiny.

At one point i wrote a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of where either his facts or his arguments were just wrong, for like 10 of his articles, but i eventually gave up.

He doesn't even really try. I just decided i'm not the target audience. The target audience is either people who already agree with Matt Stoller and want to feel like they are right, or people who can't be bothered to do even a trivial amount of research.

He's definitely not convincing anyone else.

Sure, but the author is arguing that the outcome you're describing is tightly coupled to the perverse incentives that he describes in the article. Investors pushed the company towards extraction over innovation and the end product suffered as a result.

> To be honest the Roomba sucked

I have an old Roomba (980 perhaps?) and laud it as one of my best appliances. It’s a work horse!

We’re had it for five-six years and it still works great. Nowadays it sometimes needs to charge twice to finish, but I only notice if I’m home - and I could just replace the battery. Parts are so easy to replace, that my wife has replaced most, and she isn’t a tinkerer.

Maybe I just don’t know what I’m missing - I’ve never had others - but I love my Roomba.

I had an ancient-ish Roomba (620, 11 years ago). The repairability was amazing. This was from back when there was little competition, but just 2 years ago I could still get every part replaced. Only screws, nothing else. It was beautiful. I got a new vacuum/mop now, vastly better functionality, in exchange for the cloud, but I'm glad my old one lives one at my parents.

I've read it's way worse nowadays, but if they stayed at their quality from back then, I'd have probably paid more for an offline workable repairable vacuum.

Sucked not the ideal pejorative for a vacuum

That's a good reminder I need to go track down my roborock, it got stuck somewhere again. There's a map thankfully which helps me figure out where to look.

> better chinese competitors.

From the article: Under a trade regime overseen by men like Furman, the company offshored production, thus teaching its future rivals in China how to make robot cleaners.

Did your Roombas also yelled in the middle of the night "PLEASE CHARGE ROOMBA!!!" every few minutes with no way to disable that behavior?

I now have 2x $150 iLifes and couldn't be happier. They're also imperfect, but they are affordable and simple.

How much difference was made by the Chinese competitors being able to use whatever IP they wanted, and Roomba being constrained by law and licensing, and not being able to enforce their own IP? What were the consequences of having to engage with China for manufacturing, effectively giving them the capability to clone any R&D on the fly, without having to figure things out themselves?

How much did regulation and taxation and red tape play into Roomba's inability to compete?

What sort of VC deals were they shackled by, in order to siphon off the data and abuse it for third party marketing, and other forms of enshittification?

There's a lot that American companies have been held back by. Some of it is actually good, consumer protective and well crafted, but it won't work if you allow other players in the same market to ignore the regulations and restrictions without consequences. Other policy is just stupid and self destructive, and other policies border on malignant, deliberately giving foreign companies significant advantages, directly and indirectly, without any other purpose.

American companies are way too easily forced into a race to the bottom dynamic, resulting in failure and huge wastes of money and effort.

I see what you did there...

They all suck. (No pun intended)

We know the FTC blocked the deal. What is this quote supposed to be showing us?

I have one and it's OK for my kitchen with hardwood floors. I have a lot of stairs in my house. In a couple of places, there are just one or two stairs going up or down between rooms, but obviously the Roomba can't do it. Because of that, it's based in the kitchen and mostly stays there. With a bunch of little kids, it's quicker than sweeping the floor every night, and I just keep the cords out of its way.

If I had a robot vacuum that could climb stairs, it would be a whole different ballgame, but no one has cracked that code so far to my knowledge.

Roombas have always been terrible.

I bought a top-of-line Dreame, Roborock, and Eufy recently for our place - we have lots of pets.

The Dreame is easily 10,000x better than Roomba ever was. It never makes mistakes. I'd advocate for Dreame for anyone in the market for a robot vacuum. The app is annoying, but everything else about it is sublime.

Eufy would be better if they'd fix their roller brush design and didn't lean so heavily into making you buy their replacement components. It's designed around buying Eufy refills. The Anker team nails user friendliness and design, though.

Maybe this is naive on my part but I find an argument like "the EU and FTC raised their metaphorical eyebrows at us and so we had to fold rather than merge" sort of pathetic.

I think the idea of Amazon buying Roomba causing monopoly concerns is kinda weird. But I also think it's absurd for anyone to blame the FTC for this. Amazon had enough leverage and money to take on the FTC over this, and probably could have made the FTC look laughable in the process, if they pushed antitrust. The fact that they didn't says everything about the actual value of Roomba.

One thing I keep repeating is that Roomba subreddit was managed by the company and would ban people for life is they were to share any bad experiences or anything negative about the product.

"The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal."

How did they shut it down?

Not every company needs to participate in making llms. It isn't like apple consumers are going to ignore the smell that keeps them from android and pc and samsung headphones currently.

Apple is innovating plenty.

Apple == IBM?

This is what's wrong with investing overall: 1Q future blindness.

We'd have almost nothing if it weren't for university partnerships and corporate R&D way back when. There's no way to accomplish this now except to stay private.

Their research wasn't on vacuum cleaners. It was building robots for the military and space. That's exactly what investors were complaining about -- the research wasn't leading to better vacuum cleaners. It was a distraction and not what investors wanted their money being used for.

> Thing is, if you slash research

And if you dump your defence contracts you may have trouble paying for research.

It's crazy that the Dodge brothers destroyed the company/shareholder relationship for every contemporary and future US-based corporation and then died.

The point is that "sold to Amazon" or "sold to chinese competitors" being the only options is a false narrative. There was also the "do a good job" option which is being conveniently omitted by people who want to blame the FTC.

Why not let Amazon take a stab at turning things around, then? It's better that they fail? I don't get it.

when and how did she do that exactly?

It's also wrong to think that company performance has anything to do with stock prices nowadays, anyway. Look at Oracle, supposedly an established company with a predictable runway for future earnings, jumping 40% (40%!) and then shedding that jump over the following months.

Or... wait for it... Gamestop. Not just what happened in 2021. What happened in 2024. What's happening now. (Compare its market cap to its cash, and then how it compares to competitors, and then price-to-earnings, and then again to competitors).

Look at the market as-a-whole. Falling earnings, stock prices going up.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that iRobot was simply just marked for death. Any company not named Apple that is manufacturing in China, Wall Street has decided that they're going to face headwinds from IP theft and competitors backed by the full faith and force of the Chinese Communist Party, and they get busy squeezing every ounce of value out, potential be damned (because, as far as traders and shareholders are concerned, such companies already are).

What is the current AI/data center mega-boom if not forgoing short-term extraction for long-term value creation?

I see him (Rodney) in both the Roomba and iRobot articles.

I don’t see evidence that iRobot vacuums would have been competitive with Chinese ones, simply because the moat does not exist (there is no secret sauce that makes it difficult to make a competing product).

As for the rest of the article, it’s not Wall Street’s fault the government doesn’t pay iRobot enough for research (nor should it).

Possibly an unintended consequence. Those abound in our governing systems as you're rightfully complaining about.

On the other hand, competition is good for consumers and letting Microsoft and Amazon use unfair tactics to crush the competition or their large revenues to just buy up all competition isn't good either. That is part of the problem today in that practically every industry is a monopoly or near total monopoly (maybe there are 2-3 firms colluding). There are no incentives to innovate or keep prices competitive in such a gilded-age system. There was a reason we broke up all the robber barons. There is also the hazard when you have businesses that are so large that they effectively control everything and the government can no longer regulate them. High inflation is at least partly coming from this lack of competition. There is also the issue of the money supply where we degrade our currency to make it easier to service the debt. That is also a really big component here.

Not sure how you could construe U.S. anti-trust actions as socialist. They prevented Amazon from acquiring iRobot. That is government intervention in the free market, but that is not the same thing as socialism. In fact you could argue a socialist administration would have wanted the merger (large firms tend to make labor organizing more tractable since there is only one employer to negotiate with).

Why aren't any American firms interested in buying it cheap?

At the time the former was a known bad, and the latter was a potential bad.

The FTC properly weighted known bads more highly than potential bads.

Did you read the article? Amazon wasn't "prevented" from acquiring, they decided against proceeding:

> The FTC didn’t bring a challenge, but nevertheless, in 2024, Amazon and iRobot called off the deal.

The foundational minds in Capitalism called for the need for government controls on it to keep markets healthy. It is LITERALLY Capitalism to have government oversight and intervention.

> But maybe I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances

Socialism is when the government owns businesses or entire industries.

Regulation is when the government has rules that companies have to play by.

The FTC is involved in regulation, not socialism.

Not all anti-capitalist actions are socialism. Not all socialism is anticapitalist.

You can disagree with a lot of things that the US government did under Biden. None of them were socialism. The closest recent example we have of socialism is the US government taking a 10% ownership stake in Intel. Which happened under Trump.

The previous best examples were all during the fall-out of the great financial crisis as part of TARP.

In retrospect, I think TARP was ultimately a pretty capitalist-friendly form of socialism. I am less sure about the Intel stake.

It is a single entity that contains multitudes. Some of those multitudes have contradictory intentions.

Just like you. When it happens to a person we call it "cancer".