Comment by Grombobulous

6 hours ago

Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences.

IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the consumer than handing them to Amazon. They’re still in business as an independent competitor on the market, consolidation was successfully avoided.

Yellen, I don’t have much of an opinion on, but she absolutely wasn’t alone in that opinion (the nuance of that opinion being inflated by this hyperbole), and the treasury is a lot less involved than the federal reserve in doing anything about inflation, anyway.

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Grombobulous

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Grombobulous  5 hours ago

This is a tangent to my first comment parent to this one, but also more related to the actual article at hand: whether it's Amazon buying Roomba or Nvidia buying Hugging Face, I have a somewhat radical (or is it?) opinion that large companies like Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, etc, should not actually be allowed to acquire companies. At all. under any circumstances, even if competition is healthy.

These companies are generally large enough that they do not need the competitive aid of buying an existing company and starting with that sort of structural advantage.

E.g., did Nvidia not have enough money in their bank to start a company to compete with Hugging Face? This is a company that reportedly has ~200-300 employees with investment rounds totaling $400 million. Nvidia made $31.9 billion in net income last quarter.

I look at a company like Xiaomi which just developed its automotive division in-house without resorting to buying car companies. I think our traditional business and finance mindset has an overreliance on acquisitions.

creato  5 hours ago

Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects.

Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?

  • Grombobulous  5 hours ago

    Of course Amazon would have changed that. You would go on Amazon and search for "robot vacuum" and Amazon would put iRobot at the top of the results. Review manipulation on the platform would be trivial.

    Amazon could email/push notification/text customers asking for reviews of iRobot vacuums but then not do the same for competing vacuums, skewing their reviews higher (asking for reviews boosts ratings by gathering opinions from happy customers who usually don't bother writing a review). Competing brands potentially don't even have your contact information to ask for a review.

    Go on Amazon right now and search for "usb cable." There's a giant banner at the top that recommends the Amazon Basics brand, three across horizontally, which on my desktop monitor takes up nearly 50% of the screen real estate. Then below it are the Anker cables that you're more likely to be looking for.

    They would have almost certainly been manipulating pricing on them as well. For example, they could take the strategy of lowering the price of the vacuums to break even or sell as a loss leader, but use them as a data-gathering robot in your house to help Amazon sell more of everything else. They could make their Alexa smart home platform preferential to iRobot or lock out competing models.

    Robot vacuums are a consumer goods category that is heavily skewed toward Amazon.com as the place of purchase compared to other retailers.

    I think "zombie brand owned by a Chinese company" is actually preferable, yes. They still operate and sell vacuums competing with the other robot vacuums on the market, and they aren't in service as household data collection bots for a monopoly e-commerce platform.

    I don't think the ownership of the company being foreign or domestic is very relevant to the FTC's goal of preserving positive trade conditions. Would we think the iRobot situation was a bad outcome if iRobot was purchased by a foreign company we view more positively like Miele? We only think of it negatively due to anti-Chinese bias. iRobot being Chinese-owned is almost certainly the best possible outcome for preserving the amount of competition in the market.

kaonwarb  5 hours ago

iRobot is now 100% owned by Shenzhen Picea Robotics of China. (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1159167/000115916726...)

  • Grombobulous  5 hours ago

    Yes, that's a very good company to be the owner of iRobot, because they are just a robot factory and not a near-monopoly e-commerce retailer.

    They are essentially on equal footing with other robotic vacuum manufacturers. iRobot didn't go out of business or get absorbed into a larger company lowering competition in the marketplace.

    It's also not the FTC's job to ensure that companies, especially ones with zero/trivial national security or domestic labor force value, remain under domestic ownership. Amazon itself is not really a "domestic" company, it's publicly traded. Anyone from any non-sanctioned country can buy shares of Amazon.