This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.
It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Ford themselves said they need to stay in the Chinese car market no matter what - not because they think they can win in it but because they can't compete anywhere if they leave.
The one tech area the US is most definitely ahead is AI - both software and hardware. The US will be ahead as long as China does not have access to EUV manufacturing yet.
IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks.
Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up other companies to milk dry. Most internal development is outsourced by suits far removed from any qualifications on quality.
We all know the foibles of Boeing, where accountants made the final calls on everything.
The only innovations the traditional American car companies seem to be able to focus on is how to make cars bigger to increase margins. It's ludicrous that it took a new company (Tesla) to make electric cars available.
I could go on. This is not to say that other countries (including China) don't have their own issues with their business climate, but the United States has an environment where some of the smartest and best paid people in the country are working their asses off to find out better ways to show ads (Google/Facebook).
That's ultimately what you get when you have a system that 1) has most of its money held by the retirement/pension funds of a generation that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth and 2) has incentivized returns to those institutional investors at the board and c-suite levels of most companies.
I mean if we're talking about generations that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth, then China is actually ahead of us there. Their birth rate plummeted below replacement well before the US's did.
Everyone acts like the C8 corvette doesn’t exist when they shit on American cars. Actually GM is an innovative awesome company.
The C8 has topped many “top car” lists since it came out in 2020. The reviews on it are universally excellent and it gaps pretty much anything that the turn-signal hating BMW crowd manufactures both in literal performance and in design.
Also there's no longer really any such thing as an American car. Everything now is some globalized mess of parts from brands here and there. Made in factories wherever is most financially convenient.
The bigger risk specifically with roomba may be that people who have connected their roomba’s to wifi and have their floor plans mapped and possibly in the cloud.
Wonder if the deal is going to include transfer of cloud data as well.
There's very low value to the Chinese state to having detailed floor plans of a random person's house. Or even a prominent person's house. A lot of this stuff is semi-public domain regardless as many real estate listings will include a floor plan.
Just wanted to point out that Roborock is now in a similar position - they have completely slept on the roller mop trend - and meanwhile other Chinese manufacturers are building better robots.
China's definitely much more advanced that it was twenty years ago. The science, design etc. was much worse than the west, now it's on par or sometimes ahead.
Agree. I visited China recently and every time we ordered a Didi (equivalent to Uber there) we were surprised with their vehicles, we used to order “deluxe” ones and boy we got some fancy electric vehicles.
> American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China.
Why does China have a bunch of electronics companies? Because people outsourced all their manufacturing to China. So all non-China has left, barely, is the hardware design. Cool, so let's outsource that too? So all non-China has left is, oops?
> It is complacency or is China just accelerating?
Specifically in the case of Roomba complacency certainly played a role. I have one of their robots for several years already, and while it mostly works fine for my usecases their app is a complete mess. Sometimes the roomba has an issue and aborts a run but there's zero to no detail visible in the app as to why that happened. I seem to be unable to look at old runs, see statistics over time, basically anything that might be useful other than the bog-standard basics, and even those are lacklustre at best.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually reverse-engineered their APIs and made a better app on top of them; the app is comically bad with little to no improvement since I've started using the product.
Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with minimal-at-best regard for Westerners.
15 years ago I would've agreed. I saw SUVs with obvious BMW inspired styling cues that had manufacturers badges that were conveniently the same place and the same size as the BMW roundel. I saw Starbucks and Pizza Hut look-alikes. I saw the dismay on the barista's face when I ordered a coffee drink instead of tea. They regarded the US with a sense of awe. When I told my Chinese colleagues it was unlikely that the US would lead the way in nuclear power because only China could do it at enough scale to succeed, they were shocked.
Now the Chinese have their own expensive coffee brands. They even have what one could call private equity with Chinese characteristics: private equity in China is strategic, mostly minority stakes, and often behaves like late stage VC.
I'm not making a moral comparison here. The impact of bad PE deals in China is that an often technology oriented pre-IPO company goes bust, whereas in the US your local hospital will close. Make up your own mind which is worse.
>But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.
This is very insightful. But it's more profound than what's observed on surface. There was a chain of reactions along with many coincident events.
If we consider a collection of human bounded by different glues, i.e. tribes, culture, religions, ethnicities , political beliefs, cooperate, LLCs, etc., as a new form of creature superior to nature animals, then Chinese as a new creature is very special one. Maybe next to Jews.
The failure of Opium war and consequential changes caused a humiliation that created a special stress on this creature, resulted in a strong response which also drove many revolves inside China. Chinese elites seeking different solutions as reaction to those changes.
One big revolt lead by revolutionaries , the predecessor of the Nationalists who fled to Taiwan in 1949, overthrew the last dynasty of China. However it didn't address the issue of humiliation. The elites continue to seeking solutions while tried to reunite China. CPP was one of them.
After WWII, only 2 contesters survived. Another 4 years of civil war later, the Nationalist lost and Republic of China migrated to Taiwan. In 1971, ROC lost the seat in UN, CPP took over as the representative of China.
Both CPP and the Nationalists are nationalists , among others who lost in the history. The majority of early members of CPP, even strongly believe in the Marxist ideology, deep in their heart they are the same as the other nationalists even they hate and kill each other.
Marxism is a tool which is very effective proved by history, used by the unique creature called China to restore its honor and dignity, without the user of the tool even realizing it. Today it is called "Socialism with Chinese character", a heavily modified and unrecognizable version of Marxist ideology.
That's a little long version of
>that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949
I wish I have time to write a book about it as real long version after some time, maybe 10 years.
There was an interview from a Chinese Founder and he said something that I think accurately sums up the difference.
US R&D may be on top in some areas especially AI or Frontier Tech. But it is at best 2x better than China. What sets Chinese companies apart they can have product from Lab to market and manufacturing at scale that is at least an order of magnitude faster than US, not to mention a lot cheaper.
Motorola Smartphone is now Chinese owned. I dont think people even realise it. Most of the Consumer Appliance from Washing Machine to Microwave are not just manufactured in China, the brand itself are sold off to Chinese companies as well. Toshiba Home Appliances for example. Even if they are not Made in China, they are made by a Chinese Companies in SEA Region.
For TV, most of the LCD Panel are from China. TCL and Hisense are not just copying but innovated with newer panel technology. CSOT Produce the Panel for Sony top range Bravia 9 TV. Inkjet Printing OLED commercially coming out this year.
Even Agricultural tech China is catching up, something traditionally US is strong in. And some of those results are coming in already.
There are a lot more in the pipeline they have been hammering for the past 10 - 15 years and they have finally coming out where most mainstream media haven't covered because they have no idea. I remember reading Bloomberg around 12 years ago saying Tesla Battery facility being biggest in the world and they have never heard or reported anything about CATL.
And there has been a lot more Chinese companies exporting directly. I am wondering if anyone have heard of a brand called laifen where it was massively popular on IG for their toothbrush a while ago. They called it how Apple would have design and make toothbrush. And they are using exactly the same Apple packaging box for their product as well.
Even Beauty products where it used to be R&D and manufactured in South Korea. China is now picking up a lot of market share as well. And it is apparent in Cosmoprof, largest beauty and cosmetics trade show.
Edit: I forgot to mention something I think is bigger than AI. But doesn't get the headline like AI. Robotics. Not only do I believe they are far ahead in Humanoid Robots, they are also manufacturing it better and faster and cheaper. They are already deployed in some places in production already.
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back. China has won. And they are not Japan in post WWII where US can force them give up certain things. Nor do they have a free flowing currency, arguably their biggest moat where the whole bubble may burst. Barring any black swan event China will dominate in nearly all consumer industries along with other adjacent industries. And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
And I am writing this on the day they announced [1] Jimmy Lai was found quality under Hong Kong's National Security Law.
[1] Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong tycoon and democratic firebrand who stood up to China
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back.
Unfortunate in what sense?
And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.
The last 200-250 years seems to be an abnormal period in which China was not a superpower. Historically, China has always had 25-40% of the world's GDP. It's been so long that many generations have lived and died without seeing China at the top. I think it's kind of neat for this generation to witness it.
Yes, being able to pay wages that amount to slavery opens a lot of doors. There is a lot of positive Chinese sentiment on this website, much of it exaggerated, and all of their accomplishments pretty much hinge on being able to exploit their workforce, of which we just sort of wave our hands and dismiss it in these types of discussions.
Not to mention the blatant corporate espionage. They may have some of their own innovations, and I’m sure there are plenty of smart people there who, despite being oppressed, still find joy in building things. But let’s not pretend this is all due to excellence.
Why do American companies have to rely on artificial protections like IP in order to compete? Don't forget it's only "stealing" if you're culturally inclined to see IP as actual property, whereas in China the idea has long been that ideas are common good, even predating Marxism.
Not to mention that the US was notorious for IP theft until it would up at the apex of the international order. I presume as China becomes economically dominant it too will gradually shift toward rent seeking and patent enforcement.
They introduced more and more IP laws due to requirements from the WTO[https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/completeacc_e.htm...]. At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies, and now we're at the stage where there's essentially legal parity.
Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions. But now they're getting to the point that they can start to lead the conversation.
Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
> At first they didn't prosecute them, then they did but only for foreign companies
Funny how that works.
> Basically they had to play along to western rules that were baked into global institutions
Like making it mandatory to have a Chinese co-owner own 50% for all businesses created in China? I don't remember seeing that in the WTO rules.
> Some further reading [0] could be a book like To Steal Is An Elegant Offense from William P. Alford for a longer history of the relationship to IP within Chinese society.
R&D is very expensive and you want some protection for having borne that cost. If a competitor can just swoop in and clone your tech then they’re at an immediate, unfair advantage.
There is a huge difference between "some protection" and blocking the competition for many decades, because an incompetent patent office has approved many exaggerated claims, either about things that are obvious and well known by anyone in the field, but nobody was shameless enough to claim them in a patent before, or else about things that the patent filer is completely unable to do in the present, but they are claimed in the patent for the case when someone else will figure how to do them in the future.
Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.
In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.
Patents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.
The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!
On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.
Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!
People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!
The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.
Except that you have the technical know how to keep advancing, and have already been producing them before they hit market an have been reverse engineered.
Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.
Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.
But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?
Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
IP is an incentive to develop the IP in the first place. Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long? America and Europe have been creating and innovating for centuries and millennia. In recent decades China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West? What is the plan to surpass the West without someone else supplying the IP? Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done? Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
A key difference is that the West are liberal democracies and there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
> Everything is an artificial protection by your standard. Laws are written for a reason.
No it isn't and this comes across as a straw man. Competing on price, build quality, distribution, aesthetic, service support etc etc are all very real.
> Why would anyone sink huge amounts of money into developing IP if a competitor can just wait and then take it for itself.
How/why did we ever develop anything prior to 1710? And we can add first movers advantage to the list of "real" protections, as well as prestige, marketing etc.
> And if its such a good idea, why hasn't China been a superpower for so long?
Define superpower here? It seems to me that Western powers became global powers first because of colonialism, which A) was driven by materials not by IP, and B) caused direct harm to China.
> China has risen by replicating the West's technology and techniques. Where would China right now be without the West?
Was China in a bad position before the Europeans arrived? Since the Opium Wars they've been forced to play along or risk being wiped out completely. Where could they be without the west indeed.
> Suddenly China is going excel at something at something they haven't done?
Haven't they? It seems that they are very competitive for a host of practical manufacturing reasons that could have been implemented elsewhere if there had been a will or long term vision.
> Japan is instructive because they rose economically in a similar fashion.
Japan was completely neutered and propped up by the US for half a century while they "recovered." It's not a comparable situation.
> there is strong evidence that freedom and a cosmopolitan society promotes innovation.
Is there? Did Britain become a superpower because of its free and cosmopolitan society? Is being a superpower our end goal?
> Which system is better isn't hard to spot. The naivete of some here is incredible.
This isn't an argument at all, just an ad hominem not in keeping with site guidelines. I'm happy to discuss but strawmen and as hominems are very off-putting.
That seems to be a problem with many companies. Chinese companies are innovating aggressively while others don’t. You see that with 3d printers where Bambu is kicking ass. I remember when GoPro did a drone and it simply wasn’t good. Or American carmakers are trying to turn back the clock on electric instead of embracing it.
I know people like to say that it is American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
This may be true in certain areas, but I think some Chinese companies do take the idea and then they iterate on the product to the point that it outshines the original product all while the original company refuses to act.
Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads but I don't believe that's the only reason they are not competitive.
I generally think both attitudes are a too simplistic look.
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets).
Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules.
It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.
That’s an over simplified view of the world that completely ignores all the benefits of outsourcing our manufacturing to China brought. It may have been short sighted of us, and we may have over valued those short term benefits, over the long term costs, but it wasn’t a decision made by some shadowy group of “politicians”. It was a collective societal decision, to choose easy consumerism, cheap products, and rapid growth in quality of life, over the long term viability of societies.
But this story hasn’t ended yet, and China certainly isn’t treated like a developing country. It’s treated like a country that has a vice grip on our economic nether regions, and we really don’t want to make any sudden unexpected moves.
Those benefits were chiefly lower prices for the manufactured goods. But the Federal Reserve interpreted this as a problem per their mandate to keep CPI going upwards, and created a bunch of new money that went into asset bubbles. So the "benefits" to the average person also included housing unaffordability and the general financialization of everything. Viewed through this lens, it does not seem like any sort of collective societal decision.
No, as someone in the western side of product development things. The problem is studied in the standard MBA course for Strategy, without even China mentioned.
First-mover advantage, which comes from R&D into new markets is short lived no matter what. It is critical for firms that hit new ground to find ways to continue to grow their position and market as soon as they can. Copy-cat firms always always come, even big western megacorps love to come in and push out the little western corps, this is typically what is taught in said MBA class. Depending on the market, making newer products that are cheaper is absolutely something a firm must evaluate if there is a demand for it that can be a position and a threat to them.
It's simply the song and dance of the business lifecycle. It's one of the many reasons why 90% of startups fail.
iRobot hasn't got that excuse. They had market dominance and high margins for long enough that, had they retained focus, they could've created follow up products that would've made for durable, defensible market leadership, even if not every product was a success. I hope everyone is clear that that's the world we live in now <cough>Model Y</cough>.
DJI as consumer and professional drones seems like they‘re most certainly they are also an R&D leader given the fact that there are essentially 0 western competitors.
When it comes to more commodity tech, batteries immediately come to mind. Chins has spent years funding battery research and they are now the biggest supplier for LiIon batteries of basically all kinds. Solar panels seem like another example.
Every category I can think of where China is near-first there is some international manufacturer that has a better product.
Several areas where there are much higher volumes or outstandingly better value though. Things like automotive lidar, construction assemblys (like double glazed window units), consumer electronics like quadcopters.
I recently bought a handheld spectrophotometer for work (color assessment). The product from the leading US company (X-Rite) is ~US$15k in my market. I bought the Chinese equivalent for US$3k. Maybe if I needed guaranteed nine 9s of colour accuracy the US product would be worth it, but for 95% of users in the market, the Chinese product is more than fine.
I have a vague theory that China's massive home market of poorer people keeps the innovation going. There's always an upside for making something 1% cheaper and simpler as more people can buy it.
That gets mocked by rich people in rich countries in the short term but then leads to disruptive innovation from below, cheaper, simpler items growing and eating the market.
I think you are on to something. In the US I feel the focus is more and more on catering to the maybe top 20% who can afford to pay a lot more for things. There are less and less low end cars. Concerts and sports events are super expensive. New apartments are usually in the higher price range. No starter homes anymore. Instead of innovating, we just increase the price of assets.
BEVs most certainly aren‘t. Chinese EVs are strongly competing on price. Based on my own experience with them (n=4). They are very good as a EV, solid as a rolling smartphone, but not leading as being a car. Given the choice, I still would prefer a BMW EV any day.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
They are more than capable. I have just looked at what BMW, Mercedes and Audi have on offer. Then compare what Zeekr and Xpeng has on offer (7X, G9). Quality wise they feel the same or even better.
While I agree as a "complete car" the full package might not quite be there yet. But that is from a European perspective as they mostly are focused on their home markets. But this is changing. This is then simply iterating for product/market fit.
Personally I find the major problems in chinese cars are the software. That is the easy fix and they are getting closer with each iteration.
So much that today I would choose a Zeekr 7X but choose to postpone as the software was too annoying (adaptive cruise control, lane assist, sign recognition, auto brake, audio cues).
The big loss we have with EVs are servicability. But that is a universal problem with all automakers.
I don‘t care all that much about cars, my n is soley based on the cars i got provided for business trips. One Xpeng (no clue which) was among thise vehicles.
The main problem I see (beyond my i4 just being significantly nicer to drive) is replacement parts. The chinese EV companies are replacement parts and a qualified repair network. Replacement part availability is rather bad across the board, which has a number of cascade effects, but primarily higher insurance premiums. To add, there is also the fact that it looks like the EV market in china will consolidate not too far in the future, most likely compromising long term maintainability.
Yeah, "Chinese companies just copies" was 10-15 years or beyond. No way is that relevant now.
I've been wondering about why this is. With no evidence, I wondered if one of the reasons is the long term result of the many design and engineering graduates (I notice an incredible amount in the industry I work in) who were educated in the "best western uni's" and have now returned home and grown up.
They were a honeypot for said uni's for so long. But the end result may now mean they're kicking all asses in product markets.
It can't just be cheap labour ... or maybe it's the combination.
While I would love to attribute it to their culture of hard work I believe the credit should go to the combined effect of poor choices made in the west. You cant begin to list our spending on bullshit directly nor instances of money intended for useful things that was lost in bureaucracy. China does this too of course but we are so much better at it.
It is definitely still relevant. A friend showed me two products- one from a US manufacturing company he worked for, and one on alibaba- that were practically identical. One was designed and developed, the other an illegal rip off.
The lack of WTO rule enforcement has always been a problem.
I feel like there is a hypothesis that open source and open science has helped the West but the IP laws have slowed innovation whereas China is kind of an open source culture internally which confera an advantage.
> American companies that innovate and Chinese companies just copies.
Let's take Roomba as the example, because "innovate" does not mean what people think it means.
Roomba invented the consumer robot floor care machine and won the market early on.
Roomba's competitors innovated more (iteratively adding features) and Roomba has now lost it's independence.
See Blackberry, Motorola for some more recent examples. What the lesson is: there's only one way to go when you are #1 in your market category. You cannot allow gravity to work.
Pretty much every American company is just a bank with extra steps.
The big boys would rather own real estate and balance books than sink money into R&D. And acquiring companies is simply easier, and it's basically a broken strategy. If you just keep consolidating you just get a higher and higher valuation, while doing literally nothing.
> Sure there are initial product R&D cost overheads
I think this, plus different attitudes to intellectual property are the two big reasons western companies can’t compete.
The general strategy for R&D in the west is to spend significant sums developing a new technology, then building an IP moat around it to prevent direct competition. Our IP laws make this approach viable, and it allows companies to develop something new, then exploit it for decades without needing to innovate further.
China on the other hand does not have this approach to IP. Copying is rife, even between Chinese companies, and generally the idea of being given a state enforced monopoly just because you were first is laughable. As a result, when one Chinese company figures something out, that technology, process, technique, rapidly spreads around the entire market, and all of the competing companies benefit.
This creates few interesting side-effects.
* One a ginormous ecosystem of basic parts and components that are basically common between all competitors in a market (looks at the LiDAR units of robot vacs). This drastically lowers the barrier of entry for new players, it’s easy for them to get access to everything they need to build a “good enough” product, without having to do much R&D themselves.
* Two, it forces all companies to innovate and developer technology continuously. There is no state enforced monopoly for IP, so companies can only maintain an edge by innovating and advancing faster than their competitors at all time.
* Three, it’s makes a failure to constantly innovate an absolute death sentence for a company. Not just because they loose their edge, but because it takes time to rebuild the R&D skills needed to innovate as fast as their competitors. Once you start falling behind, you can never catch up, there is no space to financialise a company and sweat its assets. It’ll be dead before you got any return.
All this creates huge problems for companies like Roomba. They developed so very cool tech early on, but stopped innovating as fast, thinking they had a strong edge over any of their competitors, and solid IP moat. Unfortunately once Chinese companies caught up, and figured out how to get around their moat, its was impossible for Roomba defend against these new competitors. They were able to innovate orders of magnitude faster, because the environment that created meant only the fastest innovating companies could survive, they had huge momentum, and also a huge common core of shared components that had driven the cost of a basic robot vac to well under anything iRobot could achieve.
The funny thing is that Bambu didn't innovate. They just made it work really, really well.
I've owned a few 3d printers, including a kit printer, and the Bambu doesn't have any tech that other printers don't. They just always work well, and are easy to maintain.
Others are finally catching up, though. Snapmaker really scared them with the U1 (which is getting insane reviews), and Prusa has finally stepped up and started innovating again, too. The Centauri Carbon is another really good entry-level printer as well and it's eating into Bambu's market.
What do you mean they didn't innovative? The H2D and the AMS are new techniques and their latest release is certainly innovative with the 6 extra hotends
The H2D's printer/laser combo was done by Snapmaker before that, and the "2 heads" thing was done numerous times in many different ways before the H2D.
The AMS may not have looked exactly like that, but the same idea was already in place by Prusa at least.
Tool changers are not new, and the way that the extra hotends are held and dispensed was already in use in industrial machines. The "6 extra hotends" thing ... I'm willing to admit that might have been an innovation not yet seen in the 3d printing space, but BondTech announced their INDX before Bambu announced their solution. Both were in R&D for years before that, of course.
But Bambu was big and popular long before their current generation of printers. Only the AMS could be seen to contribute to their popularity, and again, it was because it works so well, not because it was a new idea.
"make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products." according to Oxford.
It's a stretch to me to think that "make it work reliably" is a new idea, and their products and methods were all already done by others, but less reliably.
Same for drones, and you know why? Because all of these civilian technologies can be easily leveraged for military... so a) they get the good stuff first because they're leading the sector and b) western countries buy their shit instead of making their own, which means we don't develop the tech and we effectively subsidise theirs
Can't blame them really, they mastered the rules of the game we forced them to play.
Chinese companies don't have quarterly financial metrics to report to shareholders, which result in severe punishment if the "growth at all costs" strategy isn't followed. This means chasing quarterly profit over innovation, because it's much easier to milk an asset for as long as possible until suddenly it isn't and you're left behind. But that doesn't matter when the pressure is entirely placed on showing financial growth three months from now. Chinese companies are allowed to strategize for the long term, and receive assistance from the CCP to dominate foreign rivals.
They're playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years" at every level of the hierarchy both politically and industrially.
We moved all our factories there thinking they'd work for cheap and stay peasants forever. Meanwhile their education seriously leveled up while ours stagnated (at best) or declined. In the meantime they also mastered manufacturing techniques, and now they're slowly taking the lead over pretty much everything. Couple that with an authoritarian regime still viewing the world through the historical long term prism and you get a pretty good combo. We ended up losing the mass, know-how and innovation capabilities, all at once in ~50 years.
I hope we never have a hot conflict with them because all their drones/3d printing/thermal vision/&c. companies will produce more kamikaze drone in a day than we'll produce in a year.
You're not totally wrong, except the US didn't lose it's talent. Instead it all went to software and finance, which pay drastically more, with much comfier working conditions, and much more generous benefits then becoming a machine tool maker.
The US is an advanced, mature, economy. Our children three generations back aspired to never don a blue collar. We would lead the world at the absolute cutting edge, and delegate the rest to lower economies. That's what we did, and that's what we have. So now we just argue about the need for people to go back and do dirty work, but ain't nobody volunteering to give up their $150k/yr hybrid job to make $80k commuting 5 days a week to process engineer job at scary health hazards factory. Ain't no VC funding an e-bike factory when an e-bike picker app costs 1/1000 the cost and can be done with a team of 5 people and scaled to 50 million users.
Totally agree on those points too, but I think you're giving US companies too much credit when you say:
> playing the long game while we're playing the "whose dick I have to suck to get a better position in the next 5 years"
5 years is generous. I'd say a year at most. Just keep delivering gold statues to the White House in order curry favor for a little while longer; meanwhile, keep chasing the profits at the expense of longevity, as required by law for public companies.
Anybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.
Camping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.
There is also another thing where quality Chinese products are very cheap compared to western products. Since Chinese engineers are cheaper, they can live with lower margins on their products.
A roomba was twice as much as a roborock that was better.
Prusa MK4S is 720 EUR, the arguably better Bambu Lab A1 is 260 EUR.
It wasn't labor costs that made the Roomba twice a Roborock, but manufacturing costs. Roomba teardowns basically show that iRobot was just really bad at cost-optimizing their vacuums for mass production.
You can probably maintain your Prusa forever. The Bambu... not so much. It is a philosophy choice here and the 3D printer space is vastly more complex and nuanced for many users than an appliance that has one simple job. Yes if you /just/ want to print stuff and treat it like an appliance as a curious consumer dabbling in the space the Bambu is great. That was never Prusa's target. I don't think the comparison is very strong.
And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.
I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.
This is the cost of taking too much funding. Roomba could have remained a modest robovac company and continued indefinitely... they still sell millions of units. American corporate leadership in partner with VCs are chasing massive paydays and absolutely wrecking the companies they're running to do it.
I've been happy with the Roborock but I did not expect it to match the cleaning levels of a human. I can run it while I'm not there or doing other tasks, though, and it does a good enough job until I feel the need to intervene.
When I was looking at getting one, the iRobot one took hours / days to map out a house and it needed the lights on to do that. The Roborock model could do this in 15 to 30 minutes, and it could do it in the dark because it used LiDAR instead of a camera.
That was several years ago now, and iRobot _just_ added LiDAR to their latest models.
I have a Roborock too. It is certainly good at quickly creating a reasonably accurate map, but it just gets stuck so easily. Things like going into an enclosed corner but unable to get out. Or going into a room, cleaning the floor just behind the door such that the door shuts and now unable to leave the room. I certainly cannot run it while not at home. It will just get stuck.
