Explore vs exploit?

Let's run an expierement where we just run exploit forever, let's restrucute the private sector, our countries moral baselines and eventually our executive leadership to be maximally exploitive, lets do that for about 45 years and see where it lands us -Some greed is good guys in the 80s probably.

It just doesn’t seem like these other vacuum robotics companies spend so much money on research and development.

I’m sure they could have built more advanced robots, etc. If they had focused on research, but when virtually every competitor is cheaper and offers better technology. It seems like their competitors just applied something off the shelf and not some grand big brain advancement.

Missing the point.

iRobot was far more than vacuums until they weren't.

Read the article. The author spells it out.

I lived it. I read about them and bought a Roomba back when they first sold them. They had so much in the pipeline, consumer and otherwise. Hell, they even had a STEM kit programmable Roomba.

History repeats itself because people forget.

It just says that they sold off their defense robot division and launched a consumer products company.

They just aren’t consumer centric. The neato was so much better than the Roomba and that was so long ago

That is probably true. But Roomba sucked in the early 2000's too. They never got better.

I believe the author's thesis is that if they had invested in innovation over a couple decades, the product probably would have sucked less.

Or perhaps would have sucked more where it needed to, and sucked less where it didn't.

It's a vacuum cleaner. All you want it to do is suck.

But not at navigation.

The innovation being shutdown wasn't innovation towards making robot vacuum cleaners better. It was innovation direct towards military applications like building robotic hands.

Exactly this. If they had been innovating in vacuum technology then maybe this article would have a point. But they were building stuff for the military and for space, and there's a good reason investors wanted them to get out of that because it was sucking up money and not resulting in better vacuum cleaners.

Well it's 2025, we've just spent the better half of the year discussing the bitter lesson. It seems clear solving more general problem is key to innovation.

Hardware is not like software. A general purpose humanoid cleaning robot will be superior to a robot vacuum but it will always cost an order of magnitude more. This is different from software where the cost exponentially decreases and you can do the computer in the cloud.

I'm not sure advancements in AI and advancements in vacuum cleaners are at similar stages in terms of R&D. I'd be very wary of trying to apply lessons from one to the other.

And the commenter above is highlighting the article's hypothesis about why they never got better.

Yet they were about far more than just vacuums!

In the 2000s, no one was doing what they were doing.