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by Cherian
2366 days ago
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The article does not capture the complexity of running a hardware business. Anki’s landed cost was nearly 65% of the MSRP. Retailers take 30-35% margins. This leads to paper-thin margins for marketing, low working capital for production and other opex. You will not survive in a market like that. I work with ex-employees from Anki. It was a well-loved product/company. If it had survived another 3-4 years, they would have seen light. Source: I work with retail teams with products in similar categories (https://www.playosmo.com/). |
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These robots (I have a Cozmo and a Jibo) are at their core a novelty robot or "thing" attached to a voice assistant. Voice assistant are not "social" except to the autistic and those that have spent too much time reading about socializing in the academic literature rather than actually interacting with humans not in a study.
So they can't be social, and the robot part at the end of the day is basically a toy whose whiz-bang wears off rather quickly. I find a lot of the research on emotional connections to be a bit self-serving. There are some people that end up attached to a weird head thing, but most require something a bit smarter, it does not make a sizeable market.
Anyone in the toy industry could have looked at their financials and known this was a shitty idea, because at the end of the day none of these products have demonstrated that they are more than a toy attached to a voice assistant. Blaming retail channel cuts is a bit rich.