[gbba]

> focus on the basics instead of marketing gimmicks

This reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about Xerox[0]. After achieving market leadership in their industry, engineering at iRobot seems to have been pushed aside in the company's decision making process.

Is this a consequence of being a publicly traded company? After all, pushing consumables and subscription services requires less capital and makes more money compared to developing a better robot. The $1.7B exit seems like a good outcome for a stagnant (relative to its peers) company.

[0] https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM?t=56

[roland35]

I ran into this issue even in a private company. Hardware takes a long time, and I think leadership doesn't realize how hard it actually is do get the basic functionality done RELIABLY. That is - having a demo of a working lawn mower / vacuum cleaner / whatever is fairly easy (I've seen Arduino based projects online), but having it work in variety of settings and conditions without user intervention for years takes a very long time to work out the bugs.

I think over time leadership gets frustrated with seemingly lack of progress on the foundation, while efforts to change the high level features (app, smart home integration, GPS, etc) distract from the core product. Just my 2c