[hodder]

This is such a bad faith, and frankly dishonest take on the situation.

As you know, Khan’s FTC worried it wouldn’t be able to prevent Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot in court, so instead it dragged out approval, which it never granted, while continuously threatening to block.

Simultaneously, her FTC openly worked with the EU to convince the EU to use its more expansive antitrust regime to get the EU to block the deal. That dragged the shot clock for the deal lower and lower (deals have backend dates contractually agreed to, after which the parties no longer are committed to work towards closing the deal and can walk).

Even as the EU was challenging the deal and the shot clock was approaching zero, her FTC was STILL not granting approval and threatened to block and drag it out another year in U.S. courts, all the way until Amazon threw in the towel.

After the deal collapsed, the FTC celebrated and took credit.

The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now.

[ajkjk]

The point is that "sold to Amazon" or "sold to chinese competitors" being the only options is a false narrative. There was also the "do a good job" option which is being conveniently omitted by people who want to blame the FTC.

[twoodfin]

If we’re arguing about strategic decisions made a decade ago in this context, aren’t we really arguing about whether any company should ever fail?

This is Matt Stoller throwing a bunch of dust in the air because he wants to have been right when he was glad Khan shut down the merger, and then right again when the husk of iRobot sold out to the Chinese. Because Matt is always right, and “Wall Street” is always wrong.

[throwaway382948]

That's only an option if the FTC can rewind time. Can they?

[ajkjk]

er? No we are talking about the attribution of blame. If you're saying "what a shame that iRobot is being sold to Chinese competitors" and then you "...because of the FTC" you're essentially lying; it's because of incompetence and capitalism and then also maybe a little bit the FTC (although I'm very skeptical of that as well, because in this whole narrative the FTC is the only party that can be even claimed to be acting prosocially).

[throwaway382948]

People focus on the FTC because not blocking struggling companies from merging seems a lot more tractable than revamping capitalism or stopping humans from making business mistakes.

iRobot was (arguably) mismanaged just like Spirit Airlines or Warner Bros, but I'd appreciate if the FTC didn't make the matter worse.

[crazygringo]

Sorry, can you explain the "do a good job" option in more detail please? How should they have been run differently to generate more profit?

[ajkjk]

That's not what a good job is

[crazygringo]

Thanks, that's very helpful.

[ajkjk]

I mean, read the article? That's what it's about.

[crazygringo]

...except it's not.

[tzs]

> The fact iRobot later failed and was sold to Chinese competitors is directly attributable to that block, as it would otherwise be owned and supported by Amazon right now

...or "owned and neglected by Amazon right now". I'm not confident Amazon can maintain their IoT stuff adequately. Take their Alexa stuff. They have been having large problems with the Alexa mobile apps for months now.

For example the device list often shows up as either empty or the devices say an error occurred if you try to use them. Sometimes repeatedly trying will finally succeed and then they all work at least until next time you use the app.

The back end knows about the devices, and you can operate them all by voice just fine, through the app or an Echo device, so it looks like they just screwed up something in the app.

When I first hit this it wasn't working for so long that I assumed it must be a problem just affecting me because if it was widespread surely they would have fixed it. Eventually I described it to an LLM and it gave me links to a whole bunch of discussion on Reddit and other forums of people having the same problem, spanning something like the last year.

The Chinese company buying them is a robot vacuum company, and was already a manufacturer and supplier for iRobot. As it currently stands I'm more confident that they can keep my Roomba working than Amazon can.