Ha ha, look at that little guy go! Aren’t Roombas
fun? The robot vacuums zoom around the house, sucking up dust and dirt.
The little robots look like simple circles, and for many people they’ve turned vacuuming from an
annoying chore to something fun. Remember having to haul that bulky vacuum cleaner
around the house and squeeze the hose into corners? Now you don’t have to do any work,
and you can watch as the Roomba tackles it and provides opportunity for mischief. Want
to put your cat on top of the Roomba and video the chaos? Go for it! Want to strap
knives to two Roombas and have them go to war? That’s not covered by the warranty.
But the Roomba is more than a curiosity. It’s one of the
fastest-growing companies - and a big gun wants in.
On August 5th, Amazon announced that it intended to buy Roomba’s parent company,
iRobot, for a hefty sum of 1.7 billion dollars. That’s an impressive number,
and while the deal has to be approved by the Federal Trade Commission, it’s expected to go
through. But are Robot vacuums really worth that much? Unless Jeff Bezos plans to start
a knife-Roomba fighting ring, what would Amazon actually want from this product?
It turns out iRobot does a lot more than just Roombas.
iRobot was founded in 1990 by three people working in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab,
who worked on designing robots for the defense department and space program. They were far ahead
of much of the competition in robot development, and in addition to Roombas they sell a number of
other products for the home market. They include a floor-mopping robot closely related to the Roomba,
as well as robots for kids and adults to learn about coding and robot design. They’re much
more niche products than the Roomba, but they increase the company’s value.
But that’s not its biggest appeal.
iRobot also has a robot lawnmower called Terra in development,
which would be its first product designed for outdoor use on the home market. To make that,
they’re likely calling back to some of their most successful innovations - robots designed
for the military that are used for hard labor and sensitive tasks. For much of their history,
the majority of the public has never seen most of the robots that iRobot designed,
with most staying in the prototype phase - but some, like the heavy-duty PackBot,
are essential in exploring and clearing dangerous areas like the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.
So is Amazon getting into the military market?
These tools could be a major asset, but they’re not the main appeal for Amazon. That’s definitely
the Roomba - which has a simple appearance, but holds a lot of secrets. Because the Roomba isn’t
just a simple robot vacuum cleaner. Did you ever wonder how it seems to know where you’re
going? How it seems to be able to navigate your house so smoothly, and quickly learn
to avoid obstacles? Depending on how you feel about it, the Roomba is either like having a
strange circular pet - or a creepy little robot that’s secretly following you and judging you.
The Roomba keeps evolving - and with every model it gets smarter.
The first model in 2002 had a simple interface and was used in stable environments like workshops. As
future models debuted, they got faster, the suction got better, the brushes got better
at avoiding tangles - and the software got much, much smarter. Eventually, the updated technology
made it so the Roomba could be connected to an app, and it would learn from every path around
your house. With each run, it would build a map of your house to help it clean more effectively.
While it didn’t keep the maps between runs for privacy purposes, it did incorporate a new system
called PrecisionVision that could even avoid temporary obstacles like power cords as it worked.
So why do some people think this could be the most dangerous acquisition in Amazon’s history?
For one thing, Amazon’s really big! For those concerned with the potential for a monopoly,
Amazon’s size has been worrying them for a long time. The powerhouse tech company started as a
convenient online bookseller and now runs an empire that hosts most convenient place to
buy…well, everything! In addition to their massive online marketplace, they now have a
thriving TV streaming service with near bottomless investments, a huge online grocery-delivery
service in Instacart, and they recently purchased the internet’s only major digital comic book
retailer comiXology. They sell so many goods that every state across America is now dotted
with Amazon warehouses, and they’re quickly becoming one of the largest employers around.
But there’s one sector of sales where they might have even more influence.
Alexa, pull up every detail you have on…Amazon! The digital assistant revolutionized the concept
of smart speakers by integrating them into countless parts of your daily routine. These
all-in-one towers would play music, issue reminders of appointments, answer questions,
and provide morning wake-up calls, all in the same soothing voice that
soon started to seem like a member of the household. They run on voice recognition,
which meant that all you had to do was yell “Alexa,
what was that movie about the guy fighting a bear” to settle a movie trivia argument.
It would be Amazon’s first brush with artificial intelligence - but it wouldn’t be the last.
Other digital assistants from competitors made their debut,
but none reached the success level of Alexa. In 2018, they acquired Ring LLC,
a Smart Doorbell company that replaced the traditional lock and deadbolt with a
computerized security system. Some people loved it for its added security - others pointed out
that these homes now had surveillance technology on them at all times, and the company regularly
shared footage with law enforcement when needed. Civil rights advocacy groups were concerned,
but Ring kept growing - and Amazon was now one of the most powerful players in the Smart Home boom.
But is Roomba a bridge too far - and why?
It turns out that Roomba actually merges nicely with one of Amazon’s growing priorities. While
Alexa is a highly advanced digital assistant, it’s also largely stationary - it exists
in a tower at your home, in your phone or in your car’s dashboard,
and can be called on as needed. But when you combine that with Roomba’s mobile technology,
it’s now possible for the company to create a fast-moving robot that can follow you through
your home and respond to your commands as soon as they’re issued. At first thought,
that sounds pretty cool. It’s like having your own robot butler. Maybe you’ll name it Jeeves.
But Amazon has far bigger plans for your robot companion.
While Roomba is the dominant name in the robot vacuum marketplace,
there are competitors from just about every major electronics company like LG and Shark. Many of
them are cheaper than the Roomba too - although none have the reputation for quality. However,
the Amazon merger means that Roomba and Amazon would have access to each other’s
AI technology - which means the Roomba would be able to evolve faster than any competitor,
putting them at a massive advantage for a large share of the market.
And it may be a larger investment in the company’s future.
Amazon’s robotic development has been spotty at best, with the company rolling
out their first stand-alone model called the Amazon Astro in 2021. It looks cute,
kind of like something out of a Pixar movie, but there was just one problem - no one was really
sure what it was for! It comes with Alexa built in and seems to be able to complete
simple functions like turning off machines and retrieving items, but the $1000 bot is
only available through invitations, and there are reportedly a lot of kinks to work out.
So why build your own when you can just work off what’s already there?
By acquiring iRobot, Amazon gains access to all their decades of artificial intelligence research,
and would be able to incorporate those innovations into their new products with little lead time.
However, their biggest motivator may be less about the technology, and more about boosting
their overall market strength. While Amazon still makes an enormous amount of money from direct
one-time sales, they are increasingly pivoting to a subscription model. Amazon Prime, which
provides free shipping, access to their streaming service, and other perks, reportedly has over
two hundred million subscribers worldwide. There are many add-on services that can be attached to
your Prime subscription - and it’s likely one for the Roomba’s many digital services would be added.
And that brings Amazon one step closer to global domination!
Well, not really. Probably. But Jeff Bezos and his successors at Amazon do seem to want to dominate
the retail market in any way they can, and the more products and services they bundle into Amazon
and it’s associated Prime services, the more people they’ll have in the Amazon family. Once
you join the Amazon Roomba plan, you’ll start hearing about other Amazon services. Then it’s
just easier to join Prime and get it as a package deal. Then you’re adding on other channels because
they have shows you want. Then you might as well take advantage of that free shipping,
and ooh, that looks great. And suddenly you have a full cart, six subscriptions,
and are telling your friends how much you’re saving with your ten new subscriptions.
But is Amazon’s purchase of Roomba just about good ol’
innocent capitalism - or something more sinister?
The purchase of an AI vacuum company might not seem bad at first, but privacy advocates
are warning the public that it could be a terrifying tipping point for Amazon’s
control - with several civil rights advocates and digital journals calling it the most dangerous
acquisition in the company’s history and urging the FTC to spike it. Evan Greer,
the director of the digital rights organization Fight for the Future,
said that Amazon was essentially a digital surveillance company monitoring your online
activity and using it to gather information on your shopping habits and behavioral patterns.
And the Roomba would allow Amazon to do this on a much bigger scale.
While Alexa is mostly stationary and dependent on input, the Roomba freely wanders around your home
collecting data - and while it deletes the maps after each run, there is no guarantee that would
continue under Amazon. This could mean that it observes what you don’t have in your home,
feeding that information to your Alexa who will start to make recommendations for purchases based
on that - or it could also mean it collects inside information on activity within your home that it
could pass on to the authorities when a government request is filed. Privacy activists say the risk
of this technology being abused is way too high, while Amazon says…it’s just a little vacuum, dude!
But there’s another concern too.
iRobot and the Roomba brand are very different from Amazon’s last major tech acquisition,
Ring, because Ring was a start-up. iRobot is a publicly traded company that has been
building its value for over fifteen years, and it already has millions of people subscribing to
its Roomba digital services. Amazon would pick up that entire catalog of buyers,
adding another huge subscriber base to its massive portfolio and bringing it closer
and closer to total control of the market. Could anyone compete with the Roomba in the
digital vacuum space when it’s bundled in with all the other Prime benefits?
Would this finally make Amazon a monopoly?
Many people are asking - why hasn’t the government busted up Amazon like it did
to companies such as Standard Oil a century ago? Even Microsoft was hit with an antitrust filing,
forcing them to make concessions and payments to avoid being broken up in the 1990s. But an
antitrust ruling against Amazon or other major tech companies is much trickier for
a number of reasons. The majority of antitrust filings were against companies that controlled
the flow of a single good or service - be it oil or computers. They control the market,
eliminate the competition, and can set their prices for maximum profit. However,
today the biggest companies like Amazon and other tech giants invented their own service. Amazon
doesn’t seem to want to fully control one sector, they just want to be the biggest player in almost
every sector. And that is a lot harder to mark as a monopoly - despite what many politicians say.
So is the merger likely to be approved?
Amazon has declined to respond to any early concerns about privacy with this acquisition,
but it’s likely to answer them in front of the commission eventually. But right now,
all they’re saying is that all data will only be for internal use and
they’ll respect the privacy of their customers. It won’t be enough to calm
the fears of privacy advocates - but it might be enough for the FTC to approved the merger.
Just don’t be surprised when your Roomba suddenly starts talking in
Alexa’s voice and suggesting new carpet patterns to you.
Want to know more about Amazon’s biggest rivals for tech dominance? Check out “Real
Reason Why Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Hate Each Other”, or watch this video instead.