Sarah has a table with a curved metal bottom that her Roomba finds fiendishly difficult to navigate. 'I can't really leave it at home unsupervised.' 'It gets stuck a lot,' my Vox colleague Sarah Kliff told me. The vast majority of American households don't have a Roomba or any other robot vacuum cleaner and seem to be in no hurry to buy one.Īnd if you talk to Roomba owners, it's not hard to see why. But in a nation of 320 million people (not to mention a world with more than 7 billion people), it's still a niche product. By any reasonable metric, that's a successful product. Last year, iRobot sold 2.4 million Roombas. Getting a Roomba won't change your life Daniel Morrison These companies are struggling for similar reasons: Their products demand too much from their users while providing too little value in return.

But the Roomba remains a niche product, and iRobot hasn't come up with another hit. The company is hardly a failure, having sold 15 million units since it was introduced in 2002. But the company, which was acquired by Google in 2014, has struggled to develop new products, raising questions about whether Google overpaid for the company.Ī similar story can be told about iRobot, the company behind the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. But other tasks have proven more resistant to digital transformation.Įarlier this year, I wrote about Nest, whose popular smart thermostat made it a poster child for smart homes. And of course that's been true for industries like music, news, and maps. Silicon Valley optimists like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen have predicted that digital technology would revolutionize every facet of our lives. The result: it 'spread the dog poop over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.' Unfortunately, he happened to be asleep when the Roomba ran. 'If your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle,' the man wrote. His dog had an accident on the floor, and then the Roomba started its scheduled cleaning. In a recent Facebook post, an Arkansas man described just how bad these problems can be. But sometimes there are unexpected problems. I have a Roomba, one of the most popular models, and most of the time it works great. A robot vacuum cleaner sounds like a great idea.

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