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Amazon terminates iRobot deal, Roomba maker to lay off 31% of staff (www.cnbc.com)

submitted 7 months ago by L4s to c/technology

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Amazon terminates iRobot deal, Roomba maker to lay off 31% of staff::Amazon and iRobot said regulatory concerns made it impossible for the deal to move forward, sending the Roomba makers' shares plummeting.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 7 months ago (5 children)

If it’s any consolation those people would have been laid off no matter what happened. That’s how we do things now apparently

[–] Copernican 17 points 7 months ago (2 children)

iRobot said it would focus on margin improvements, reduce spending on research and development, and pause all work on “non-floorcare” products, including its air purifiers and robotic lawn mowers.

I doubt it. If you are stopping r&d and killing whole product lines, it makes sense to lay off the teams directly tied to those product lines. I'm guessing they needed Amazon to help them break into the market for areas outside of floor vacuums?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Call me a skeptic but I’d be willing to bet small amounts of money that Amazon would absolutely lay some or all of these people off after the initial onboarding.

[–] Copernican 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It really depends on redundancy. Does Amazon have people that can do what iRobot staff does. For operational or sales teams maybe. If Amazon becomes the only store where you can buy a roomba, you probably lay off folks responsible for wholesale. That probably also means you lay off some marketing. But the core people that make the stuff probably have less redundancy. These layoffs are probably impacting the people that actually make and design the stuff, since they no longer or going to make all the stuff they planned. The hypothetical layoffs for acquisition would probably be smaller and impact different people at the company. And because it's an acquisition, there may have been negotiated more favorable severance terms,

[–] Clent 1 points 7 months ago

They should definitely dump air purifiers. What does that have to do with robotics?

Lawn mowers however seem like a stupid drop, since a lawn is floor adjacent and the market in them is growing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Gotta artificially drive the cost of labor down somehow. All those poor folk started getting some wild ideas that they were worth something....

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

They fired their whole education wing when my startup was just starting to work with them (15 or something years ago). No warning just a month after starting a new project (early stem outreach type program), fired them all.

So I don’t feel bad for iRobot. Sucks for the employees though.

[–] Ghostalmedia 6 points 7 months ago

iRobot had been struggling over the past few years, and now capital is expensive. They were either going to need to sell or cut back in order to right the ship.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Very sustainable