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A comment on Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B. Parent comment

Re:Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B by peteradio on Friday August 05, 2022 @08:50AM (#32355338)
> will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.

I can't even get a chicken waterer to work for months at a time, no way I'd let a robot access. Even so, is it so bad to let China take the lead, western design can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back!

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Re:Amazon to acquire maker of Roomba vacuum for roughly $1.7B by jitl on Friday August 05, 2022 @09:24AM (#32355765)
> can go on vacay and rip off the results when they get back

You can clone the design if there's capital left after consumers have been buying the competitor for years, but can you clone the manufacturing process or price as easily when you're years behind?

We see with Qualcomm CPUs and Android phones - the internals are still a few years behind iPhone after about a decade, and Apple still takes the lions share of profits in the phone market.

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