Amazon to Acquire iRobot For $1.7 Billion
upstart writes:
The deal will give the e-retail behemoth even more access to our homes:
[...]
It seems fairly obvious why Amazon wanted to get its hands on iRobot. Amazon has been working for years to integrate itself into homes, first with audio systems (Alexa), and then video (Ring), and more recently some questionable home robots of its own, like its indoor security drone and Astro. Amazon clearly needs some help in understanding how to make home robots useful, and iRobot can likely provide some guidance, with its extraordinarily qualified team of highly experienced engineers. And needless to say, iRobot is already well established in a huge number of homes, with brand recognition comparable to something like Velcro or Xerox, in the sense that people don't have "robot vacuums," they have Roombas.
All those Roombas in all of those homes are also collecting a crazy amount of data for iRobot. iRobot itself has been reasonably privacy-sensitive about this, but it would be naive not to assume that Amazon sees a lot of potential for learning much, much more about what goes on in our living rooms. This is more concerning, because Amazon has its own ideas about data privacy, and it's unclear what this will mean for increasingly camera-reliant Roombas going forward.
[...] My worry, though, is that iRobot is just going to get completely swallowed into Amazon and effectively cease to exist in a meaningful and unique way. I hope that the relationship between Amazon and iRobot will be an exception to this historical trend. Plus, there is some precedent for this-Boston Dynamics, for example, has survived multiple acquisitions while keeping its technology and philosophy more or less independent and intact. It'll be on iRobot to very aggressively act to preserve itself, and keeping Colin Angle as CEO is a good start.
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