Amazon’s Dangerous New Acquisition
The company’s purchase of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, likely has little to do with cleaning floors.
by Ron Knox
Aug 21, 2022
4 minutes
Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it was buying the Roomba vacuum maker iRobot. On the surface, this move looks like a massive online retail marketplace acquiring a popular gadget to sell to its loyal shoppers. Roomba is a sparkling consumer product, and iRobot has sold 40 million of them over the past two decades. Shoppers today find them occupying end caps at big retailers such as Costco and Target. The device’s smooth, spinning design has given it a huge chunk of the $3 billion-a-year robot-vacuum market; three quarters of all smart vacuums sold in America bear the Roomba name. In that way, the deal makes sense.
But my suspicion is that, for Amazon, the
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