> It is shocking that no hardware manufactures are jumping in the space of not running their own services.
We've been wondering for a long time why the vendors (especially Roborock) invested so much effort in locking us out.
We still don't know, but just a few days ago I saw this post on Reddit, where Roborock unilaterally altered the deal, hinting at the possibility of perhaps upcoming subscription-based features in the future?
With the market being as saturated as it is and with Roborock being a publicly traded company required to bring in the revenue, I suppose such a move would make sense. It would at least be following the same playbook, all the other players in all the other markets are following.
Anyway, my point being that I don't think that there is still much money to find in hardware alone. There still is, but it's not the money maker it once was.
You can see it by robot vacuums becoming a commodity but also by one of the largest players doing something that could be read as preparing to shift from just hardware to services.
And, since the vast majority of investment is only done on the promise of providing hypergrowth and 100x to 1000000000x (add some more 0s to that) ROI, I'm not sure if some entity just selling decent robots without cloud tethers would receive any funding at all.
You can definitely make such a business profitable, but you can't make it the absurd amounts of profitable, investors with deep enough pockets to fund hw development upfront are seeking.
We've been wondering for a long time why the vendors (especially Roborock) invested so much effort in locking us out.
We still don't know, but just a few days ago I saw this post on Reddit, where Roborock unilaterally altered the deal, hinting at the possibility of perhaps upcoming subscription-based features in the future?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Roborock/comments/1ghlgjb/anyone_ge...
With the market being as saturated as it is and with Roborock being a publicly traded company required to bring in the revenue, I suppose such a move would make sense. It would at least be following the same playbook, all the other players in all the other markets are following.
Anyway, my point being that I don't think that there is still much money to find in hardware alone. There still is, but it's not the money maker it once was. You can see it by robot vacuums becoming a commodity but also by one of the largest players doing something that could be read as preparing to shift from just hardware to services.
And, since the vast majority of investment is only done on the promise of providing hypergrowth and 100x to 1000000000x (add some more 0s to that) ROI, I'm not sure if some entity just selling decent robots without cloud tethers would receive any funding at all. You can definitely make such a business profitable, but you can't make it the absurd amounts of profitable, investors with deep enough pockets to fund hw development upfront are seeking.