There's about a nine minute video on why it failed. It dominated the robot vacuum industry, pioneered it. But now it's in danger of going BK by end of 2025. What happened?
First they chose to stick with camera mapping instead of Lidar and as Lidar got cheaper, companies that used Lidar got an advantage on how efficiently the vacuum worked in your house, if that sounds familiar Tesla uses cameras only for self driving which is the whole issue their cars have.
Second Roomba wasn't the only product, they made a separate one to mop floors and they were working on a robotic lawnmower and other stuff which failed and cost money.
But the single biggest mistake, was completely Trumps' fault. The parts they used the key was counter rotating rollers that were patented, nobody else could use them or the process at all. It's why their vacuum worked better than anybody elses at actually sucking up dirt. Then Trump took over and did two things, China tariffs which increased the costs of those parts, and deregulation which included a change to the rules that effectively ended the life of their patent in April of 2023.
Overnight all the Shark and Chinese knockoffs took over the industry with cheaper vacuums using the same technology but with Lidar and cheaper parts. Shark also got most of its parts outside China so the tariffs weren't crushing them. China, even with tariffs, still had cheaper vacuums because of labor costs. Roombas have Lidar now and they're trying to get parts outside of China but probably too late, they are a dying company.
And a dying AMERICAN company, that made mistakes but was largely killed by one man, Donald Trump