this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I doubt it. If you are stopping r&d and killing whole product lines, it makes sense to lay off the teams directly tied to those product lines. I'm guessing they needed Amazon to help them break into the market for areas outside of floor vacuums?
Call me a skeptic but I’d be willing to bet small amounts of money that Amazon would absolutely lay some or all of these people off after the initial onboarding.
Fold home automation IP into Alexa brand, keep iRobot vacuum brand but increase data exfiltration, and put ads on all searches to increase sales, layoff the ~~scrubs~~ R&D team would be the natural playbook.
It really depends on redundancy. Does Amazon have people that can do what iRobot staff does. For operational or sales teams maybe. If Amazon becomes the only store where you can buy a roomba, you probably lay off folks responsible for wholesale. That probably also means you lay off some marketing. But the core people that make the stuff probably have less redundancy. These layoffs are probably impacting the people that actually make and design the stuff, since they no longer or going to make all the stuff they planned. The hypothetical layoffs for acquisition would probably be smaller and impact different people at the company. And because it's an acquisition, there may have been negotiated more favorable severance terms,
They should definitely dump air purifiers. What does that have to do with robotics?
Lawn mowers however seem like a stupid drop, since a lawn is floor adjacent and the market in them is growing.