Clean Dancing

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Even Goliath, one imagines, began life as a David. And as for David, well, he went on to become a giant in his own right, before all was said and done. Herein lies the tension at the heart of the Roomba story. Around the turn of this past century, iRobot played the David role to Electrolux’s Goliath, as the Massachusetts startup and Swedish appliance giant suddenly found themselves swimming in the same waters. 

We know how that chapter ends, of course. YouTube wasn’t awash with videos of baffled cats riding tricked out Electrolux Trilobites during the 2010s. After several failed attempts to put itself on the map, iRobot won that battle, full stop. A second Trilobite was released three years later, before the product went the way of its arthropodic namesake.  

Joseph Jones’s Dancing With Roomba  recounts the moment in consumer robotics history directly from one of its principal creators. It’s a rare robotics book that’s more memoir than technical manual, going so far as recounting a little bit of quasi-industrial espionage as a treat.  

The book recounts — one by one — why various contemporary attempts at robot vacuums failed to gain purchase. As far as Trilobite goes, it turns out no one in 2001 wanted to pay $1,000 for routine floor cleaning. Things have changed a bit on that front — though one could certainly argue that iRobot has had to relearn this lesson via a flood of low-cost competitors, produced largely by Chinese firms.  

Jones and I chatted last week — largely about my longstanding questions of why and how iRobot’s vacuum proved to be a true unicorn, by cracking a market that continues to perplex both Davids and Goliaths to this day. 

“Getting it right gets you to the starting gate,” Joseph Jones tells me, “and then someone rolls the dice and either you succeed or fail.” 

One important piece of the puzzle is striking the right balance between over- and under-engineering a product. That takes the right engineers, marketing execs, and focus groups to achieve that golden ratio between cost and function, determining the minimal viable product that will inspire consumer interest in a new product type. iRobot, as Jones tells it, tended more toward the under, achieving a relatively reasonable $200 price point at the expense of sensors and other upgrades. 

Something the team couldn’t achieve by launch (or for generations after) was a method to the Roomba’s cleaning madness. Rather than following a clean, map-guided path, the hockey puck bounced around living rooms like a DVD screensaver. This ambling approach to tidiness, the author suggests, ultimately proved its own strength.  

“It seemed like a little entity just trying to do its best,” Jones says, suggesting that non-linear paths helped humanize the home helper. “Roomba ended up having personality […] That was the thing that amazed me. There was one study back then where 80% of the people who bought a Roomba named it.” 

“A little entity just trying to do its best” isn’t a wholly inaccurate description of the startup that built it. A David who would find its niche among the Goliaths. But it was precisely that transformational that convinced Jones — and a team of fellow iRobot employees — to jump ship a few years after the first Roomba launch. 

“After Roomba became successful and the Packbot military robot became successful about the same time, I thought that it meant that suddenly we have a lot more freedom. We had money coming in, and because of that we'd be able to try all sorts of different robot applications. Exactly the opposite happened. Instead of having more freedom, suddenly we have a whole lot less.” 

Jones said he joined the firm believing it would be the robot company. Rather than accelerating R&D into new categories, however, he believes iRobot simply held onto the Roomba for dear life. Four years after the product’s launch, he and a handful of fellow iRobot employees left the company to found a David that would become the ag-tech firm, Harvest Automation.