Missing the point.
iRobot was far more than vacuums until they weren't.
Read the article. The author spells it out.
I lived it. I read about them and bought a Roomba back when they first sold them. They had so much in the pipeline, consumer and otherwise. Hell, they even had a STEM kit programmable Roomba.
History repeats itself because people forget.
It just says that they sold off their defense robot division and launched a consumer products company.
They just aren’t consumer centric. The neato was so much better than the Roomba and that was so long ago
I’m sure they could have built more advanced robots, etc. If they had focused on research, but when virtually every competitor is cheaper and offers better technology. It seems like their competitors just applied something off the shelf and not some grand big brain advancement.