Daniel Barca

Category: Tech

  • Dyson: you’re next

    During the last decade, iRobot watched as Chinese companies took away the business they had led for a long time.

    iRobot was not just a leader in their sector, they were years ahead of the competition in technology and enjoyed the benefits of being embedded in the public’s mind as a synonym with home vacuum robots.

    Amongst other things, we can point at a lack of focus from iRobot as the main reason of their downfall. Despite LIDAR being the best system for indoor navigation and mapping, iRobot focused their R&D efforts on a camera system that lets the robot recognize its position using computer vision algorithms. The reasoning behind this decision is not that they believed that their products would work better this way, but that it would allow them to recognize the items in their user’s home for data analysis to be used for ads. That would be very interesting for a company like Amazon, which was looking to buy iRobot but ultimately failed to do so.

    Sadly, this approach was not very interesting for users concerned about their privacy. They also decided to pursue side businesses like air purifiers, while they were already losing ground to Chinese companies at the moment.

    LIDAR offers excellent results for in-home navigation, and is able to perfectly map the environment. While iRobot was spending their efforts on dead ends, their competition was investing heavily in what is nowadays the state of the art in the industry.

    I’ve spent the last year using a Dyson V15 that is Dyson’s top-tier vacuum, and seeing it now, I cannot avoid thinking about iRobot. I think Dyson can do a lot better.

    Yeah, the device itself works really well, but its build quality leaves much to be desired. Now that it’s lost its original shine, it feels pretty much like a flimsy bunch of plastic. There are just too many potential failing points and it feels designed to break. I had to make a warranty claim for a small plastic button in the Submarine accessory module. Mind, it’s a 250€ accessory that doesn’t really do that much. For a top-tier product like this, why did they decide to go for such fragile tiny components with complex mechanisms instead of, for example, a metallic button?

    Dyson is supposed to be the best of the best, but their products lack premium feel (except maybe, right after the unboxing) and transmit a worrying sense of planned obsolescence. Yes, they are technologically advanced but not unreachable anymore by the competition, and find themselves a bit in the middle of nowhere: not cheap enough to compete by price, not expensive enough to be able to improve their build quality to a more premium approach.

    Considering the value for money, they can also improve quality without increasing their prices, or go for an even higher tier of products (+1k€ robot vacuums are not uncommon).

    I think it would be a wise move because, doing a bit of research around some of the main Chinese companies that are taking over the robot market (Dreame, Roborock, Eufy…), I see that all of them are already offering really interesting alternatives to Dyson Vacuums. And I also see their products are already more feature-rich than what Dyson has to offer: automatic emptying bins, robot+cordless integrated systems, special accessories. And they are a lot, a lot cheaper.

    Dyson enjoys being synonym with cordless vacuum cleaners just like iRobot enjoyed being equivalent to home robots, but how long will it take for the competition to switch the narrative?

    It only takes one of them to offer something that really clicks with the public, and it will be very hard for Dyson to revert the momentum.

    Take that, along with the fact that Dyson seems to be more focused on weird endeavors like headphones (and even weirder, some headphones with an integrated air-purifier mask), lighting lamps and hair dryers; and it takes me back to iRobot’s focus on side businesses while they lose track of their main source of income and reputation. Yeah, some of those investments can be an opportunity (afaik hair products are a big success) but they would do well not getting too comfortable in their privileged position.

  • Google Photos Takeout uselessness can only be attributed to malice

    Yesterday I was reminded of how impressively useless Google Photos is. During the last few years I’ve become increasingly aware of the importance of choosing services that take their own disappearance into account, or the fact that I may want to stop using them.

    For software services, I try to go for open source alternatives, regardless of wether they are free or not. For example, I’ve chosen Bitwarden as my password manager because it’s built on an open source core, but I pay the premium subscription because of the advantages it provides. I like the peace of mind of knowing I can choose to export all my information and go to another service at any time.

    A few years ago I decided to choose Google Photos as my photo storage service. I happily uploaded decades of photographs into it and was very happy with the result. Google Photos has a great user experience and a very nice UI… unless you want to leave.

    As my photo library grew larger, I started reaching the 200GB limit that I was subscribed to. The price of increasing the storage on Google’s cloud services was just unacceptable for me, as I realized the system wouldn’t scale properly if my library grew even more.

    So I decided to get a NAS system and leave. But leaving Google Photos is not so easy. Due to some European laws, Google is basically obligated to provide some sort of download system so users can download their own data. If we decide to download all our pictures through this system, we get a bunch of compressed files with all our pictures. Next to each picture, Google includes an additional JSON file containing the metadata information for that picture.

    If we want the library to be usable, we need to process the whole thing through custom scripting programs that are found online, and are extremely complex and unsafe for non-programmers.

    There is not a single good reason not to include the metadata information within the picture itself. The only reason for Google to include a file type that only programmers understand is malice: they know a user is trying to exit their platform and are trying to obfuscate the process. I’m sure Google has a thousand excuses for something like this, but a massive company like this spares no resources on the dumbest imaginable details. There is just no way this can be attributed to incompetence or lack of resources, it is a business decision.

    To further make my point, there’s another step in the transition that Google intentionally tries to make not hard, just impossible unless you have a tiny library. Now that we downloaded all our pictures, how do we liberate our existing Google Cloud storage so we can stop our subscription?

    If we decide to stop our data subscription we must delete all our pictures, because if the standard 15GB of storage are full, we risk Google’s most important service to stop working: Gmail. Gmail is often not just important for people, it’s essential. It grants access to every other online service and it’s where we receive all kinds of information like government notifications or bank movements confirmation details.

    Since Gmail is omnipresent we’re pretty much Google’s hostage and they know it. They will use this to force us to keep a subscription fee that we don’t want or need, and thus they make the deletion of the photos library impossible.

    The only way of automatically deleting our photo library is by inserting a very specific piece of code while the Google Photos library is open. Again, just like happens with library processing programs, this is an extremely complex and unsafe procedure for non-programmers, leaving them the only alternative of deleting the pictures selecting them one by one.

    This kind of behavior from Google is why I decided to entirely ditch their whole ecosystem, swapping GMail for Fastmail and my own email domain, and their search engine for Kagi search, and Google Photos and Drive with my own NAS system.

    I’m convinced that Google is engaging in anticompetitive behavior with this, and I’m surprised that no government entity has decided yet to step in and force Google to make this process usable.

    The kind of modifications that need to be made to make the system reasonable are extremely easy to make for a company like Google, and I bet that they actually already have them somewhere in their codebase, just disabled for end users.

    I’m ok with companies making it inconvenient to leave their ecosystem, but it has to be done by the sheer quality of the service itself, not by adding artificial barriers around it. Photo libraries are an extremely sensitive and personal matter, and companies shouldn’t be playing with people’s lives like this.