The guys were making bomb disposal robots not predator drones I don&#x27;t think activists had any effect on their prospect, and could we please stop calling them &quot;warbots&quot;?<p>Selling of a chunk of your company for a short term cash flow might be a good reason.<p>However there might be a more straight forward one as working with the military isn&#x27;t easy or cheap, they are your most picky costumer and unlike people who order Roomba&#x27;s from Amazon actually know how to formulate contracts and keep you honest.<p>Military contracts come with years of support and services and while they can be very lucrative they also can have a very negative effect on the company as a whole.<p>When you sell something to the military you are usually bound by a contract to continue supporting that product for say 10 years.<p>This means that during these 10 years you can&#x27;t discontinue that product or have to keep a large stockpile of replacement units and parts and more importantly keep the in-house knowledge required to support it which means keeping the personnel who were involved with the project originally or ensuring that every bit of the knowledge is transferred this isn&#x27;t cheap and in the tech industry isn&#x27;t easy.<p>Military contract pretty much mean that you have to magically increase the average employee retention period for more or less the duration of the contract, in many other cases the contract might actually force you to transfer some knowledge and skills to sub-contractors that would provide the global service the military might require which means some of your IP can leak.<p>There&#x27;s a good reason why so many companies are either 100% dedicated to the defense industry (and many of those burn out quite quickly because of how demanding those contracts are) or have their defense oriented subsidiary very well isolated from the main corporate entity.<p>That&#x27;s because when you sell to the military it might actually restrict the potential market as the contract might specify exclusivity or give the DOD oversight on all your future deals (to prevent technology transfer to non-friendly actors), when you are a tech company that can be an issue because quite often there will be quite a bit of lateral technology sharing across the company (one of the additional reasons why big corporations tend to keep their military subsidiaries very separated).<p>Which now could mean you are restricting your commercial products from being sold as they now might require a DOD oversight as well; a possible example in iRobot&#x27;s case might be that the same algorithm that allows your Roomba to detect objects such as cats and babies is the same algorithm that is used by their commercial bomb disposal robots to detect road side IED&#x27;s so now the DOD might either force them to modify it sufficiently or restrict sales of the Roomba&#x27;s to &quot;friendly&quot; nations.<p>Dumping their military&#x2F;leo department in some one else&#x27;s lap releases them from most of the commitments, protects their future IP from oversight and gives them a short term cash influx that they might need.
Trying to find some ideological reasoning behind this is just silly.