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Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy
(www.engadget.com)
It’s like when Dunder Mifflin started selling tablets
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
311 points (98.7% liked)
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That was actually a Sabre product. They just used the acquisition to pivot to a Apple-style electronics company for a business oriented costumer base.
Wow. I just honestly don't know what else to say. Headline is spot on.
I'm not shocked. I used to love their shoes but the last couple pairs I bought dropped noticeably in comfort and quality. The enshitification rolls on
This isn't enshittification, though.
Cory doctorow actually actively encourages the bastardization of the term he coined. It is enshittification.
I'm with you, but the end user's experience is rather similar either way
I mean Tandy Leather was a thing and they expanded into Tandy Corporation for Tandy Computers. So there is precedents but yeah this screams bubble and pets.com level of stupid.
AFAIK the ColecoVision is from the same company that made plastic sleds. Think they're gone now - at the very least I know they did nothing about the video game copyrights expiring, making it one of the rare cases where emulating "pirated" copies of their games is perfectly legal.
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Echoes of when the Long Island Iced Tea company rebranded to "Long Island Blockchain" back during that particular craze.
Sooooooo, do people not remember the dot com bubble burst? Yes the internet still exists, but the companies that led the burst aren't.
Remember the pet food commercial with the sock puppet?
Or the super hero who was obviously superman, but for legal reasons wasn't superman who saved you money from travel by sticking you on his back and flying you places?
Yeeeaaaahhhh........those don't exist anymore.
Hell, even the big names like Juno and Compuserve are gone. Is AOL even still a company? ICQ is dead. Yahoo still exists, but only because they got bought by Verizon. Altavista, Ask Jeeves are both gone.
So yeah, some companies will survive the AI bubble, just as Google survived the dot com bubble. But the majority of the big names from 1998 do not exist post 2002.
Do these countless companies NOT see this?
We don't know if this bubble is going to be more like the dot-com bubble where the bubble burst but left useful things behind, or if it's going to be like the NFT bubble that left nothing useful behind.
As for whether the companies see this or not, of course they do. But, what are they going to do, go out of business intentionally before the bubble pops? It's really the investors who don't seem to see it. Why do they keep pumping money into the companies that are obviously ridiculously overvalued?
Do these countless companies NOT see this?
Western companies tend to chase short term profits at the expense of the long term.
So disappointing.
Aside from whether these companies see simularities with the dot com bubble, nobody knows for sure when the bubble will burst nor what policies will help you get to the other side unharmed. If for example their shoe business is not performing well right now, they might already not survive the economic downturn that'd hit them if the bubble bursts. It is definitely possible that this company is run by blind idiots, but it could also be imperfect human beings trying to keep their workers employed.
Allbirds isn't the only company pivoting to compute in an effort to feed the hungry goblin called AI. Boom Supersonic is a startup trying to build the world's fastest airliner but has begun selling gas turbines to AI companies to power data centers. Many Bitcoin mining centers have pivoted to AI and it's worth remembering that NVIDIA's GPUs were once used primarily for PC gaming.
Aircraft company manufacturing gas turbines seems perfectly sensible.
It does, except their execs are on LinkedIn sucking Trump's cock on the regular
linkedin became very pro-right wing after thier purchase, and when start blocking profiles if they cant datamine you. it used to be able to track people you know(through thier careers) if they are trying to bs thier CV/RESUMES.
That's also a very sensible business decision, to be fair.
Yeah the rest of the examples besides the shoe company don’t seem like a big stretch
That's a business model that makes some sense.
Fads gonna fad. At least pogs didn't wreck the environment
the announcement that Allbirds was transitioning from shoes, a product category it has a decade of experience in, to AI compute, a product category it has no experience in, shot the stock up by over 400 percent.
This is preying on boomers being really goddamn dumb. It's basically elder abuse!
bro, trust me bro, it's totally not a bubble bro
Never heard of them but their shoes look shit house so no biggie.
They're a company that made environmentally sustainable shoes out of wool and eucalyptus gum. The looks were never really the main selling point, but I've been buying from them for a few years now and I always liked them, very comfortable and I like the simple style. Unfortunate that I'm now going to have to find an alternative.
environmentally sustainable
And then they decide to use AI to generate new designs... Do they know how AI runs?
They're not generating new designs, they are no longer a shoe company and now run AI.
we literally saw this not so long ago with blockchain.
Back in my day the blockchain was a chainwith one end embedded in a block of concrete. It was our favourite toy.
Pivoting towards a different industry is okay. Japanese companies do it a lot. But of course, the concern is going towards a sector that is in a bubble to chase the hype.
I'm pretty sure sometimes what happens is they don't want to pay their quality designers. So they bring in cheap foreigners to use the og designs and modify them or build from them.
But then claim it's "AI" so it's not theft of design or style from og designers.
AI can't even handle fingers. It can't do high quality design work. Especially 3d.
Lots of ai 3d stuff floating it around. Looks okay in the render photo but when you open the file it's crap and poor quality.
It’s not that they’re using AI to replace designers, that would at least make a little sense. They sold off the shoe designs and manufacturing to a Venture Capitalist company and Allbirds is now purely an AI company, they have nothing to do with shoes anymore.
Well a few legit game review websites were sold off. Fires all staff writers and now all content is AI.
The reason is you can't make a reputation if you start as AI. You need humans to make something good first and establish reputation.
So the whole point is to buy legitimacy by buying out existing established companies.
Do you think that's what is going on here ?
It's a dumb strategy. People quickly learn and reputation can literally tank in 24 hrs. No matter how big the company's reputation and following was.
Once it comes out it's all AI garbage. It's over.
Was this supposed to be released 15 days ago?
with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider." It's also changing its name to NewBird AI.
Nope!
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