Jeff Bezos is nothing if not a showman. Amazon's CEO loves a good reveal, and took the opportunity afforded by a 60 Minutes segment to show off his company's latest creation: drones that can deliver packages up to five pounds, to your house in less than half an hour. They're technically octocopters, as part of a program called "Amazon Prime Air." The drone sits at the end of a conveyer belt, waiting to pick up a package — Bezos says 86 percent of Amazon's packages are under five pounds — and can carry them up to ten miles from the fulfillment center.
The segment focused primarily on holiday shopping, particularly the annual shopping extravaganza that is Cyber Monday. It's a huge day for Amazon — more than 300 items will be ordered each second — and does much to reveal the company's true ambitions. Amazon doesn't just want to reinvent the way we shop for and buy things, it wants to upend every step of the process — including how our purchases come to us.
Charlie Rose spoke to a number of Amazon executives and employees, and toured one of the company's 96 massive warehouses, known as "fulfillment centers." Amazon's burgeoning same-day delivery infrastructure was on full display, and Rose explored the company's sprawling moves into fashion, groceries, web hosting, tablets, and strange political shows starring John Goodman.
But Jeff Bezos was predictably the star of the segment. He talked about how, 18 years ago, he'd drive packages to the post office himself, and dreamed of one day owning a forklift. (Things have changed a bit since then.) He says we're four or five years from drones being able to deliver small packages right to your house.
As Bezos said it is still in R&D stage but after a few years it could easily, I imagine, move farther out than 10 miles. I just wish they would expand Amazon Fresh into other major cities across the country and even start competing with Google in terms of High Speed Internet.
Pet dogs would be my biggest concern. If one of them tried to land in my garden while our dog was outside it would probably not end up leaving again :p
I could potentially see it working on a smaller scale in areas with tightly packed inhabitants though. University dorms, military bases or some apartment complexes, things like that with compact, homogeneous housing.
Not sure how many distribution Centers there are in the USA but in Europe there are maybe a total of 10? (2 I know of for sure in Germany). So how exactly is 10k range going to help there? Unless they plan to completely revamp their distribution chain it will remain a nice gimmick for people living very close to a center, but 90% of their customers won't be in range.
I suppose the cost of manufacturing a drone has to be smaller than the cost of the shipping method.
I mean, it is a 30-min delivery system. I'd be fine to pay a lot for that, as long as it is a really quick delivery and other, cheaper, options were still available.
The externalities of having all these drones buzzing about bothers me. I am 90% sure I value a drone free airspace over one filled with the buzzing noise dropping in and out of every house or hell just simply not seeing the sky poluted by the sheer number of drones.
That's all ignoring the inevitable disguising of spy drones (for private firms) as delivery drones.
On December 02 2013 11:42 Sabu113 wrote: The externalities of having all these drones buzzing about bothers me. I am 90% sure I value a drone free airspace over one filled with the buzzing noise dropping in and out of every house or hell just simply not seeing the sky poluted by the sheer number of drones.
That's all ignoring the inevitable disguising of spy drones (for private firms) as delivery drones.
All they need to do is make a law requiring the flight path of a drone to stay on a road. I doubt it'd be much louder than your average traffic.
Interesting idea. Not sure how good the implementation will end up being though seeing as there are roadblocks to it like Sabu113 mentioned or how does a drone know that they should land on the front yard and not the back or roof? What about animals? What if your pet runs towards it, the blades could technically hurt the animal so does the drone have a sensor or can it detect body heat? etc...
So a few things right off the bat based on information from this thread since I did not watch the original program,
1) Cost for this delivery method is going to be enormous, the loss of those neat plastic totes and potential loss of those drones will add a hefty premium for sure.
2) If the range is limited to ten miles from the fulfillment center you would be better off telling them the item will be a customer pick up and driving there to get it yourself (I actually don't know if Amazon allows this, my previous companies have).
3) The size of said totes leaves only very small items like phones to be worth using this for.
I would be amenable to drones going on normal car routes. Admittedly, there's a lot to be sussed out but I am definitely on the more suspicious than positive side at the moment.
EPT
