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It's worth noting that while many of the comments here involve the interesting problem of if drone delivery is viable, the article itself focuses on what appear
by TrevorJ 5y ago
It's worth noting that while many of the comments here involve the interesting problem of if drone delivery is viable, the article itself focuses on what appears to be a mismanaged project by Amazon. That is to say, their failure here seems to be separate from the difficulty of the problem space itself.
- neltnerb 5y agoSure, but I mean, I literally always thought this service was a joke. It never even occurred to me that this was a serious project, I thought it was like tacocopter for how silly it was (don't get me wrong, I love tacocopter). If Amazon's leadership did too... limited resources and lack of support make a lot of problems impossible to solve.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoYes, this is not a technology failure but a top to bottom management failure. Here's a juicy quote: "Another source says their only contact with the central office was an American executive, who would visit every few months, buy the team pizza and then ask them to double their workload" I guess if they were following the infamous Bezos rule, it would have been just one pizza as well. So, yes there are some challenges with drone deliveries; but flying stuff from A to B with an autonomous drone is pretty much a solved problem. Substitute stuff with people and that's going to be a reality soon as well. A couple of autonomous drone manufacturers were showing off their products at the Oskosh air show recently. There are challenges related to non technical issues like certification, where to fly, when to fly, how to price, how to identify suitable places to land and drop the packages, etc. But that should all be solvable.