40 ms·

First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes

327 points by brk 13y ago

CraigJPerry 13y ago
Delivery drones makes for more interesting and stimulating news than the usual b movie plots involving terrorists that come up any time the d word is mentioned.
samspenc 13y ago
Ouch, a bit harsh, but my first question after reading this was: why are Hubspot and its CEO so upset about the CBS piece?
- qq66 13y ago
  Hubspot has a lot of small ecommerce retailers as customers who compete with Amazon.
- gurumx 13y ago
  I'm a dev at HubSpot and though I have no way of knowing this for sure, I don't think our CEO was involved in this blog post. We have a lot of blog posts, and I don't think they're meant to represent the views of the company.
inigoesdr 13y ago
I'm not sure the target audience for 60 minutes is that similar to the audience that would care about drone delivery or Cyber Monday so much. Suggesting that Amazon may have intentionally wanted the story aired the day before Cyber Monday seems like a bit of a stretch. Also, the fact that Amazon wants to do drone delivery in the future has been discussed previously, and they still say it's a few years out, so this isn't much of a story to begin with.
- mpclark 13y ago
  It's the other way around, really. News organisations want to be relevant, so will all have been looking around for Cyber Monday stories. This "narrative shift" is just a way for Amazon to make sure the stories that ran prior to and during Cyber Monday were not about working conditions in its warehouses, its international tax arrangements, or the death of independent retailers. An organisation can very effectively dictate the precise timing of a story's running using tools such as an embargo (which determines the opening of the publishing window) and pre-arranged release of the story to other media (which tells an outlet with an exclusive that they should be publishing before this time). So a conversation along the lines of "We've got this great story, would you treat it properly if we gave it to you on 1 December, ahead of when it hits the wires at 8am on 2 December?" does the trick nicely.
- uptown 13y ago
  "I'm not sure the target audience for 60 minutes is that similar to the audience that would care about drone delivery or Cyber Monday so much." The 60 Minutes audience is absolutely part of the Amazon customer base - if not currently, they're in the crosshairs. Amazon explained in the segment that part of their mission is to sell everything - to everyone. And they also got their company name on the front page of every major news site. I expect they were part of most morning "news" shows, and will be mentioned in many evening news broadcasts tonight. Whether people watched 60 minutes or not - it's likely that a huge percentage of potential American shoppers saw the Amazon name mentioned someplace because of that story.
snowwrestler 13y ago
This piece is right on. Amazon package drones are total vaporware at this point; the only reason to announce them is to improve the competitive positioning of Amazon in the press. This is no different than the "slate" announcement by Microsoft and HP at CES 2010, which was widely panned and never produced any actual products for sale. But for a short time, it put MS in all the news stories about the iPad.
- girvo 13y ago
  HP did release a windows tablet called the Slate...
- headShrinker 13y ago
  You can call it vaporware, but someone is going to utilize this technology. Companies in the other countries already are. The technology is so new, and has yet to get to it's pinnacle. Bezos properly address the element that is missing, "redundancy". Whether you like it or not, these things will be flying above your head within 3 years. Whether Amazon is the one to do it? You think it's going to be UPS, FedEx, or USPS? My money is on Amazon.
- BackerHopez 13y ago
  Widely panned by trolls everywhere!
- BackerHopez2 13y ago
  Widely panned... by trolls from Hacker News?
37prime 13y ago
As soon as I saw the name Dan Lyons as the author, I son’t even bother reading it. His past articles are filled with nonsense.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  Good catch. Thanks for that.
- dsuth 13y ago
  Yeh, what a ridiculous beat-up piece. Nothing of substance. Thanks for the heads up, I'll know to avoid in future.
ljd 13y ago
It seems obvious to me that Bezos took this one public so early to garner public support so that the FAA can't just sit on it forever. All of Amazon's other initiatives didn't need some federal regulator to OK it before they could start selling it. I think this is an effective solution to getting a notoriously slow agency to move on an item. No one wants to be seen as stopping innovation, not even the FAA.
- vowelless 13y ago
  > No one wants to be seen as stopping innovation, not even the FAA. That has been my experience. I don't deal with them directly, but we have people on our team who work closely with them when it comes to unmanned aircraft. The FAA has a comprehensive publication about UAVs: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/ http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/
- RandallBrown 13y ago
  I agree. Even if Amazon doesn't end up launching its own drones, you can be sure that Fedex and UPS will eventually. That helps Amazon too.
  - buckbova 13y ago
    UPS is a slow moving entity because of its enormous size and culture. Their delivery system was more or less handled manually until about 10 years ago. 15 years ago they were still using punch clocks for hourly workers. "Eventually" could mean 25-50 years from now.
  - hershel 13y ago
    Fedex and UPS suffer from the innovator's dilemma which will make it hard for them to build the best drone service with the right business model because it means they'll lose money, sunk investments and jobs relative to their old business model. Anyway, this is probably a field rich with patents and amazon with their acquisition of kiva robotics and their attraction as an employer in this field with this PR, will grab quite a few patents and make it quite hard for other companies to compete.
  - 13y ago
ck2 13y ago
Even the still for the youtube video seems to have picked out the two big honking signs for "amazon prime" http://img.youtube.com/vi/6in-MZeeeGk/hqdefault.jpg http://img.youtube.com/vi/6in-MZeeeGk/hqdefault.jpg
tptacek 13y ago
It seems disingenuous for this blog to suggest that MacKenzie Bezos's negative review of the Bezos book was part of the same orchestrated spin campaign as the drone story. That review didn't simply object to the tone or the message of the book, but also pointed out specific factual errors the book made, errors that were later tacitly acknowledged by the author.
- owenjones 13y ago
  Also even if the book '... portrays Bezos as a ruthless tyrant and a "penny-pinching ballbuster,"' would that dissuade anyone who was already planning on it from shopping at Amazon? To me, regardless of the truth, being "penny-pinching" given Amazon's razor thin margins seems like a good trait for the CEO.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    What about "ruthless tyrant?" I'm making a point to shop locally now. I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country.
    - Crito 13y ago
      One would think that you would reserve that sort of terminology to describe warlords with armies of child soldiers, or dictators who have their "democratic opponents" dragged out of their homes with black bags over their heads... you know, "ruthless tyrant" stuff...
      - swalkergibson 13y ago
        Walmart essentially engages in the capitalist equivalent of both of those. Third World labor exploitation and near-extortion of their upstream suppliers. I cannot think of a more ruthless tyrant than Walmart.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country Have you ever shopped there? Or do you just repeat what you read all the time? Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas, and I doubt a drive-by HN commenter has any sense of proportion on the real issues at play. Wall-mart migh mean more competition for mom & pop stores, but they also bring reliable and affordable access to otherwise unaffordable or trans-port prohibitive goods and services to people that don't have the wallet or the access to shop at whole foods or a boutique coffee shop that charges $5/cup. The reality is that even for successful stores such as these, the owners are absent, the employees make non-living wages (corrected for rent), and the extant competitors are out of business or severely harmed. Think of all the gentrification in the mission in the past 15 years...all of those (poor) people are more fucked by hipsters and their fancy shit than anyone ever was by Walmart.
zallarak 13y ago
While I agree the 60 minutes segment seemed like a commercial, I don't understand why one would waste time attacking this innovation (not the helicopters, but the logistics behind it). A more meaningful discussion would be what the actual objections of the FAA are, what the repercussions of drones in the air are, etc.
benjamincburns 13y ago
In all of the criticism, I haven't seen anything remarking on the energy cost for this. I can hear a strawman in the audience saying "But drones are tiny/electric/cheap!" Not at these scales. Consider the (lack of) efficiency of quadcopters, the weights and distances involved, and the total sales volume for this service in even a small test market. I'd buy that flight itself is a viable option over wheeled vehicles when you consider more direct transit, reduction in delays due to traffic, and the reduction in weight of the delivery vehicle, but I'd imagine this advantage would only exist for fixed-wing delivery vehicles, not quad/hex/octo-copters. $20 says that if this ever happens in the real world, the delivery vehicles are mechanically very different from what's shown in the promo video.
- randomdata 13y ago
  I, for one, eagerly await the return of the autogryo for local mail delivery.
- joenathan 13y ago
  The energy cost would have to be less than shipping by traditional means, which requires much more human involvement, additional sorting, travel, and stops. If you've ever tracked a package this would be pretty obvious.
- gutnor 13y ago
  What I wonder is why nobody is pointing out that delivering less than 2kg in 30 min in a radius of 10 km can be done freely on a cheap pizza using plain old human labour. I fail to imagine at what stage Amazon drone become cheaper considering the reliability of drone and the complexity of navigating a dense urban environment (I assume it is to be used there) Also, if it can be done cheaply enough, takeaways will eventually use the same system. I wonder how that will scale ...
  - __Joker 13y ago
    While the pizza delivery will be cheap now but given time for the technology to mature and then the scale of the operation will make drone technology more cheaper. Obviously it will take a quite a time before it adds to profit line. As usual Amazon will keep absorbing the losses for that time and it is well equipped to that, if amazon history tells us anything.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
neakor 13y ago
Seems like a long stretch. Who cares if the CEO is a nice guy? Steve Jobs is known as a terrible boss, but no one cares. The only thing matters to the mass consumers and the company's customers is the products the company produces.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Sadly, yes. Further, people dont really care where or how products are made. We get all this negative PR about how appalling working conditions are where many top selling brands are made, but there is no noticeable dent in sales as a result. If shoppers cared, they would shop differently. However, its a lot to do with the egos of these CEOs, and what not. You and I may not care how nice or horrible these people may or may not be, but the people getting the negativity do. They dont like the idea that the public think they are not very nice, or what ever. So, I'd suggest its possible its more about individual ego, than sales. Sales is a convenient excuse.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Well that didn't take long[1] :-) Perhaps Bezos is taking his cues from Google who trots out their self driving car when ever they want to boost their image with the public. It is interesting to watch from the perspective of companies balancing the 'reality' that they are doing everything they can to maximize their influencer, revenue, Etc. And still keep a friendly face on it. There was a time that the only information the public got about a company was their advertisements. I subscribe to the notion that this particular stunt was both, technology investigation and PR piece. It sets Amazon apart from Walmart as "new technology" which carries a bit of cachet with the buying public, and there are some very real and interesting questions that can be informed by building a prototype system (which refers back to our discussion a while ago about actually doing something to figure out how hard it is really) and since it is so far out all it does is cause worry on the part of competitors. Seems like a reasonable strategy to me. [1] A blog post arguing some technology demo is a PR stunt
bhartzer 13y ago
I find this whole publicity stunt by Amazon curiously similar to the publicity stunt that Domino's did back in June, where they deliver pizzas via drones.
- jaybna 13y ago
  Do no one remember TacoCopter? http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/ Most brilliant PR move ever. #suckers
coldcode 13y ago
I don't think they had much credibility left.
noonespecial 13y ago
Perhaps it was prior art. I can already feel the ground rumbling with the coming stampede of "X... but with teh drones!" patents.
- Crito 13y ago
  "The Tacocopter of [Something]" is one of my favorite answers to the "The something of something" startup idea game. "The Tacocopter of Twitter" I think has been my best so far; some sort of telegraph service that delivers your printed telegraph message with a quadcopter instead of a courier.
siglesias 13y ago
Who cares? It sparks the public imagination and gets people excited for the future. It's the kind of thing that can get a child interested in robotics or can give entrepreneurs a new level of insight into where commerce is headed. It sets a bar for ambition. Also, how often is it that we're dazzled with TED talks showcasing university research projects that promise the world and never make it to market? Is the point, ultimately, to make it to market, or to submit something bold to the consciousness? Secondly, how will it work out for Amazon, in its coveted "long-run," if it erodes public trust by showing something it doesn't really think will ship? I think showing it in public gives them an onus to execute. As others have mentioned, it also creates an onus for the FAA to take this challenge seriously and to accelerate its thinking about this new direction.
- javajosh 13y ago
  Indeed - I wish more companies were goaded into doing interesting, exciting things in reaction to scathing biographies. Quick, someone write a scathing biography of Elon Musk - we'll have people on Mars in 3 years!
ams6110 13y ago
CBS and 60 minutes lost their credibility long before this.
- joedevon 13y ago
  Took the words out of my mouth. It's mostly puff pieces nowadays.
Zaephyr 13y ago
If Prime Air happens, I predict a boom in the illicit 'package intercept' business. Knock a drone down, "win" a prize is going to appeal to percentage of the population.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  Presumably the drone will be quite valuable too. But then the current delivery trucks are valuable as well.
- jrockway 13y ago
  When I lived in a big apartment building, sometimes my Amazon packages would go missing. The thief got an EVO 4G screen protector, a micro USB cable, and some hand towels. Most Amazon orders aren't expensive things. Going to jail for a few years for hijacking an aircraft just isn't worth it, when you can just wait for the package to be delivered and steal it from someone's doorstep. Even then, probably not worth it.
swalsh 13y ago
People say that there's usually about a 10 year lag before tech from the military enters civilian use. Since drones showed up roughly 2003, it stands to reason that 2013 is when we should first starting seeing the tech become civilian viable. In fact that seems to be true, there's a whole lot of DIY material out there, and that's from people who don't have real world experience. I wouldn't be surprised if as military contracts wind down the large amount of people who just developed a new set of expertise may try to break out into the private sector. The only thing stopping the tech seems to be the FAA. Obviously its not something to take lightly, there are real safety concerns here... but its not completely science fiction. Why do we accept that modern warfare can be fought almost entirely with drones (libya?) but when it comes to civilian applications it's a fairy tail publicity stunt? I think bezos wants to turn a profit, and lowering delivery costs, and giving faster service might only make his company that much more valuable. I don't doubt for a second that this is a genuine effort.
- ye 13y ago
  You're confusing huge ridiculously expensive military drones, which are essentially small planes, with what Amazon is showing us, which are essentially small helicopters. There's no way in the world these tiny drones can fly 10 miles each way, carry 5lbs of payload, deliver the package perfectly on the driveway/doorstep, and cost low enough to not be a financial nightmare. That's not even accounting for dealing with FAA, weather issues, safety issues. There will need to be a few technological revolutions before it works. #1 - battery technology. Current batteries just can't handle long enough flights.
  - criley2 13y ago
    Sorry, but who are you? Who are you to stand up and call Amazon's idea unviable? Why is their idea unviable? Because they have no proof? Well you certainly proved how unviable the idea is with your lack of proof. Quite frankly, when it comes to Bezos vs "ye", I have to say that the billionaire owner of one of the most successful stores in our world is SLIGHTLY more credible than "ye", random commenter who has no domain experience and no evidence for literally a single word they said. I mean honestly, in a conversation about credibility and evidence, you thought providing neither makes for a good argument?
lukethomas 13y ago
Personal opinion, but this article should be on someone's personal blog, not promoted through Hubspot. It seems after a quick Google search, Dan Lyons has stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the past, and it's probably something I would avoid getting into from a company POV. http://www.realdanlyons.com/blog/2012/02/13/hit-men-click-whores-and-paid-apologists-welcome-to-the-silicon-cesspool/ http://www.realdanlyons.com/blog/2012/02/13/hit-men-click-wh... http://parislemon.com/post/17587323277/bat-shit-crazy http://parislemon.com/post/17587323277/bat-shit-crazy
nhangen 13y ago
I think the real reason people are frustrated with Amazon's announcement is because Amazon is getting/will get the credit for the drone delivery idea despite the fact that numerous hackers/engineers/companies have been working on (and presenting) this idea for years.
casca 13y ago
In the UK, Waterstones (equivalent to Barnes and Noble) have announced a competing product: http://blog.waterstones.com/?p=15525 http://blog.waterstones.com/?p=15525
gress 13y ago
I haven't seen anyone mention another key PR benefit of announcing this early: to take the wind out of Google announcing delivery via self-driving car. Google is probably more threatening to Amazon than any other company, and they have a clear interest in attacking physical good delivery in a manner that is deflationary relative to Amazon - almost certainly by using self-driving vehicles to provide local delivery to existing retailers, gaining access to the inventory databases in the process. Google likes to do PR stunts to project an image of futuristic technological leadership. It looks like they have a competitor.
johngrefe 13y ago
Bezos attempting to be the next great master product revealer, but a barnums style gag and prank won't have lasting media staying power like jobs. That and he could improve his speaking ability. I would have been more impressed if he showed off a fleet of electric/autonomous self driven deliver robot trucks, because that is more realistic to amazon.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  End customers don't care about your CEO's speaking ability.
jenncom 13y ago
The credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes? This presumes CBS and 60 Minutes had any credibility remaining after 60 Minutes got caught pumping up a fictional account of the Benghazi raid as fact; coincidentally the subject of a book to be launched days later Simon & Schuster (a publisher owned by CBS). [0] [0]: http://goo.gl/DkZDRx http://goo.gl/DkZDRx
grellas 13y ago
I am not a technology expert and I am not a marketing expert but, as a consumer, I have moved gradually over the years from using Amazon primarily for online book-buying to using it extensively for all kinds of retail buying needs. The Prime service has been central to that experience because human psychology appears to be perverse and something so small as "free" 2-day shipping, though not really free, seems to have given me ample incentive to buy from Amazon when I could just as easily have bought from someone else. I am not sure why exactly. It just proved the path of least resistance. Being fast, efficient, and reliable, it worked and makes me a reflexive Amazon customer. I buy books, DVDs, select grocery items, and quite an array of other things from Amazon that I could just as easily be buying from others and "free" delivery via Prime has been a major factor in shaping that habit for good or for bad as concerns whatever my true self interests may be in the buying choices. What is more, as video streaming has begun to supplant things such as DVDs, I have moved somewhat zombie-like into Amazon's Prime streaming service for the reason, among others, that I have developed my reflexive relationship with the company and have found it easy to try their other offerings before I will move to offerings of other vendors. Again, this has all been bundled with Amazon's Prime service, with which the company now packages a broad range of "free" streaming resources into the annual cost of the service. If my experience is at all typical of other consumers, I would guess that Amazon's Prime strategy is central to its whole attempt to conquer worldwide retailing and therefore that amazing delivery capacity lies at its heart, whether instantly via things such as video streaming or highly expedited in the case of tangible products. Now Amazon could continue to rest comfortably upon its existing accomplishments by which it has used third-party delivery services to achieve a big part of its goals. But it is not. Indeed, it is spending huge sums of money to build massive warehousing facilities all over the place in support of a long-term plan to achieve super-fast delivery. And, in doing so, it has abandoned its former (and highly effective) strategy of trying to avoid physical "presence" in the various states in order to avoid having to hold back sales/use taxes from its customers. So, fanciful or not in their present state of technological development and in the present state of legal and regulatory tangles that might arise, drones of the type shown in Amazon's promotional materials can hardly be called a simple marketing ploy to divert attention from some otherwise critical publicity affecting Amazon or its founder. The huge benefits to Amazon as a universal retailer that might from such a delivery mechanism are stupendous and obvious. If it should prove unfeasible to gain these benefits owing to technological limitations, that is one thing. If regulators should attempt to freeze delivery mechanisms to current forms and bar new ones such as drones, that is yet another thing. Such barriers may prove insuperable and cause the effort to fail. But to accuse Amazon of not being ready, willing, and able to devote even vast resources to the potential use of drones as part of its broader strategy - and instead to be using this as a mere publicity stunt - is, in my view, to miss the obvious. Amazon has a long-term goal of becoming the primary shopping source for millions of consumers across a broad range of products. It wants to leverage technology in ways that help remove the physical-presence advantage used by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. If it can do so by building vast warehouses and then finding a magic way of delivering products to consumers in ways that better what they can do by visiting the local retail store, why not go for it. And not just go for it but really go for it, with a massive investment of time, energy, and capital with the long-term view of using this strategy to achieve potential exponential growth over competitors. Whatever else this is, it cannot be mere vaporware. The fact that its announcement may have been accompanied by conventional marketing hype and by what may have even been a cynical deal with news outlets to agree to promote it on a big shopping day only confirms the seriousness of the effort, in my view. People like to get excited about exciting possibilities. Steve Jobs knew that and his way of presenting has become legendary. Mr. Bezos has some of that same flair and, when combined with adept entrepreneurial skills, stands to make an amazing mark in the annals of commerce. He may win in the end or he may lose. But he is going for the big win and he is doing it with flair. You may like what Amazon is doing or you may hate it but it can't be denied that it is bold, daring, and very real. The author here misses it altogether in suggesting otherwise.
ww520 13y ago
Vaporware aside, revealing the Amazon Drone project before Cyber Monday was an enormous PR coup, with all the press tucked along. Kudos to Amazon's marketing department.
__pThrow 13y ago
I predicted this about a week ago in some thread complaining about Amazon delivery when I said I lived in Texas and my packages were being delivered by Blue Origin, which worked fine, but one time left a big hole where my car once was.
egocodedinsol 13y ago
That Charlie Rose refuses to turn his show into "Trash TV: Business Edition" counts toward his credibility, not against it.
joshdance 13y ago
I don't agree that 60 Mins loses its credibility. Some of my friends and family didn't believe me until I told them it was 60 Mins. Then they believed. If that isn't credibility, I don't know what is.
dkrich 13y ago
Amazon somehow got CBS and 60 Minutes to create a 14-minute free ad spot for Amazon on the eve of this huge shopping day. This is a fairly one-sided assessment of the situation. CBS and 60 Minutes benefit as much from the piece airing on the eve of Black Monday as Amazon, arguably more so, since Amazon needs little advertisement for its services. I watched the piece and frankly found it to be somewhat of a puff-piece as well (Amazon was given too much credit in my opinion for being customer-centric). However, 60 Minutes caters to a broader audience than most of us, so they aren't going to get into pricing theory or the merits of Amazon S3. They describe the company to people as if it is the first time they've ever gotten a glimpse inside the website, because many people know little about it or its history. 60 Minutes almost always times its pieces to coincide with related events, and I think it makes the stories more interesting because of it. Edit: If the goal of the piece was in fact to conjure up free positive publicity for Amazon I have to believe it worked. Last night my FB news feed was a flurry with people posting their love of Amazon and how they were now going to be loyal customers because "Amazon puts the customer first."
- brc 13y ago
  What surprises me is the naivety of most people who seem to think that 60 minutes and the like follow their nose for stories instead of having complicated marketing and PR deals behind them. There is no way that 15 minutes of sunday night prime-time TV is just given away to a puff-piece because the shows editors thought it might make a good story. Next thing people will be shocked that Oprah is paid to endorse products.
adestefan 13y ago
What the fuck is with all the hit pieces today? Who the hell cares what comes about it. It was an interesting little side show. Guess this is the story that's going to rack up page views for at least the beginning of the week.
- Brakenshire 13y ago
  They're not hit pieces, they're educated responses to a marketing announcement.
  - girvo 13y ago
    Pfft. It's a hit piece, and I don't even like Amazon.
  - adestefan 13y ago
    When you're calling out someone's credibility with nothing backing you up it's a hit piece.
ry0ohki 13y ago
It should not surprise anyone that a large amount of articles, stories, etc... in every publication, every day are simply because of PR. Not sure why Amazon is being picked on here.
phaus 13y ago
>You line up Charlie Rose to do one of his famous softball-tossing puff pieces.. You can't claim that Amazon destroyed the credibility of CBS and at the same time claim that one of their top anchors regularly gives "soft-ball" interviews. Well, to be honest you can, but you'll sound like an idiot.
danielharan 13y ago
This finally makes sense, much more sense than advanced drones being used to deliver dead trees.
downandout 13y ago
The CBS interview was primarily focused on Amazon's technology. It was only fitting that they show off something they are still tinkering with that shows what the future might be. The drones are easily possible - the technology already exists. If Amazon doesn't do it, lots of other private companies will. But I am a little shocked that this cool little announcement has brought Amazon's critics out of the woodwork. IMO, if you try to ride the coattails of other things getting press just to get your very negative views out, you are just as bad as the entity you are criticizing. Congratulations, a few more people read your negative opinion of Amazon and its founder than would have had you not tied it into the drone story. Nearly all of them will still be shopping on Amazon this Christmas.
- ghaff 13y ago
  I don't really see it as about criticism of Amazon--though there was that tone in Lyons' piece. Amazon has a PR department and they did their job remarkably well in this case in that they succeeded in landing essentially a puff piece about future technological concepts related to fast parcel delivery with a supposedly serious journalistic institution the day before the busiest online shopping day of the year. Kudos to Amazon PR. Not so much to 60 Minutes.
blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
This is almost exactly how I felt when I saw that Google was "taking on death". Some of these SV companies are better than others at this kind of thing. Amazon, Google, and Apple have this ability to make otherwise skeptical journalists just turn their brains off...Google's "death stunt" was the cover of Newsweek for god's sake.
Bulkington 13y ago
Drone/autonomous vehicle impact on supply chain discussed here on Saturday, ahead of 60 Mins piece. http://www.ccjdigital.com/self-driving-planes-trains-trucks-will-lead-supply-chain-redesign/?full-article=true http://www.ccjdigital.com/self-driving-planes-trains-trucks-... Got the Reddit treatment here: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rrvxb/selfdriving_planes_trains_trucks_will_lead_supply/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rrvxb/selfdrivi... Conclusion: Gobolinks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klecksography#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klecksography#History
hosh 13y ago
I think people keep forgetting that Bezos has a longer planning horizon than most people. "... won't realistically arrive in the real world for another four or five years, which in realspeak means they're a decade or more away." Sure, Amazon used this as an opportunity for an image boost, sales boost ... but what else does this move also do? Reminds me a bit of: http://xkcd.com/1287/ http://xkcd.com/1287/ People who want to be ornery will find reasons to act ornery.
easy_rider 13y ago
Nice, buy a $10 book. Own a $1000 drone.

327 points by brk 13y ago

Delivery drones makes for more interesting and stimulating news than the usual b movie plots involving terrorists that come up any time the d word is mentioned.

samspenc 13y ago

Ouch, a bit harsh, but my first question after reading this was: why are Hubspot and its CEO so upset about the CBS piece?

qq66 13y ago
Hubspot has a lot of small ecommerce retailers as customers who compete with Amazon.
gurumx 13y ago
I'm a dev at HubSpot and though I have no way of knowing this for sure, I don't think our CEO was involved in this blog post. We have a lot of blog posts, and I don't think they're meant to represent the views of the company.

inigoesdr 13y ago

I'm not sure the target audience for 60 minutes is that similar to the audience that would care about drone delivery or Cyber Monday so much. Suggesting that Amazon may have intentionally wanted the story aired the day before Cyber Monday seems like a bit of a stretch. Also, the fact that Amazon wants to do drone delivery in the future has been discussed previously, and they still say it's a few years out, so this isn't much of a story to begin with.

mpclark 13y ago
It's the other way around, really. News organisations want to be relevant, so will all have been looking around for Cyber Monday stories. This "narrative shift" is just a way for Amazon to make sure the stories that ran prior to and during Cyber Monday were not about working conditions in its warehouses, its international tax arrangements, or the death of independent retailers. An organisation can very effectively dictate the precise timing of a story's running using tools such as an embargo (which determines the opening of the publishing window) and pre-arranged release of the story to other media (which tells an outlet with an exclusive that they should be publishing before this time). So a conversation along the lines of "We've got this great story, would you treat it properly if we gave it to you on 1 December, ahead of when it hits the wires at 8am on 2 December?" does the trick nicely.
uptown 13y ago
"I'm not sure the target audience for 60 minutes is that similar to the audience that would care about drone delivery or Cyber Monday so much." The 60 Minutes audience is absolutely part of the Amazon customer base - if not currently, they're in the crosshairs. Amazon explained in the segment that part of their mission is to sell everything - to everyone. And they also got their company name on the front page of every major news site. I expect they were part of most morning "news" shows, and will be mentioned in many evening news broadcasts tonight. Whether people watched 60 minutes or not - it's likely that a huge percentage of potential American shoppers saw the Amazon name mentioned someplace because of that story.

snowwrestler 13y ago

This piece is right on. Amazon package drones are total vaporware at this point; the only reason to announce them is to improve the competitive positioning of Amazon in the press. This is no different than the "slate" announcement by Microsoft and HP at CES 2010, which was widely panned and never produced any actual products for sale. But for a short time, it put MS in all the news stories about the iPad.

girvo 13y ago
HP did release a windows tablet called the Slate...
headShrinker 13y ago
You can call it vaporware, but someone is going to utilize this technology. Companies in the other countries already are. The technology is so new, and has yet to get to it's pinnacle. Bezos properly address the element that is missing, "redundancy". Whether you like it or not, these things will be flying above your head within 3 years. Whether Amazon is the one to do it? You think it's going to be UPS, FedEx, or USPS? My money is on Amazon.
BackerHopez 13y ago
Widely panned by trolls everywhere!
BackerHopez2 13y ago
Widely panned... by trolls from Hacker News?

37prime 13y ago

As soon as I saw the name Dan Lyons as the author, I son’t even bother reading it. His past articles are filled with nonsense.

jasonlotito 13y ago
Good catch. Thanks for that.
dsuth 13y ago
Yeh, what a ridiculous beat-up piece. Nothing of substance. Thanks for the heads up, I'll know to avoid in future.

ljd 13y ago

It seems obvious to me that Bezos took this one public so early to garner public support so that the FAA can't just sit on it forever. All of Amazon's other initiatives didn't need some federal regulator to OK it before they could start selling it. I think this is an effective solution to getting a notoriously slow agency to move on an item. No one wants to be seen as stopping innovation, not even the FAA.

vowelless 13y ago
> No one wants to be seen as stopping innovation, not even the FAA. That has been my experience. I don't deal with them directly, but we have people on our team who work closely with them when it comes to unmanned aircraft. The FAA has a comprehensive publication about UAVs: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/ http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/
RandallBrown 13y ago
I agree. Even if Amazon doesn't end up launching its own drones, you can be sure that Fedex and UPS will eventually. That helps Amazon too.
- buckbova 13y ago
  UPS is a slow moving entity because of its enormous size and culture. Their delivery system was more or less handled manually until about 10 years ago. 15 years ago they were still using punch clocks for hourly workers. "Eventually" could mean 25-50 years from now.
- hershel 13y ago
  Fedex and UPS suffer from the innovator's dilemma which will make it hard for them to build the best drone service with the right business model because it means they'll lose money, sunk investments and jobs relative to their old business model. Anyway, this is probably a field rich with patents and amazon with their acquisition of kiva robotics and their attraction as an employer in this field with this PR, will grab quite a few patents and make it quite hard for other companies to compete.
- 13y ago

ck2 13y ago

Even the still for the youtube video seems to have picked out the two big honking signs for "amazon prime" http://img.youtube.com/vi/6in-MZeeeGk/hqdefault.jpg http://img.youtube.com/vi/6in-MZeeeGk/hqdefault.jpg

tptacek 13y ago

It seems disingenuous for this blog to suggest that MacKenzie Bezos's negative review of the Bezos book was part of the same orchestrated spin campaign as the drone story. That review didn't simply object to the tone or the message of the book, but also pointed out specific factual errors the book made, errors that were later tacitly acknowledged by the author.

owenjones 13y ago
Also even if the book '... portrays Bezos as a ruthless tyrant and a "penny-pinching ballbuster,"' would that dissuade anyone who was already planning on it from shopping at Amazon? To me, regardless of the truth, being "penny-pinching" given Amazon's razor thin margins seems like a good trait for the CEO.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  What about "ruthless tyrant?" I'm making a point to shop locally now. I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country.
  - Crito 13y ago
    One would think that you would reserve that sort of terminology to describe warlords with armies of child soldiers, or dictators who have their "democratic opponents" dragged out of their homes with black bags over their heads... you know, "ruthless tyrant" stuff...
    - swalkergibson 13y ago
      Walmart essentially engages in the capitalist equivalent of both of those. Third World labor exploitation and near-extortion of their upstream suppliers. I cannot think of a more ruthless tyrant than Walmart.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    I've already seen what supporting Walmart has done to our country Have you ever shopped there? Or do you just repeat what you read all the time? Wall mart typically only exists in rural poor areas, and I doubt a drive-by HN commenter has any sense of proportion on the real issues at play. Wall-mart migh mean more competition for mom & pop stores, but they also bring reliable and affordable access to otherwise unaffordable or trans-port prohibitive goods and services to people that don't have the wallet or the access to shop at whole foods or a boutique coffee shop that charges $5/cup. The reality is that even for successful stores such as these, the owners are absent, the employees make non-living wages (corrected for rent), and the extant competitors are out of business or severely harmed. Think of all the gentrification in the mission in the past 15 years...all of those (poor) people are more fucked by hipsters and their fancy shit than anyone ever was by Walmart.

zallarak 13y ago

While I agree the 60 minutes segment seemed like a commercial, I don't understand why one would waste time attacking this innovation (not the helicopters, but the logistics behind it). A more meaningful discussion would be what the actual objections of the FAA are, what the repercussions of drones in the air are, etc.

benjamincburns 13y ago

In all of the criticism, I haven't seen anything remarking on the energy cost for this. I can hear a strawman in the audience saying "But drones are tiny/electric/cheap!" Not at these scales. Consider the (lack of) efficiency of quadcopters, the weights and distances involved, and the total sales volume for this service in even a small test market. I'd buy that flight itself is a viable option over wheeled vehicles when you consider more direct transit, reduction in delays due to traffic, and the reduction in weight of the delivery vehicle, but I'd imagine this advantage would only exist for fixed-wing delivery vehicles, not quad/hex/octo-copters. $20 says that if this ever happens in the real world, the delivery vehicles are mechanically very different from what's shown in the promo video.

randomdata 13y ago
I, for one, eagerly await the return of the autogryo for local mail delivery.
joenathan 13y ago
The energy cost would have to be less than shipping by traditional means, which requires much more human involvement, additional sorting, travel, and stops. If you've ever tracked a package this would be pretty obvious.
gutnor 13y ago
What I wonder is why nobody is pointing out that delivering less than 2kg in 30 min in a radius of 10 km can be done freely on a cheap pizza using plain old human labour. I fail to imagine at what stage Amazon drone become cheaper considering the reliability of drone and the complexity of navigating a dense urban environment (I assume it is to be used there) Also, if it can be done cheaply enough, takeaways will eventually use the same system. I wonder how that will scale ...
- __Joker 13y ago
  While the pizza delivery will be cheap now but given time for the technology to mature and then the scale of the operation will make drone technology more cheaper. Obviously it will take a quite a time before it adds to profit line. As usual Amazon will keep absorbing the losses for that time and it is well equipped to that, if amazon history tells us anything.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

neakor 13y ago

Seems like a long stretch. Who cares if the CEO is a nice guy? Steve Jobs is known as a terrible boss, but no one cares. The only thing matters to the mass consumers and the company's customers is the products the company produces.

alan_cx 13y ago
Sadly, yes. Further, people dont really care where or how products are made. We get all this negative PR about how appalling working conditions are where many top selling brands are made, but there is no noticeable dent in sales as a result. If shoppers cared, they would shop differently. However, its a lot to do with the egos of these CEOs, and what not. You and I may not care how nice or horrible these people may or may not be, but the people getting the negativity do. They dont like the idea that the public think they are not very nice, or what ever. So, I'd suggest its possible its more about individual ego, than sales. Sales is a convenient excuse.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Well that didn't take long[1] :-) Perhaps Bezos is taking his cues from Google who trots out their self driving car when ever they want to boost their image with the public. It is interesting to watch from the perspective of companies balancing the 'reality' that they are doing everything they can to maximize their influencer, revenue, Etc. And still keep a friendly face on it. There was a time that the only information the public got about a company was their advertisements. I subscribe to the notion that this particular stunt was both, technology investigation and PR piece. It sets Amazon apart from Walmart as "new technology" which carries a bit of cachet with the buying public, and there are some very real and interesting questions that can be informed by building a prototype system (which refers back to our discussion a while ago about actually doing something to figure out how hard it is really) and since it is so far out all it does is cause worry on the part of competitors. Seems like a reasonable strategy to me. [1] A blog post arguing some technology demo is a PR stunt

bhartzer 13y ago

I find this whole publicity stunt by Amazon curiously similar to the publicity stunt that Domino's did back in June, where they deliver pizzas via drones.

jaybna 13y ago
Do no one remember TacoCopter? http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/ Most brilliant PR move ever. #suckers

coldcode 13y ago

I don't think they had much credibility left.

noonespecial 13y ago

Perhaps it was prior art. I can already feel the ground rumbling with the coming stampede of "X... but with teh drones!" patents.

Crito 13y ago
"The Tacocopter of [Something]" is one of my favorite answers to the "The something of something" startup idea game. "The Tacocopter of Twitter" I think has been my best so far; some sort of telegraph service that delivers your printed telegraph message with a quadcopter instead of a courier.

siglesias 13y ago

Who cares? It sparks the public imagination and gets people excited for the future. It's the kind of thing that can get a child interested in robotics or can give entrepreneurs a new level of insight into where commerce is headed. It sets a bar for ambition. Also, how often is it that we're dazzled with TED talks showcasing university research projects that promise the world and never make it to market? Is the point, ultimately, to make it to market, or to submit something bold to the consciousness? Secondly, how will it work out for Amazon, in its coveted "long-run," if it erodes public trust by showing something it doesn't really think will ship? I think showing it in public gives them an onus to execute. As others have mentioned, it also creates an onus for the FAA to take this challenge seriously and to accelerate its thinking about this new direction.

javajosh 13y ago
Indeed - I wish more companies were goaded into doing interesting, exciting things in reaction to scathing biographies. Quick, someone write a scathing biography of Elon Musk - we'll have people on Mars in 3 years!

ams6110 13y ago

CBS and 60 minutes lost their credibility long before this.

joedevon 13y ago
Took the words out of my mouth. It's mostly puff pieces nowadays.

Zaephyr 13y ago

If Prime Air happens, I predict a boom in the illicit 'package intercept' business. Knock a drone down, "win" a prize is going to appeal to percentage of the population.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
Presumably the drone will be quite valuable too. But then the current delivery trucks are valuable as well.
jrockway 13y ago
When I lived in a big apartment building, sometimes my Amazon packages would go missing. The thief got an EVO 4G screen protector, a micro USB cable, and some hand towels. Most Amazon orders aren't expensive things. Going to jail for a few years for hijacking an aircraft just isn't worth it, when you can just wait for the package to be delivered and steal it from someone's doorstep. Even then, probably not worth it.

swalsh 13y ago

People say that there's usually about a 10 year lag before tech from the military enters civilian use. Since drones showed up roughly 2003, it stands to reason that 2013 is when we should first starting seeing the tech become civilian viable. In fact that seems to be true, there's a whole lot of DIY material out there, and that's from people who don't have real world experience. I wouldn't be surprised if as military contracts wind down the large amount of people who just developed a new set of expertise may try to break out into the private sector. The only thing stopping the tech seems to be the FAA. Obviously its not something to take lightly, there are real safety concerns here... but its not completely science fiction. Why do we accept that modern warfare can be fought almost entirely with drones (libya?) but when it comes to civilian applications it's a fairy tail publicity stunt? I think bezos wants to turn a profit, and lowering delivery costs, and giving faster service might only make his company that much more valuable. I don't doubt for a second that this is a genuine effort.

ye 13y ago
You're confusing huge ridiculously expensive military drones, which are essentially small planes, with what Amazon is showing us, which are essentially small helicopters. There's no way in the world these tiny drones can fly 10 miles each way, carry 5lbs of payload, deliver the package perfectly on the driveway/doorstep, and cost low enough to not be a financial nightmare. That's not even accounting for dealing with FAA, weather issues, safety issues. There will need to be a few technological revolutions before it works. #1 - battery technology. Current batteries just can't handle long enough flights.
- criley2 13y ago
  Sorry, but who are you? Who are you to stand up and call Amazon's idea unviable? Why is their idea unviable? Because they have no proof? Well you certainly proved how unviable the idea is with your lack of proof. Quite frankly, when it comes to Bezos vs "ye", I have to say that the billionaire owner of one of the most successful stores in our world is SLIGHTLY more credible than "ye", random commenter who has no domain experience and no evidence for literally a single word they said. I mean honestly, in a conversation about credibility and evidence, you thought providing neither makes for a good argument?

lukethomas 13y ago

Personal opinion, but this article should be on someone's personal blog, not promoted through Hubspot. It seems after a quick Google search, Dan Lyons has stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the past, and it's probably something I would avoid getting into from a company POV. http://www.realdanlyons.com/blog/2012/02/13/hit-men-click-whores-and-paid-apologists-welcome-to-the-silicon-cesspool/ http://www.realdanlyons.com/blog/2012/02/13/hit-men-click-wh... http://parislemon.com/post/17587323277/bat-shit-crazy http://parislemon.com/post/17587323277/bat-shit-crazy

nhangen 13y ago

I think the real reason people are frustrated with Amazon's announcement is because Amazon is getting/will get the credit for the drone delivery idea despite the fact that numerous hackers/engineers/companies have been working on (and presenting) this idea for years.

casca 13y ago

In the UK, Waterstones (equivalent to Barnes and Noble) have announced a competing product: http://blog.waterstones.com/?p=15525 http://blog.waterstones.com/?p=15525

gress 13y ago

I haven't seen anyone mention another key PR benefit of announcing this early: to take the wind out of Google announcing delivery via self-driving car. Google is probably more threatening to Amazon than any other company, and they have a clear interest in attacking physical good delivery in a manner that is deflationary relative to Amazon - almost certainly by using self-driving vehicles to provide local delivery to existing retailers, gaining access to the inventory databases in the process. Google likes to do PR stunts to project an image of futuristic technological leadership. It looks like they have a competitor.

johngrefe 13y ago

Bezos attempting to be the next great master product revealer, but a barnums style gag and prank won't have lasting media staying power like jobs. That and he could improve his speaking ability. I would have been more impressed if he showed off a fleet of electric/autonomous self driven deliver robot trucks, because that is more realistic to amazon.

AsymetricCom 13y ago
End customers don't care about your CEO's speaking ability.

jenncom 13y ago

The credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes? This presumes CBS and 60 Minutes had any credibility remaining after 60 Minutes got caught pumping up a fictional account of the Benghazi raid as fact; coincidentally the subject of a book to be launched days later Simon & Schuster (a publisher owned by CBS). [0] [0]: http://goo.gl/DkZDRx http://goo.gl/DkZDRx

grellas 13y ago

I am not a technology expert and I am not a marketing expert but, as a consumer, I have moved gradually over the years from using Amazon primarily for online book-buying to using it extensively for all kinds of retail buying needs. The Prime service has been central to that experience because human psychology appears to be perverse and something so small as "free" 2-day shipping, though not really free, seems to have given me ample incentive to buy from Amazon when I could just as easily have bought from someone else. I am not sure why exactly. It just proved the path of least resistance. Being fast, efficient, and reliable, it worked and makes me a reflexive Amazon customer. I buy books, DVDs, select grocery items, and quite an array of other things from Amazon that I could just as easily be buying from others and "free" delivery via Prime has been a major factor in shaping that habit for good or for bad as concerns whatever my true self interests may be in the buying choices. What is more, as video streaming has begun to supplant things such as DVDs, I have moved somewhat zombie-like into Amazon's Prime streaming service for the reason, among others, that I have developed my reflexive relationship with the company and have found it easy to try their other offerings before I will move to offerings of other vendors. Again, this has all been bundled with Amazon's Prime service, with which the company now packages a broad range of "free" streaming resources into the annual cost of the service. If my experience is at all typical of other consumers, I would guess that Amazon's Prime strategy is central to its whole attempt to conquer worldwide retailing and therefore that amazing delivery capacity lies at its heart, whether instantly via things such as video streaming or highly expedited in the case of tangible products. Now Amazon could continue to rest comfortably upon its existing accomplishments by which it has used third-party delivery services to achieve a big part of its goals. But it is not. Indeed, it is spending huge sums of money to build massive warehousing facilities all over the place in support of a long-term plan to achieve super-fast delivery. And, in doing so, it has abandoned its former (and highly effective) strategy of trying to avoid physical "presence" in the various states in order to avoid having to hold back sales/use taxes from its customers. So, fanciful or not in their present state of technological development and in the present state of legal and regulatory tangles that might arise, drones of the type shown in Amazon's promotional materials can hardly be called a simple marketing ploy to divert attention from some otherwise critical publicity affecting Amazon or its founder. The huge benefits to Amazon as a universal retailer that might from such a delivery mechanism are stupendous and obvious. If it should prove unfeasible to gain these benefits owing to technological limitations, that is one thing. If regulators should attempt to freeze delivery mechanisms to current forms and bar new ones such as drones, that is yet another thing. Such barriers may prove insuperable and cause the effort to fail. But to accuse Amazon of not being ready, willing, and able to devote even vast resources to the potential use of drones as part of its broader strategy - and instead to be using this as a mere publicity stunt - is, in my view, to miss the obvious. Amazon has a long-term goal of becoming the primary shopping source for millions of consumers across a broad range of products. It wants to leverage technology in ways that help remove the physical-presence advantage used by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. If it can do so by building vast warehouses and then finding a magic way of delivering products to consumers in ways that better what they can do by visiting the local retail store, why not go for it. And not just go for it but really go for it, with a massive investment of time, energy, and capital with the long-term view of using this strategy to achieve potential exponential growth over competitors. Whatever else this is, it cannot be mere vaporware. The fact that its announcement may have been accompanied by conventional marketing hype and by what may have even been a cynical deal with news outlets to agree to promote it on a big shopping day only confirms the seriousness of the effort, in my view. People like to get excited about exciting possibilities. Steve Jobs knew that and his way of presenting has become legendary. Mr. Bezos has some of that same flair and, when combined with adept entrepreneurial skills, stands to make an amazing mark in the annals of commerce. He may win in the end or he may lose. But he is going for the big win and he is doing it with flair. You may like what Amazon is doing or you may hate it but it can't be denied that it is bold, daring, and very real. The author here misses it altogether in suggesting otherwise.

ww520 13y ago

Vaporware aside, revealing the Amazon Drone project before Cyber Monday was an enormous PR coup, with all the press tucked along. Kudos to Amazon's marketing department.

__pThrow 13y ago

I predicted this about a week ago in some thread complaining about Amazon delivery when I said I lived in Texas and my packages were being delivered by Blue Origin, which worked fine, but one time left a big hole where my car once was.

egocodedinsol 13y ago

That Charlie Rose refuses to turn his show into "Trash TV: Business Edition" counts toward his credibility, not against it.

joshdance 13y ago

I don't agree that 60 Mins loses its credibility. Some of my friends and family didn't believe me until I told them it was 60 Mins. Then they believed. If that isn't credibility, I don't know what is.

dkrich 13y ago

Amazon somehow got CBS and 60 Minutes to create a 14-minute free ad spot for Amazon on the eve of this huge shopping day. This is a fairly one-sided assessment of the situation. CBS and 60 Minutes benefit as much from the piece airing on the eve of Black Monday as Amazon, arguably more so, since Amazon needs little advertisement for its services. I watched the piece and frankly found it to be somewhat of a puff-piece as well (Amazon was given too much credit in my opinion for being customer-centric). However, 60 Minutes caters to a broader audience than most of us, so they aren't going to get into pricing theory or the merits of Amazon S3. They describe the company to people as if it is the first time they've ever gotten a glimpse inside the website, because many people know little about it or its history. 60 Minutes almost always times its pieces to coincide with related events, and I think it makes the stories more interesting because of it. Edit: If the goal of the piece was in fact to conjure up free positive publicity for Amazon I have to believe it worked. Last night my FB news feed was a flurry with people posting their love of Amazon and how they were now going to be loyal customers because "Amazon puts the customer first."

brc 13y ago
What surprises me is the naivety of most people who seem to think that 60 minutes and the like follow their nose for stories instead of having complicated marketing and PR deals behind them. There is no way that 15 minutes of sunday night prime-time TV is just given away to a puff-piece because the shows editors thought it might make a good story. Next thing people will be shocked that Oprah is paid to endorse products.

adestefan 13y ago

What the fuck is with all the hit pieces today? Who the hell cares what comes about it. It was an interesting little side show. Guess this is the story that's going to rack up page views for at least the beginning of the week.

Brakenshire 13y ago
They're not hit pieces, they're educated responses to a marketing announcement.
- girvo 13y ago
  Pfft. It's a hit piece, and I don't even like Amazon.
- adestefan 13y ago
  When you're calling out someone's credibility with nothing backing you up it's a hit piece.

ry0ohki 13y ago

It should not surprise anyone that a large amount of articles, stories, etc... in every publication, every day are simply because of PR. Not sure why Amazon is being picked on here.

phaus 13y ago

>You line up Charlie Rose to do one of his famous softball-tossing puff pieces.. You can't claim that Amazon destroyed the credibility of CBS and at the same time claim that one of their top anchors regularly gives "soft-ball" interviews. Well, to be honest you can, but you'll sound like an idiot.

danielharan 13y ago

This finally makes sense, much more sense than advanced drones being used to deliver dead trees.

downandout 13y ago

The CBS interview was primarily focused on Amazon's technology. It was only fitting that they show off something they are still tinkering with that shows what the future might be. The drones are easily possible - the technology already exists. If Amazon doesn't do it, lots of other private companies will. But I am a little shocked that this cool little announcement has brought Amazon's critics out of the woodwork. IMO, if you try to ride the coattails of other things getting press just to get your very negative views out, you are just as bad as the entity you are criticizing. Congratulations, a few more people read your negative opinion of Amazon and its founder than would have had you not tied it into the drone story. Nearly all of them will still be shopping on Amazon this Christmas.

ghaff 13y ago
I don't really see it as about criticism of Amazon--though there was that tone in Lyons' piece. Amazon has a PR department and they did their job remarkably well in this case in that they succeeded in landing essentially a puff piece about future technological concepts related to fast parcel delivery with a supposedly serious journalistic institution the day before the busiest online shopping day of the year. Kudos to Amazon PR. Not so much to 60 Minutes.

blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago

This is almost exactly how I felt when I saw that Google was "taking on death". Some of these SV companies are better than others at this kind of thing. Amazon, Google, and Apple have this ability to make otherwise skeptical journalists just turn their brains off...Google's "death stunt" was the cover of Newsweek for god's sake.

Bulkington 13y ago

Drone/autonomous vehicle impact on supply chain discussed here on Saturday, ahead of 60 Mins piece. http://www.ccjdigital.com/self-driving-planes-trains-trucks-will-lead-supply-chain-redesign/?full-article=true http://www.ccjdigital.com/self-driving-planes-trains-trucks-... Got the Reddit treatment here: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rrvxb/selfdriving_planes_trains_trucks_will_lead_supply/ http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1rrvxb/selfdrivi... Conclusion: Gobolinks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klecksography#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klecksography#History

hosh 13y ago

I think people keep forgetting that Bezos has a longer planning horizon than most people. "... won't realistically arrive in the real world for another four or five years, which in realspeak means they're a decade or more away." Sure, Amazon used this as an opportunity for an image boost, sales boost ... but what else does this move also do? Reminds me a bit of: http://xkcd.com/1287/ http://xkcd.com/1287/ People who want to be ornery will find reasons to act ornery.

easy_rider 13y ago

Nice, buy a $10 book. Own a $1000 drone.