First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
1–10 of 200 posts
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#2Ouch, a bit harsh, but my first question after reading this was: why are Hubspot and its CEO so upset about the CBS piece?
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#3I'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.
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#4This 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.
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#5As 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.
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#6It 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.
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#7Even the still for the youtube video seems to have picked out the two big honking signs for "amazon prime"
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#8It 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.
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#9I'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 is…
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.
Re: First Victim of Amazon Drones: The Credibility of CBS and 60 Minutes
#10While 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.