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Brick-and-mortar stores are doomed. I can only see a few types of products remaining in brick-and-mortars: Clothes that you want to try for size, fruits and vegetables that you want to sample, and restaurants... any others?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contact the police and send another.
"Amazon Fulfillment Center Alpha Bravo Six Six Ten, you are cleared hot pickle -- repeat, cleared hot pickle. Good hunting."
Let's say that a little drone could reliably carry a package to doorsteps 10 miles away. Let's assume that it can navigate past trees and power lines and kite strings and so forth.
So Amazon builds up these service centers with hundreds of drones delivering packages in a metro area to meet their delivery time commitments.
Then you get a few weeks of bad weather: regular daily thunderstorms, snow storms, a great deal of gusty weather, etc.
Do the delivery time commitments have caveats for consistently bad weather? Unless you live in California, you have to deal with days and days of rain or other foul weather that will eliminate a drone's ability to fly safely, much less be able to deliver a small package without damaging the contents.
When that happens, Amazon will need to maintain a fleet of trucks with drivers to take over. Maintaining that capacity will deeply cut into the profit of their business model.
Brick-and-mortar stores are doomed. I can only see a few types of products remaining in brick-and-mortars: Clothes that you want to try for size, fruits and vegetables that you want to sample, and restaurants... any others?
bookstores, where one can browse more than the cover and a few pages
I guess it's mostly been smooth sailing until now (as Amazon grew, so did they), but this is an actual threat to their business model. Amazon would still need a large amount of classic logistics, but couriers would lose the final mile.
Courier drivers might want to consider a career change very soon.
Avoiding powerlines seems like a fairly tough problem as well. Are drone-sized object sensors (ultrasonic? LIDAR?) accurate enough to see thin power lines?
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>>I had to seriously check to see it wasn't April 1st. It isn't. Honestly; I'm still not sure if this is a joke or not. This totally fits the kind of stuff Google likes to do on April 1st. If this became real, I'd go out of my way to order things just to see that show up at my door. And I'm sure it won't be long until people plan on catching the device when it shows up. Even I probably couldn't resist the temptation…
If this develops more promise they will be well positioned to take advantage of it.
Just watched the 60 minutes segment: Bezos say they won't be ready until 2015 at the earliest, likely 2016. (Edit: as the commenter below pointed out, I misheard the timeframe: is is 4-5 years out) He said the range is 10 miles, which is good enough for most residential areas. They are aiming for delivery in 30 minutes. The drones are autonomous: you plug in the GPS coordinates and away they go. The biggest challenge…
I like my blue silent sky. I recall scenes of sci-fi worlds like the 5th Element. I suggest we tax externalities. If you order by sky, you'll create visual and noise pollution to many people, and you should pay a tax for this, to be shared by the community as a whole.
My take is that Bezos wants to see how society will respond to this. A high tax would kill his ROI, and he won't invest much in R&D. If we say "Nice! We want this" he will double down.
Not a new idea. TacoCopter[1] had this idea as a ironic VC joke. It's amazing to see this sort of things are becoming a reality. Just wondering how much it will cost to be a member after all. Flying a quadcopter is not cheap! [1] http://tacocopter.com/
Who cares? Why do people always feel compelled to make this kind of comment?
Amazon here is trying to play the same role that Google has been playing for a long time with their self driving cars. They are setting a standard and pushing for regulations and laws.
It is not that difficult to think that the future of unmanned vehicles won't be as naive as people may think. There will probably be a combination of different sets of vehicles that would go around for large distances and/or sizes, and different vehicles covering smaller distances and/or sizes. They can be used in series to optimize the traveling salesman problem in terms of what's powering these vehicles.
It's not that different from thinking of an ant-like distribution system.
And not that different from the Google approach of crawling the web, then crawling the actual world with google street view cars, eventually moving into self driving cars. Except you'll also get lots of metadata with it, that can be used and sold.
Amazon is now part of the game, moving the attention to drones and self flying objects.