Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…
> Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) You mean the drone delivery they're actively testing in the UK? The drone delivery they're fighting with the FAA about? The drone delivery they just testified before Congress about? They're spending an awful lot of time, money, and political capital on something that makes no sense, will neve…
Amazon Home Services
131–140 of 247 posts
Re: Amazon Home Services
#132Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…
Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to…
For starters. "To your door" urban drone delivery would be nearly impossible as most urban dwellers live in condos, apartments or densely populated areas where landing or hovering presents real-world, safety, security and logistical concerns most likely impossible to overcome.
The best case urban scenario is Amazon "drop off points". Basically small Amazon stores strategically located throughout a city with designated landing zones for their drones and close proximity to the recipient - so the recipient (or the delivery person) only needs to walk a few blocks max.
In this scenario you're still looking at a "real person" to get the package to the door though.
"To your door" sub-urban and rural (the outskirts as you call it) in theory may be more doable as dwellings tend to have driveways, yards and space. However the challenges of urban still exist. And landing (hovering) on location, on private property adds greater complexity from a safety and legal perspective.
Amazon has an uphill battle to wage with regards to the legality, rules, regulations and safety of operating unmanned air vehicles over "built up areas" in general. Current pending and existing regulations lean towards flightpaths and fly-zones that ensure drones can land safely in the event of an emergency requiring immediate decent (eg. a crash landing).
This means flightpaths over built-up areas of cities and towns in general would be extremely expensive (funding, insurance, lobbying) and most likely impossible under today's regulations.
No matter how safe they're deemed, drones represent a hazard to persons and property, and as such they'll be highly regulated. Amazon won't be able to fly them anywhere, anytime soon. It will take time.
Now, with all that said, a couple years ago the FAA Modernization and Reform Act was signed, providing funding to the Federal Aviation Authority to establish safety rules that deal with all of the above. The funding as I mentioned has already begun ... to the tune of $60 billion or so.
We'll see how the FAA strikes a balance between corporate interest and public safety.
In the mean time Amazon Drone Delivery is mostly a marketing / PR tactic to generate interest and buzz. Strategic in the sense that, on the surface, it sounds like something the public would like to see. It's exciting! Progress! Get the public on your side and "fast-tracked regulation" becomes much more realistic.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll address some points here. 1. Safety: drones - multirotors, specifically - are very safe devices, inherently. They are incredibly simple (4-8 motors and no other moving parts). If they are dangerous, it's only because of lack of investment by the manufacturers to make mission critical hardware/software. That's the next step in the drone ecosystem though, as commercial use is gaining traction (multirotors are bare…
The problem with drones is that they're insecure. People will shoot them down for fun, and even if they don't, whenever they land they'll have to leave their packages in places that are either insecure or exposed to the elements. If it really takes off, you will need ways to manage "drone traffic" and insurance will be extremely expensive. To top it off, they will simply not work on most days in Northern Europe, wher…
The Amazon drone won't take off unless you confirm in advance (using the app) being able to accept the package, and you need to enter a code at arrival for it to release it to you. I am sure the drone can call for help, and keep lots of video and other evidence of what happened to it.
Ultimately, Amazon just calculates the loss of 1/10000 drone packages into their profit calculations.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people…
When you have a company the size of Amazon (100,000+ employees, thousands of engineers) I think its very dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about the culture based on one person's experience.
Even if we were talking about 100,000 engineers, though, I think it's fair to make a generalization about the culture. Companies have a lot of autonomy in deciding the nature of interactions between the employees as a group, and especially between employees and their superiors.
Also, people make similar generalizations all the time around small towns and neighborhoods (with often dubious accuracy, sure), but the only difference is one's structure develops bottom-up, and the other top-down.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dead serious. The technology is there, the economics are there - it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason.
> it just seems outlandish as an idea, but for no real good reason I imagine safety and power issues, talking to friends who research drone tech.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you expand a little on how Amazon does stack ranking in a more palatable way? As a consumer, I love Amazon, but I have heard a lot of horror stories first-hand from an Amazon employee about this very thing.
You won't get fired for no reason, but you do get compared with your colleagues. But you also won't get promoted just because of seniority, most of what people say about being hard to get promoted is true. However, there are only 3 SDE levels if you don't count Principal, so SDE II has a very large range of pay rates, and you don't need to get promoted to get a higher pay. Higher levels are all about being a better l…
However I suppose that it stands to reason that perhaps that phenomena is due to the fact that greener managers may have greener engineers working under them who are perhaps more prone to mistakes or may not be a good fit.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon.com is their US site. If you're there, you've effectively walked into a store in Seattle. If you want a store not tailored to the US market, you'll need to visit one of the sites they've made for other countries (where this is probably not available yet).
> Amazon.com is their US site. That's exactly the problem. .com US Initially this kind of behavior was "quaint" and amusingly "typically American". But in 2015 it's just f-ing annoying.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people…
Seems like you had a very bad experience at Amazon, but you are also spilling a lot of lies about the company, and I'm afraid people might buy it. Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determin…
Re: Amazon Home Services
#139Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/canada-proves-fertile-groun...
Don't forget they started in books and now sell pretty much everything. Also, the kindle seemed to work out pretty well.
Re: Amazon Home Services
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon.com is their US site. If you're there, you've effectively walked into a store in Seattle. If you want a store not tailored to the US market, you'll need to visit one of the sites they've made for other countries (where this is probably not available yet).
> Amazon.com is their US site. That's exactly the problem. .com US Initially this kind of behavior was "quaint" and amusingly "typically American". But in 2015 it's just f-ing annoying.