Friday, December 6, 2013

The Instant Delivery Race


Amazon Prime has been an amazing thing for us.  It definitely changed our shopping habits by making it so easy to get online goods.  Amazon Prime's two day delivery is pretty amazing too.  It certainly is something that one gets used to pretty quickly.  Now, for a small fee, you can have your Amazon Prime packages delivered the next day.  Of course, all the competitors are getting into the act as well.  Google Shopping Express delivers goods the same day.   eBay Now promises delivery in about an hour.  This escalation has gotten ridiculous, to the point where Amazon has announced Amazon Prime Air.  We love the idea of using multi-rotor copters to do delivery, but it seems like there are a lot of practical issues to resolve before you put this into practice.  For instance, you are sending out a device with whirring blades into the public.  What could go wrong?  I would imagine that these multi-rotor copters will be expensive, so what is to stop someone from stealing it?  What if the weather turns bad while it is enroute?  There are quite a few difficult problems to solve.  This video shows Amazon's vision of how the system would work.


If this race escalates much more, things will really get out of hand.  One potential scenario is shown in this video.


This video is not serious, but it's harder than one might expect to tell it apart from the real one.

My advice?  Settle down everyone.  Patience is a virtue.

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