Jeff Bezos the CEO of Amazon, yesterday revealed on a television program "60 minutes" that the company was working on sending five pound packages to people using drones. This would reduce the delivery time to 30 minutes. Amazon has been disruptive many times in the past and with same day delivery might even put small exclusive stores out of business. But using drones instead of actual people to deliver a package from a warehouse to a house in 30 minutes is disruptive on a totally different scale.
Such a drone does exist and is works in a program called Prime Air. The drone will sit on the conveyor belt and pick up the relevant package. Fly over to the recipient's house and gently place the package down. According to a Verge article, the drone will travel over 10 miles and most importantly 86% of Amazon's packages are smaller than 5 pounds. So the scope of using this drone is huge.
The video below shows how the octo-copter or drone will work.
But will drones for delivery work?
Amazon still has some technical problems like how to ensure they do not drop packages from the sky or manage to avoid people and things while landing in the real complex world. They also need see how the drones could sense where to place the package. The video demo the package is dropped in the front yard but what happens to packages that need to be delivered to high rises. But Jeff Bezos has declared 2015 as the year when the program kicks off and 5 years to get it running at large.
But those are just technical issues, there are major political and employment issues to deal with too. Lack of an actual person delivering packages means loss of jobs. Delivery inside 30 minutes could put provision drones or specialized stores out of business. Drones with sensors and cameras scouring over neighborhoods means an almost total lack of privacy which is something that will not be very popular.
Finally would local government bodies allow hundreds of such drones to fly through their airspace and not find it unsafe? Amazon will have to work very hard in convincing people and governments to firstly make this technology really viable.
Was this just a massive PR exercise?
The whole delivery by drone think does sound like a major PR exercise for Amazon. They can always go back and claim a multitude of reasons to say the project did not materialize but what happened yesterday almost every media outlet was giving Amazon coverage and mostly in a positive light. Yesterday was "Cyber Monday" a day traditionally people shopped online in the US. And which name is the biggest in online shopping world? Amazon.
So basically Amazon got massive publicity on the biggest day of online shopping in the US. And they got this more or less free as this was news coverage not an ad campaign which costs millions of dollars.
So what do you think about Amazon's drone program? Think it will succeed or will it be such a proto-type that got them a lot of publicity on a very convenient day?
Do drop in your comments.
-- This Post Amazon's Drone Delivery: The Future or just a Marketing Gimmick? is Published on Devils Workshop .
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