What’s That Up In the Sky? (It’s my delivery from Amazon!)
I don’t know that I would ever bet against Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He’s had more hits (Amazon Web Services, Prime services, the Kindle line) than misses (Kozmo dot com, askville dot com, LivingSocial), and even if the misses were BIG misses, the hits were BIG, BIG hits. That said, I’m not sure I’m ready to call it in favor of Amazon Prime Air. Yet.
The upgraded services available to Amazon’s Prime subscription customers include free second-day delivery to US Mainland addresses, upgrades to next-day delivery for $3.99, instant video streaming, a Kindle lending library, and a lot more. If you order a lot through Amazon and/or can make use of the video streaming (we can’t at our house) or music service, you’re the market for Prime. Bezos is a guy who loves technology, and Amazon shines at customer service, so Prime Air is a good fit with the Amazon brand.
The goal of Prime Air, according to Amazon’s press release, is to get deliveries into customers’ hands within 30 minutes. That’s a tall order, and it will require strategic placement of a lot more warehousing that Amazon has in place right now. But even that would be an underachievement for Bezos. Amazon’s R&D team is working on a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) to help pull it off.
The Prime Air UAV’s have already acquired the unfortunate nickname of “drones,” and Americans are already suspicious of anything drone-like. Given the recent surfacing of the NSA’s depth of delve into our conversations, we just aren’t sure whom to trust anymore, and even Amazon is not above suspicion. They aren’t supposed to be armed, but what if….? They aren’t supposed to spy on us, but what if….? They aren’t supposed to be bombs, but what if….? I mean, we are supposed to have protection against unwarranted search and seizure, and we see how THAT turned out.
Bezos admits that the vehicles are not ready for Prime Time, no pun intended. There are FAA regulations to write and rewrite and inspect and follow. His estimation is that the FAA rules will be in place in 2015 and that Amazon will “be ready.” But the press release also states that it will take “some years” to get the technology into commercial use. There are issues of security of the packages and security of the vehicles that will need to be addressed to the satisfaction of the customers. What happens when a hacker compromises the program that directs the vehicle to the delivery address? (And you know a hacker WILL compromise that program.) This is an octocopter, that’s EIGHT spinning blades, sharing airspace not only with other aircraft, but also with wildlife. And, once on the ground, with pets. It could be conceivable that the delivery agreement would specify that the recipient affirm that they have no pets that could be harmed, but it could be just as unpleasant to come home and find that a squirrel or bird has had a close encounter in your yard with one of those EIGHT spinning blades. If your neighbor’s dog jumps the fence and attacks this incredibly expensive machine, will you be held responsible for the damage? If the dog gets damaged, who compensates the neighbor? If a vehicle goes astray and lands in the middle of a park and a dozen children come up to it and meet those blades…well, you get the picture, there are a lot of things that can—very conceivably—go very badly wrong.
The good thing about these questions is that Jeff Bezos is no fool. Someone has already asked him these questions and he already has someone working on the answers to them. 2015? I doubt it. But I don’t doubt that it will happen some time.
