WASHINGTON – Amazon’s splashy announcement of its plan to revolutionize package delivery – via drone, naturally – has already started running into skepticism.
The project was first reported by CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday night, hours before millions of shoppers turned to their computers for Cyber Monday sales.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, said in the primetime interview that while the octocopters look like something out of science fiction, there’s no reason they can’t be used as delivery vehicles.
But despite Amazon’s familiarity with the Federal Aviation Administration, it will be a long time before such vehicles will be cleared for commercial use.
Drone opponents, upset with the contraptions’ already heavy intrusion into contemporary life, are threatening to shoot them out of the sky. And is it really worth the cost of acquiring a big enough fleet of flying machines to deliver something in 20 minutes rather than 20 hours?
Delivery-by-robot may or may not be the future of commerce. If it is, it’s certainly a long way off. So, why would Amazon start talking about it now?
It’s a tactic more companies are using these days: research and development as image-making.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, innovation was part of the image of iconic American companies.
These days, however, U.S. firms aren’t investing in coming up with new ideas as much as they used to, as the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ intellectual property index has tracked.
Countries like Finland, Israel, Sweden and South Korea now spend more on R&D than the United States does, as a percentage of their GDP.
In terms of R&D PR, however, American firms are leading the world. Companies that want to position themselves as part of that new economy are much louder about what they’re doing to bring it about.
Take eBay’s Paypal, for example, which recently tackled the challenge of interplanetary commerce. Yes, commerce between planets. Or Google, which has proposed a grand plan to bring WiFi to the world with Internet balloons and also has a plan to solve death. It’s by no means clear that any of these projects will come to fruition, but in the meantime, the companies get a nice publicity bump for thinking way, way outside the box – taking moonshots, as the Googlers like to call them.
The project was first reported by CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday night, hours before millions of shoppers turned to their computers for Cyber Monday sales.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, said in the primetime interview that while the octocopters look like something out of science fiction, there’s no reason they can’t be used as delivery vehicles.
But despite Amazon’s familiarity with the Federal Aviation Administration, it will be a long time before such vehicles will be cleared for commercial use.
Drone opponents, upset with the contraptions’ already heavy intrusion into contemporary life, are threatening to shoot them out of the sky. And is it really worth the cost of acquiring a big enough fleet of flying machines to deliver something in 20 minutes rather than 20 hours?
Delivery-by-robot may or may not be the future of commerce. If it is, it’s certainly a long way off. So, why would Amazon start talking about it now?
It’s a tactic more companies are using these days: research and development as image-making.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, innovation was part of the image of iconic American companies.
These days, however, U.S. firms aren’t investing in coming up with new ideas as much as they used to, as the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ intellectual property index has tracked.
Countries like Finland, Israel, Sweden and South Korea now spend more on R&D than the United States does, as a percentage of their GDP.
In terms of R&D PR, however, American firms are leading the world. Companies that want to position themselves as part of that new economy are much louder about what they’re doing to bring it about.
Take eBay’s Paypal, for example, which recently tackled the challenge of interplanetary commerce. Yes, commerce between planets. Or Google, which has proposed a grand plan to bring WiFi to the world with Internet balloons and also has a plan to solve death. It’s by no means clear that any of these projects will come to fruition, but in the meantime, the companies get a nice publicity bump for thinking way, way outside the box – taking moonshots, as the Googlers like to call them.