The Amazon Drone: Thunderbird 2 2.0

In the 1960s TV series, Thunderbirds, there was a vehicle called Thunderbird 2. It was a heavy transport carrier and used a variety of pods to deliver the appropriate equipment to a rescue site.

The Amazon Drone uses a variety of pods to deliver goods to customers.

Twitter exploded with chatter about the Amazon Drone last night.

We had a lot of fun.

And then I pointed out:

https://twitter.com/mikecane/status/407335323266338817

https://twitter.com/mikecane/status/407335871356997632

https://twitter.com/mikecane/status/407336700780630016

Yeah.

This Drone has many, many implications.

Some of them are:

1) Amazon is disintermediating humans. All of the truckers it currently relies on — many will be gone in the future. Drones don’t form unions, need health care, ask for raises, or need sick days. And as volume production of Drones occur, they become even less expensive versus human beings.

2) Everyone wondered why Amazon bought a mapping company. It wasn’t just for their tablets!

3) Don’t expect the final Drone to be as benign as the one shown. It will have many cameras and sensors. The cameras will help with mapping. The cameras will also confirm deliveries. And the cameras will link to a facial recognition database too. While Google Maps has Street View, Amazon can offer Drone View. And those sensors? Amazon Weather. Be afraid, Weather Channel.

4) This is another reason for Amazon to offer a phone. Why limit deliveries to customer street addresses? A Drone can be sent directly to where you are now by homing in on your Amazon phone.

5) Bezos is rich enough to buy the sky. If you think the FAA will object, forget it. This is a done deal because it also ties into law enforcement. Remember all those cameras? If Drone Monitors see something, they’ll say something. The privatization of policing via unintended(?) consequences.

6) Weather will become even bigger. We’ll have “drone forecasts.” You’ll check the status of the weather to confirm that it’s drone-friendly. And you’ll do it via Amazon Weather.

7) While people will inevitably go on about how many distribution centers Amazon needs to blanket the USA — each drone, today, has just a ten-mile limit — they’ll (once again!) miss the larger point about how clever Amazon is and how they can do this with smaller delivery sub-centers. Amazon doesn’t have to offer everything at once for Drone delivery. Just enough to begin. Amazon is a company that has figured out how to shelf things by size. And they know that eighty-six percent of their current deliveries fall within the Drone lifting limit of five pounds.

8) And yeah, Amazon will score huge PR when their Drones can get to hungry people in a disaster area while the Red Cross and others have to plod along on land first clearing wreckage with bulldozers to get through.

Those are just eight things (actually more, if you parse carefully). I could go on, but this is probably more than anyone else has thought of, so I’ll stop.

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