I think that a lot of comments here are missing a crucial point: in the next few years unmanned vehicles are going to play a major role in most of the transportation landscape, whereas this is for people or objects.
Amazon here is trying to play the same role that Google has been playing for a long time with their self driving cars. They are setting a standard and pushing for regulations and laws.
It is not that difficult to think that the future of unmanned vehicles won't be as naive as people may think. There will probably be a combination of different sets of vehicles that would go around for large distances and/or sizes, and different vehicles covering smaller distances and/or sizes. They can be used in series to optimize the traveling salesman problem in terms of what's powering these vehicles.
It's not that different from thinking of an ant-like distribution system.
And not that different from the Google approach of crawling the web, then crawling the actual world with google street view cars, eventually moving into self driving cars. Except you'll also get lots of metadata with it, that can be used and sold.
Amazon is now part of the game, moving the attention to drones and self flying objects.
I disagree that they're making the same play as Google. Google has never claimed they're going to make a self-driving car, or offer it as a service. As far as I can tell with a few minutes of googling, they don't even have a home page for the project. It's a research project and a tool to "push" the law in the direction Google wants.
Amazon, on the other hand, is 100% offering a product. It has a name, and they indicate a plan to, "enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place." This is partially about getting into the game early, but it's also focused on a product in a way that Google's car isn't.
The recent New Yorker piece on Google's driverless cars makes it very clear that Google's intention from day one was to bring this to market as a product, even if it requires partnering with another company: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_...
I don't think we disagree on that. I'm not talking about the product side of things. I said and mean that Amazon is pushing for standards, regulations, laws etc. also by showing the possible demand side.
The reason why Google doesn't have a product, can be for multiple reasons, for example because they may (who knows) only want to create an Android OS-like self driving system, not necessarily building the cars. It's the same they did with smart phones.
If they want to dominate the car OS market, they might not need to present it as a product at this stage.
They just need, as Amazon, to push it enough to gain momentum and be one of the early players.
Amazon here is trying to play the same role that Google has been playing for a long time with their self driving cars. They are setting a standard and pushing for regulations and laws.
It is not that difficult to think that the future of unmanned vehicles won't be as naive as people may think. There will probably be a combination of different sets of vehicles that would go around for large distances and/or sizes, and different vehicles covering smaller distances and/or sizes. They can be used in series to optimize the traveling salesman problem in terms of what's powering these vehicles.
It's not that different from thinking of an ant-like distribution system.
And not that different from the Google approach of crawling the web, then crawling the actual world with google street view cars, eventually moving into self driving cars. Except you'll also get lots of metadata with it, that can be used and sold.
Amazon is now part of the game, moving the attention to drones and self flying objects.