Are Amazon’s Drones Crazy or Awesome?

Rosenfeld Media asked me my opinion of Amazon’s idea to use drones to deliver packages. Here’s a short excerpt from the interview:

Say what you will about Jeff Bezos, the man knows how to touch off a media storm. Which is precisely what ensued after Bezos told 60 Minutes that Amazon is testing the use of drones to deliver goods. Immediately, everyone was discussing the prospect of ordering a box of tissues from Amazon and having a drone arrive at your doorstep in half an hour. We’ve asked some Rosenfeld Media experts to join the fray on this audacious idea.

It’s a longshot that this will ever happen.  But let’s imagine for a moment that Amazon pulls this off.  A terrible road to go down, or awesome?

Victor Lombardi: The danger is in trying to answer this question using reason rather than experimentation. And that’s because drone package delivery is so new we have no idea if it’s awesome or not. To find out, we need to test it. The reason we fail to get these things right is because we fail to treat them as experiments. We fall in love with ideas, with visionaries, with progress for the sake of progress. And that leads to failure.

Read the the full interview at Rosenfeld Media.