Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Without the power to see what the future brings, I'm afraid you (and I) are entirely unqualified to determine what will ultimately count as "vision" in this regard.
You may end up being right, but right now, we have no idea in the least how successful (or un-) the future of drone delivery might be.
The point is that Amazon has always taken chances--have always experimented with cutting-edge technologies and practices in order to be ahead of everyone should some idea take the world by storm.
Vision is not always about seeing the future. Sometimes it's about getting your fingers in the pies of as many things as possible (as ridiculous or unlikely as some of those things may seem right now) in the hopes that a few of them become reality. Sometimes it will pay off and sometimes it won't. But one thing will always be true: you won't be an innovative company by waiting on technologies to be viable by today's standards before taking a serious look into them now.
I have no doubt whatsoever that there will be a lot of future whingeing about Amazon's "monopoly" on something everybody else originally saw as a pipe-dream, or a "solution in search of a problem." After all ... what's the difference between predicting a future and creating one, where business ventures are concerned?
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That's not vision, that's just the standard investment strategy of spreading out your risks. A lot of companies do that. Vision is having an idea of where you want to go and figuring out a way to get there. Musk has the vision thing (Telsa and SpaceX) down, but perhaps not the execution thing down. Companies like Xerox, and the old AT&T with Bell Labs had fingers in a lot of pies thing down, but they didn't really have the vision thing down, so a lot of stuff just sat on the shelf waiting for someone else to pick it up and make something of it.
Certainly, I can't predict the future, but I can look at a Sumo wrestler and Ben Johnson line up for a 100 yard dash and make a pretty good guess who is going to win. Drones is one of those concepts that sounds cool, but when you start looking at the specifics, you start asking "why?". It's a bit like flying cars. The issue with flying cars isn't that they aren't possible, the issue with flying cars is that they aren't currently practical and don't really solve any real world problems. Same with jet packs. But they sound cool.