Amazon, the technology giant grown out of an idea for an online bookshop, sits like a massive spider atop the world of online commerce. Amazon has a stake in much of what happens: It sells goods directly, guides other people to retailers, and lives by nibbling off pieces of the fees paid to do so. But perhaps it’s best not to think of Amazon itself as a massive store, but a functional appendage to the infrastructure of the online world.
That, at least, appears to be the thesis behind “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick? Think Again” by Farhad Manjoo in today’s New York Times. Manjoo writes:
We’ve seen this most recently with Amazon branding its own fleet of cargo airplanes to assist in delivery. Amazon isn’t trying to crowd out anyone already in the business of deliveries goods to customers. That’s existing infrastructure, and without it, Amazon would have a much harder time getting goods where they need to be. Instead, Amazon is trying to bolster this, so that deliveries from Amazon arrive when expected, even during peak times.
We’ve seen this approach from Amazon before, for online traffic itself. As Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic:
How did Amazon get into the business of renting servers in the first place? From the Atlantic, again, this time as part of Ingrid Burrington’s series on the physical spaces of the internet. Burrington writes:
What the web needed to grow was the ability to handle high volumes of traffic, suddenly. The electrical grid is an apt metaphor. Homes use bursts of electricity in the morning, heating water for showers, powering toasters and coffeemakers, and then typically sit idle during the day, until people come home after work and start up the TV, the stove, plug in their phones, and open up their laptops. An infrastructure built for even use all the time would collapse under the patterns of daily life, as every evening high demand would overtax supply and cause rolling blackouts.
With web traffic, the consequence isn’t quite so bad, but there’s a definite evening rush as more people go online and watch Netflix when they get home. Amazon Web Services is the infrastructure that prevents that crash by letting companies buy, through a largely automated process, the extra server space they need, as immediately as they need it.
Shipping goods, too, has a similar pattern, as Americans rediscover every December. Holidays are a high-capacity time for shipping, and Amazon’s excess capacity is one way to meet that demand, as it happens.
There are hurdles to this: Unlike putting more servers on the internet, there is only so much capacity than Amazon can gain by putting more trucks on the road until the traffic they cause further delays deliveries. So to get around the clogged roads, Amazon’s drone service is looking to the sky.
Again, from Manjoo:
It’s hard to make a part of the physical world as automatically responsive to immediate need as renting server space. A fleet of autonomous drones, carrying cargoes and even recharging from streetlight perches would be the next closest thing, a physical web over all our heads, bringing us everything we want within 48 hours of our wanting it.
What a brave new future that will be.
