(06-11-2019 10:45 AM)bullet Wrote:  Enron? Dutch Tulip bubble? 2007 real estate bubble?

In any event, not everything Bezos touches turns to gold. They are giving up on restaurant delivery. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/amazon...ting-down/

Well hell, why stop there? There are literally pages and pages one could fill with failures. But guess what, there's a book right next to it with an equal or greater number of successes.

Why are you guys so resistant to this idea? It may well be a flop but it's outside the box thinking with creativity which should be encouraged.

The bottom line is no one really knows whether or not this will fly (pun intended) because no one has yet tried it.

What if all the what iffers of the day had managed to shoot down the moon landing because they THOUGHT it couldn't be done? No one ever succeeded by being too afraid to make a mistake.

(06-11-2019 11:37 AM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 10:45 AM)bullet Wrote:  Enron? Dutch Tulip bubble? 2007 real estate bubble?

In any event, not everything Bezos touches turns to gold. They are giving up on restaurant delivery. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/amazon...ting-down/

Well hell, why stop there? There are literally pages and pages one could fill with failures. But guess what, there's a book right next to it with an equal or greater number of successes.

Why are you guys so resistant to this idea? It may well be a flop but it's outside the box thinking with creativity which should be encouraged.

The bottom line is no one really knows whether or not this will fly (pun intended) because no one has yet tried it.

What if all the what iffers of the day had managed to shoot down the moon landing because they THOUGHT it couldn't be done? No one ever succeeded by being too afraid to make a mistake.

Most new jobs are created by small businesses despite the fact that big businesses employ most of the people. There is an odd worship of experts and big business being expressed by some. Those of us who know it best know better. After the 2016 election, everybody but the die-hard progressives should know better than to trust "experts."

In any event, I said it would probably be commonplace in 20 years, just that the first out are likely to fall on their face.

It's not a fawning over of experts or their technology so much as it is looking at someone with a proven track record of success. In fact, the MOST proven track record of success when measured by dollar amount in modern history.

If he thinks it's viable, and Walmart thinks it's viable, and UPS thinks it's viable, what's it gonna take to make some guy on a message board give up his antiquated way of looking at companies?

Hint - modern CEO's and businesses dont operate from a top down approach anymore. It's all about agile, lean, etc, and in those paradigms authority has been democratized almost to the point where it's a given that the decision makers are influencing from the middle somewhere IN BETWEEN the bottom people that have a good idea of how things are actually done from a hands on perspective and the top who actually write the checks.

I would bet a lot of money I won't be able to have an Amazon item delivered by drone within 100 feet of my front door within 6 months.

(06-11-2019 01:00 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 11:37 AM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 10:45 AM)bullet Wrote:  Enron? Dutch Tulip bubble? 2007 real estate bubble?

In any event, not everything Bezos touches turns to gold. They are giving up on restaurant delivery. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/amazon...ting-down/

Well hell, why stop there? There are literally pages and pages one could fill with failures. But guess what, there's a book right next to it with an equal or greater number of successes.

Why are you guys so resistant to this idea? It may well be a flop but it's outside the box thinking with creativity which should be encouraged.

The bottom line is no one really knows whether or not this will fly (pun intended) because no one has yet tried it.

What if all the what iffers of the day had managed to shoot down the moon landing because they THOUGHT it couldn't be done? No one ever succeeded by being too afraid to make a mistake.

Most new jobs are created by small businesses despite the fact that big businesses employ most of the people. There is an odd worship of experts and big business being expressed by some. Those of us who know it best know better. After the 2016 election, everybody but the die-hard progressives should know better than to trust "experts."

In any event, I said it would probably be commonplace in 20 years, just that the first out are likely to fall on their face.

That may well be, anything could happen. I'm not a huge fan of some drone flying up to my house with all my information and dropping off a package. I believe these to be wireless units and I would worry more about my info being hacked than having a package stolen. I think I really just like the idea of flying things more than anything else.

(06-11-2019 03:42 PM)king king Wrote:  It's not a fawning over of experts or their technology so much as it is looking at someone with a proven track record of success. In fact, the MOST proven track record of success when measured by dollar amount in modern history.

If he thinks it's viable, and Walmart thinks it's viable, and UPS thinks it's viable, what's it gonna take to make some guy on a message board give up his antiquated way of looking at companies?

Hint - modern CEO's and businesses dont operate from a top down approach anymore. It's all about agile, lean, etc, and in those paradigms authority has been democratized almost to the point where it's a given that the decision makers are influencing from the middle somewhere IN BETWEEN the bottom people that have a good idea of how things are actually done from a hands on perspective and the top who actually write the checks.

So that's what that 6 week course called Agile I took while still employed at AT&T was about. And I went the full Six Sigma, no lean crap for me.

Some of these guys here are pretty old, like me, and maybe haven't been exposed to radical new methodologies and processes like Agile or Six Sigma (not new any longer but still a great way to refine processes). If those courses did anything they taught me to look beyond my own perceptions of things to see possibilities and potential.

(06-11-2019 07:00 PM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  I would bet a lot of money I won't be able to have an Amazon item delivered by drone within 100 feet of my front door within 6 months.

Why, you know something we and Amazon don't?

Maybe their plans never included package delivery to your area so the same could probably be said by a lot of folks.

(06-11-2019 07:00 PM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  I would bet a lot of money I won't be able to have an Amazon item delivered by drone within 100 feet of my front door within 6 months.

Do you live in an apartment building without a patio?

I could say the same thing, but only because I no longer order anything from Amazon.

(06-12-2019 05:24 AM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 07:00 PM)Ohio Poly Wrote:  I would bet a lot of money I won't be able to have an Amazon item delivered by drone within 100 feet of my front door within 6 months.

Do you live in an apartment building without a patio?

I could say the same thing, but only because I no longer order anything from Amazon.

So, thus far - out of all the naysayers - you're the only one here who can state unequivocally that drones will not be delivering any packages to you, at least not from Amazon.

(06-11-2019 08:33 PM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 01:00 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 11:37 AM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 10:45 AM)bullet Wrote:  Enron? Dutch Tulip bubble? 2007 real estate bubble?

In any event, not everything Bezos touches turns to gold. They are giving up on restaurant delivery. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/amazon...ting-down/

Well hell, why stop there? There are literally pages and pages one could fill with failures. But guess what, there's a book right next to it with an equal or greater number of successes.

Why are you guys so resistant to this idea? It may well be a flop but it's outside the box thinking with creativity which should be encouraged.

The bottom line is no one really knows whether or not this will fly (pun intended) because no one has yet tried it.

What if all the what iffers of the day had managed to shoot down the moon landing because they THOUGHT it couldn't be done? No one ever succeeded by being too afraid to make a mistake.

Most new jobs are created by small businesses despite the fact that big businesses employ most of the people. There is an odd worship of experts and big business being expressed by some. Those of us who know it best know better. After the 2016 election, everybody but the die-hard progressives should know better than to trust "experts."

In any event, I said it would probably be commonplace in 20 years, just that the first out are likely to fall on their face.

That may well be, anything could happen. I'm not a huge fan of some drone flying up to my house with all my information and dropping off a package. I believe these to be wireless units and I would worry more about my info being hacked than having a package stolen. I think I really just like the idea of flying things more than anything else.

So you do have stars in your eyes.

(06-11-2019 08:38 PM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 03:42 PM)king king Wrote:  It's not a fawning over of experts or their technology so much as it is looking at someone with a proven track record of success. In fact, the MOST proven track record of success when measured by dollar amount in modern history.

If he thinks it's viable, and Walmart thinks it's viable, and UPS thinks it's viable, what's it gonna take to make some guy on a message board give up his antiquated way of looking at companies?

Hint - modern CEO's and businesses dont operate from a top down approach anymore. It's all about agile, lean, etc, and in those paradigms authority has been democratized almost to the point where it's a given that the decision makers are influencing from the middle somewhere IN BETWEEN the bottom people that have a good idea of how things are actually done from a hands on perspective and the top who actually write the checks.

So that's what that 6 week course called Agile I took while still employed at AT&T was about. And I went the full Six Sigma, no lean crap for me.

Some of these guys here are pretty old, like me, and maybe haven't been exposed to radical new methodologies and processes like Agile or Six Sigma (not new any longer but still a great way to refine processes). If those courses did anything they taught me to look beyond my own perceptions of things to see possibilities and potential.

None of these things change human nature. They only nibble at the edges of how large organizations work. I've worked or know people who have worked in companies implementing all these latest management strategies. The Who understood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q

And who do you think decided to implement all these management strategies? Did it come from the middle or the top?

The people who gravitate to the top tend in big companies to be the extreme type A personalities who want power, just like what we have in politics. So the CEOs now are little different from the CEOs 30-40 years ago. And on average, they are probably even more extreme and insensitive to their employees than the ones you had 40-50 years ago. And like all people, they tend to like people like themselves. Hence, most CEOs surround themselves with people just like themselves, which magnify their mistakes. Only the rare few understand they need people who complement them. They may have a group with different skin color and sexual orientation, but the personalities tend to be the same.

For every Herb Kelleher at a Southwest Airlines, there are ten Frank Lorenzos like at Continental (now United). And there are quite a few Andy Fastows (Enron) out there too.

(06-12-2019 08:09 AM)bullet Wrote:  And who do you think decided to implement all these management strategies? Did it come from the middle or the top?

The people who gravitate to the top tend in big companies to be the extreme type A personalities who want power, just like what we have in politics. So the CEOs now are little different from the CEOs 30-40 years ago. And on average, they are probably even more extreme and insensitive to their employees than the ones you had 40-50 years ago. And like all people, they tend to like people like themselves. Hence, most CEOs surround themselves with people just like themselves, which magnify their mistakes. Only the rare few understand they need people who complement them. They may have a group with different skin color and sexual orientation, but the personalities tend to be the same.

For every Herb Kelleher at a Southwest Airlines, there are ten Frank Lorenzos like at Continental (now United). And there are quite a few Andy Fastows (Enron) out there too.

CEOs may not get into the weeds and micromanage what processes or techniques developers use, but they sure as schit do dictate what will be developed.

And process oriented quality systems like ISO and Six Sigma are great for managing a product or service that is already being provided and great for large businesses to manage against risk of rapid decline, but they are terrible for innovation. I've worked for large and small business and I see these QMS as the prevent defense of industry. They get in the way of innovation, which is why small business is better at innovation, but also have a higher failure rate whereas large business sucks at innovation, but are great at making money. There are exceptions, especially with the right leadership. Apple continued to innovate until Jobs kicked the can, for instance. I would say the CEO had something to do with it considering they haven't done schit since and I highly doubt Steve Jobs went through his day running through his processes.

(06-12-2019 08:09 AM)bullet Wrote:  And who do you think decided to implement all these management strategies? Did it come from the middle or the top?

The people who gravitate to the top tend in big companies to be the extreme type A personalities who want power, just like what we have in politics. So the CEOs now are little different from the CEOs 30-40 years ago. And on average, they are probably even more extreme and insensitive to their employees than the ones you had 40-50 years ago. And like all people, they tend to like people like themselves. Hence, most CEOs surround themselves with people just like themselves, which magnify their mistakes. Only the rare few understand they need people who complement them. They may have a group with different skin color and sexual orientation, but the personalities tend to be the same.

For every Herb Kelleher at a Southwest Airlines, there are ten Frank Lorenzos like at Continental (now United). And there are quite a few Andy Fastows (Enron) out there too.

Most of the management strategies are pushed for by the influencers that sit somewhere in the middle. They use their influence to win over those at the top and those at the bottom. I see it all over the place.

Some of the very largest companies in the world are based on some version of these strategies.

LEAN:
Toyota, Ford, John Deere, Intel, Caterpillar, Kimberly Clark, Nike, Bell Labs, Motorola, GE, Dell, Amazon.

Agile:
Spotify, Google, 3M, IBM, Philips, Apple, Principal Financial, AT&T, Microsoft

Look guys, the problem with technology is we rush to do something with it before we ask the question, "Should we do something with it?"

Your discussion is interesting and some good points have been made, but when this topic was presented here's what immediately came to mind for me.

Federal Express, UPS, and the Postal Service all screen packages for biological and explosive devices. I wouldn't be so much worried that an Amazon drone would run a bus off the road as I would be that the average American doesn't track their package until they are late. So a terrorist could easily have their own drone with a package addressed to an Amazon user wrapped with Amazon knockoff tape but containing a deadly payload. Anyone getting an Amazon package who orders from Amazon (and we are talking a significant % of the population) would take the package inside and open it to see what it was, particularly if they had a family members name on the label as a sender, and those names are easily obtained from Facebook. And none of this even takes into account a package not intended to be delivered but rather detonated at altitude with a contagion. Such a delivery mechanism if it looked like an Amazon drone could go undetected and would be a cheap delivery mechanism.

I would rather live in a drone free world with the exception of military drones for operation outside the United States. That way if we see one it would be open season on drones for all citizens.

So while the concept is cool, I suppose, it is fraught with potential unintended consequences not the least of which is an easy tool for terrorists.

So I say can this concept period. At least with standard shipping the real package is packed and sealed under the cameras of the company, picked up by a trained carrier, screened, and for the most part under scrutiny until delivery.

On a lighter note I think a hobo with a baseball bat would have a pretty good chance of scoring some stuff and putting a drone out of commission.

(06-12-2019 07:43 AM)EverRespect Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 08:33 PM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 01:00 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 11:37 AM)TigerBlue4Ever Wrote:  

(06-11-2019 10:45 AM)bullet Wrote:  Enron? Dutch Tulip bubble? 2007 real estate bubble?

In any event, not everything Bezos touches turns to gold. They are giving up on restaurant delivery. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/11/amazon...ting-down/

Well hell, why stop there? There are literally pages and pages one could fill with failures. But guess what, there's a book right next to it with an equal or greater number of successes.

Why are you guys so resistant to this idea? It may well be a flop but it's outside the box thinking with creativity which should be encouraged.

The bottom line is no one really knows whether or not this will fly (pun intended) because no one has yet tried it.

What if all the what iffers of the day had managed to shoot down the moon landing because they THOUGHT it couldn't be done? No one ever succeeded by being too afraid to make a mistake.

Most new jobs are created by small businesses despite the fact that big businesses employ most of the people. There is an odd worship of experts and big business being expressed by some. Those of us who know it best know better. After the 2016 election, everybody but the die-hard progressives should know better than to trust "experts."

In any event, I said it would probably be commonplace in 20 years, just that the first out are likely to fall on their face.

That may well be, anything could happen. I'm not a huge fan of some drone flying up to my house with all my information and dropping off a package. I believe these to be wireless units and I would worry more about my info being hacked than having a package stolen. I think I really just like the idea of flying things more than anything else.

So you do have stars in your eyes.

I wouldn't go that far.

(06-09-2019 12:34 PM)bullet Wrote:  It amazes me people keep having unbridled faith in experts.

Amazon may have it all figured out. But questioning whether a mammoth bureaucracy will get things right is pretty reasonable, even if their experts are right. Following science is not how decisions are made in large corporations.

You quoted me here so I assume this is directed at me, though perhaps not as there are others in the thread as well...

I don't remotely have unbridled faith in experts... but I do have a bit more faith in those with skin in the game than those without. Amazon recently closed their grocery delivery business, so despite the investigation I'm sure they did, they failed at it... but none of us that I'm aware of have done any of that.

I worked for a GE sub at one point and learned a whole lot from that experience. I once took them a 'deal' that was a 'federal agency and GE credit guarantee' arbitrage return of iirc, 8% ROI in a 7% market for agency (and GE) and they declined because their threshold for that department was 8.4%. The deal was rock solid... but didn't meet their parameters. End of story. I also saw them take flyers with huge returns and lose a lot... but make money overall.

Amazon is in this business. They are going to make smart and well-vetted decisions, but that certainly doesn't remotely guarantee results.... but we're throwing up some pretty obvious obstacles as if they haven't considered them, and I find that a bit silly. Said differently... a middle schooler may stumble on to a correct answer and a Harvard PhD may make a mistake; but if I'm a betting man.........

Heard on the radio that Uber Eats was going to start delivering by drone. DJ's comment was, "if they can't get you food by car, what makes them think they can do it by drone!?" Then she echoed JR's concerns about our current world.

(06-13-2019 07:58 PM)bullet Wrote:  Heard on the radio that Uber Eats was going to start delivering by drone. DJ's comment was, "if they can't get you food by car, what makes them think they can do it by drone!?" Then she echoed JR's concerns about our current world.

Nothing screams 'I'm a millennial' more than ordering a $5 Big Mac via Uber Eats, and paying $20 in delivery charges for that burger just so you can take a selfie with your food and drone.