Ah, delivery drones — simultaneously terrifying and potentially quite helpful.
Amazon, long a promoter of its own efforts in the space, now appears to have committed a cardinal sin of business: overpromise and under-deliver.
In 2015, Amazon launched a PR campaign with this cool video.
But a new report from Wired found that 100+ Amazonians in the company’s UK-based drone unit have lost their jobs, and the project is broadly struggling to take off.
Anonymous Amazonians described the program as “collapsing inwards,” “dysfunctional,” “organised chaos,” and “detached from reality.” (Ouch.)
Leaders appointed to the project were reportedly logistics and warehouse ops folks, and not experts in scalable machine-learning drone delivery networks.
That whole situation sounds rough. But hey, at least there was pizza.