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Comment by jonjenk | Hacker News Reader

Former Amazonian here. If anyone wants to understand the key difference between Amazon and Google culture there's a great quote in the article.

"In all the testing, Roy had never seen one of his drones deliver a package. He was always at the takeoff point, watching debugging information scroll up the screen, and anxiously waiting to see what would happen. “Sergey [Brin] has been bugging me, asking, ‘What is it like? Is it actually a nice experience to get this?’ and I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t know. I’m looking at the screen,’” Roy told me."

Google and Amazon are both great companies. But at Amazon the drone program would start with a description of what the customer experience is when they receive a drone delivery and you'd work backwards to the technology solution. At Google the technology precedes the customer experience.

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err...

"Another obvious idea is to simply land the craft, drop the package, and then take off again. To test the premise, they brought in some of Google’s user experience researchers who queried people about how they might react to such a delivery. What they found was that individuals could not be stopped from trying to reach for their packages, even if they were told that the rotors on the vehicle were dangerous, which they are."

I have worked for neither company but I use products and services from both daily and I have to say I disagree. And remember the Prime Air demo video that showed a drone landing in a yard? And when your dog thinks it's a great new toy and runs up to it? Or your kid?... I have to say they didn't really think that experience through before taking it to the press.

The article directly contradicts your claim:

While the hardware is a significant part of the problem, they seem largely agnostic about which flying machine might ultimately serve their needs best. The real challenges, Teller and Roy insist, come in the design of the rest of the system like, for example, the delivery mechanism.

For example, the reason they do the winch down thing, instead of just landing, is so that customers are not tempted to approach the drone and get hit by the rotors.

instead they get hit on the head.

... by something lowered on a tether. If you think that's comparable to touching a rotor, you don't know much about rotors. mv^2!

touching a rotor chops your hand off. Getting hit in the head by delivery of dog food kills you. It's kinetic vs potential energy. for your kinetic energy equation you need a lot of speed and a lot of mass. You can have one of those, but not both.

Doesn't it have to be a bit of both? Because if you start strictly with the experience you might back into impossible technology.

I don't think so. I can almost hear Jeff's voice...

"Don't make your problem the customer's problem!"

There are often many technical solutions to create a particular customer experience. Jeff never accepts false dichotomies. If the particular technical solution being considered fails to produce a delightful customer experience then you better start thinking about other solutions. Many of the projects on which I worked turned out much better when Jeff challenged us break out of our little technical boxes and consider alternate solutions that preserved the customer experience.

I can sense that my answer will be frustrating to some who don't like being told that they aren't thinking big enough / creatively enough / bold enough / outside the box enough. Believe me, I felt that way too when working on Jeff projects. I left his office in frustration many times only to realize several hours or days later that I would have been better served by focusing on creative problem solving instead of trying to convince Jeff that X was not possible.

I have immense respect for Jeff. I also have increased respect for Sergy because he appears to be asking the right types of questions at Google.

> at Amazon the drone program would start with .. the customer experience ... and you'd work backwards to the technology solution. At Google the technology precedes the customer experience.

Speaking of false dichotomies.

This seems to happen frequently with some of the largest tech companies. I'm reminded of how Apple was developing a tablet computer, what would eventually become the iPad, far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad#History). They spent almost 10 years in R&D before they were able to put something out there, and even longer before they could actually ship the iPad. It's a good thing they wasted all that money, because it ended up paying off.

I think Google, Amazon and even Microsoft are hedging similar bets against the limits of technology. After all, what's impossible today may be trivial tomorrow.

> far before anyone was thinking about multi-touch interfaces

CERN built capacitive multi-touch displays in the 70s. Mitsubishi, Bell, Microsoft, IBM and a bunch of other companies were involved in the R&D from there.

What Apple are good at is integrating and commercializing at the exact point where the economies of scale are viable, adding a layer of accessibility for users (eg. inventing the gestures, but not the touch technology itself).

The anecdote about how Apple tried to launch the iPad before the iPhone is proof that they didn't catch-on to how the core touch tech scaled (every inch of touch surface would increase production cost non-linearly) until much later.

Well, I think starting with the experience first gives you a clear indication if this is worthwhile or not. Once you decide if it is worthwhile then you can go back to the technology and determine if it is feasible.

Well, you can tweak the customer experience portion and try backing out of it again.

> at Amazon the drone program would start with a description of what the customer experience is when they receive a drone delivery and you'd work backwards to the technology solution

"work backwards to the technology" is a quote from Steve Jobs:

> One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. — http://youtu.be/GnO7D5UaDig?t=52m16s

That a quote like that should be attributed to Amazon shows how much Jeff is trying to emulate Steve.

"Start with the customer and work backwards" :-)

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