siglesias

I would argue that this pattern is an irrationality that must be corrected with force [1]:

When faced with a choice of selecting one of several available products (or possibly buying nothing), according to standard theoretical perspectives, people will choose the option with the highest cost–benefit difference. However, we propose that decisions about free (zero price) products differ, in that people do not simply subtract costs from benefits and perceive the benefits associated with free products as higher.

That is, users systematically spring for games with lower cost-benefit tradeoffs simply because they are offered for free. While this would be economically infeasible for game developers, they've figured out how to take advantage of other psychological breakdowns to extract revenue. On a larger scale I'm not sure this makes users as happy as they could be.

1) http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/Papers/zero.pdf

If you're trying to model something simpler like a WiiMote, then I think you might hit closer to the mark. Let's keep in mind too the fun possibilities of asymmetric information games that are possible because of the display (think poker, football, Scrabble, Wii U type-games, etc).

Secondly, how will it work out for Amazon, in its coveted "long-run," if it erodes public trust by showing something it doesn't really think will ship? I think showing it in public gives them an onus to execute. As others have mentioned, it also creates an onus for the FAA to take this challenge seriously and to accelerate its thinking about this new direction.

One also marvels at the possibility for home-to-home delivery, say, for used items, or the ability to have returned items "picked-up" by these drones. A fascinating avenue.

Amazon.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&...

Isn't this somewhat intellectually dishonest though? A phone is a system, and how fast the CPU can run given the constraints of the system is a testament to the manufacturer's hardware and software engineering abilities: the software's power management, the hardware and ID's thermals. OEMs shouldn't give themselves a free pass on this. We know how fast a snapdragon can go. Now let's see how fast you can make it go in your handset.

The point isn't whether it was Android or iPhone (for the record, the Droid campaign started fall 2009). The notion of getting disrupted by higher cost phones--not iPhone for a Symbian but a smart phone for a flip phone--was so unthinkable and invisible that for three years the two companies under discussion here made do selling to emerging markets. It's essentially a tale of how the market and leadership at these companies do not see disruptions from above coming, and if they do see them coming being in a paradoxical state of needing to reverse course on a (thus far) successful strategy.

Not seeing how this follows from the data... There is a real chance of smartphones getting commodotized

Nobody is arguing that smart phones haven't been commoditized. The question is, how viable is a business that does not serve the low end? According to critics who are not keen on the nuances between these different products, a high-end play is not viable at all. But this is ignorant of the history of the Mac and iPod. It's also ignorant of the fate of PC-era commodity players.

By the way, I love the last sentence of Horace's piece here: "That’s not likely to be the case for those who found themselves in competition with the Mac in its pocketable re-incaration."--he's hinting at the possibility that these scary "commodity players," even if they see success, set themselves up poorly for the next round of disruption. Apple's whole-widget approach uniquely set it up to introduce disruptive form factors, and might do so again in the future.

As I understand it every now and again Apple will prompt you to enter your passcode/password, such as when you restart your device or if you haven't unlocked it in two days. Hardly a signal that passwords are done.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6258275

http://cl.ly/image/1U3i2F2v2r43

I'm only using 5 people with 3 cars as an example. In reality it's hundreds upon hundreds of people and proportionally fewer cars. I understand there are challenges with dealing with humans that will disappear when we switch to robots, but I can't see the API changing very much. The concept of a vehicle network, customers, app, doing clever things to anticipate traffic and customer desires on certain days, all of these things take (I would imagine) years to understand and optimize.

Your claim that operating such a network with humans versus robots, on a logistical (API) level, have "almost zero in common" is rather brash.

Please explain how it makes a difference whether humans are operating the vehicles or whether they are self driving. In either case a larger network is making the pickup, dropoff and navigation decisions, not the driver.