In my recently posted article, "Chris Anderson's Expanding Drone Empire," I made the bold claim that Amazon's Jeff Bezos got "one of the biggest free advertisements in high-tech history" in November, when CBS broadcast his company's video pre-enactment of a program to deliver packages to customers' doors.
But you get what you pay for. It turns out Bezos also opened himself up to an epic wave of mockery. Of course, most of the catcalls have come from the peanut gallery, but now comes a full-scale, mocking faux advertisement [above] that hits Amazon right in the nose. And it comes from no less a corporate archrival than Netflix:
Note how the ad mentions, in passing, how trivial it will be to work out the bugs in the "Drone2Home" scheme.
It's easy for Netflix to laugh at Amazon—Netflix is well into a long-planned transition from the postal delivery of things to the Internet-based transmission of bits.
Philip E. Ross is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. His interests include transportation, energy storage, AI, and the economic aspects of technology. He has a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University and another, in journalism, from the University of Michigan.
