So Sunday night Jeff Bezos goes on 60 Minutes and tells Charlie Rose that Amazon wants to deliver packages by drone in four or five years, and by Monday morning that's the only tech story anyone on my Twitter feed wanted to talk about. Octocopters! Little cardboard boxes falling out of the sky onto your porch! I get why it's fun to talk about. It's also, and I say this as someone who has watched a lot of corporate PR in his time, suspiciously well timed.
Because Monday was also Cyber Monday. The actual biggest online shopping day in US history up to that point, according to Adobe's numbers, which had Americans spending something like $2.29 billion online in a single day, up around 20% from last year. That's not a small story. That's the story that would normally lead every tech and business blog on a Tuesday morning. Instead half the coverage I saw was drone speculation and half was Cyber Monday sales roundups, and the drone stuff mostly won.
I'm not saying Amazon planned it that way on purpose (okay, I am kind of saying that). A company that does tens of millions of dollars in extra sales specifically because of one shopping event has every incentive to make sure the news cycle the day after is about something other than "we make truckloads of money and treat our warehouse workers like robots." A goofy octocopter segment on 60 Minutes, four to five years out, no FAA approval, basically a fantasy at this point, is a pretty efficient way to do that. Bezos didn't even pretend it was close. "This is years away," he told Rose. Years away and yet it's what everyone's talking about instead of the actual news that happened that day.
Anyway. The Cyber Monday numbers themselves are worth sitting with for a second because they tell you where this is all heading. Mobile made up something like 17-20% of online traffic that day depending on whose numbers you trust, which is nuts when you think about how recently "shopping on your phone" was a novelty rather than a Tuesday-afternoon-on-the-couch activity. I did a chunk of my own shopping on my phone this year, which I never did last Cyber Monday, and mostly because a couple of the retailer apps have actually gotten decent instead of being the bloated garbage they were in 2011 and 2012.
Not all of them, though. I tried to check out on one big retailer's app around 11pm Monday (don't judge me, there was a $40 external hard drive deal) and the thing just spun a loading wheel at me for a solid two minutes before dumping me back to the login screen, cart contents gone. Had to do the whole thing over on a laptop. If you're going to build the infrastructure to handle "biggest shopping day ever," maybe load-test the checkout flow first. This isn't a new complaint, retailers have been getting caught flat-footed by their own traffic for years now, but you'd think by year three of "Cyber Monday is officially a huge deal" someone would have fixed it.
The other thing nobody's really said out loud yet, at least not in anything I've read: this was the first Cyber Monday where a meaningful chunk of the sales conversation online was actually about the sales themselves rather than doorbuster lines at physical stores. Black Friday still gets the news trucks parked outside Best Buy at midnight, but Cyber Monday used to feel like the office worker's consolation prize, something you did quietly from your desk on Monday because you missed the Friday chaos. This year it felt like the main event with an actual number attached to it that people cared about, not just "lots of people shopped online, the end."
I don't know if drones are ever going to drop a box of protein powder on my front steps. Given how long it took the FAA to even start writing rules for commercial drone use, I'd bet on 2018 before I'd bet on Bezos's own four-to-five-year window, and even that feels optimistic. But $2.29 billion in a day is real money that real people spent right now, in 2013, on their phones and laptops, and that story didn't need an octocopter to be interesting.