The Last Mile
I don’t love devoting the first several paragraphs of this newsletter to Amazon every week, but no one is making waves — both good and bad — in the robotics space quite like the little mom-and-pop bookseller from Seattle, Washington. This is one of the bad weeks. It’s a story about what happens when your high-profile pilot doesn’t turn out as planned.
Failure is always an option. It’s not a good option, and it’s certainly not the option anyone is hoping for, but to suggest it’s not an option is really just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the word “option” means. Life isn’t a motivational poster dressed up as a LinkedIn post — it’s life, and failure is sitting around like a teenager loitering in the 7-Eleven parking lot. It could be a blessing, it could be a curse, but it is never, under any circumstances, not an option.
Last week, Amazon confirmed reports that it has scaled back real-world piloting for its last-mile delivery robot, Scout. The ~400-person team will mostly scatter to the wind. A few will remain with the (not entirely dead) project and still others will fill suitable roles inside the company.
