Alexis Madrigal, over at The Atlantic, has the big scoop story concerning Google's project to create delivery drones, in its Google X moonshot factory. The project, unimaginatively dubbed Project Wing, has many people comparing it to Amazon's similarly announced plans for delivery drones. And, of course, for years before that, we discussed ideas like the TacoCopter (and the LobsterCopter) which some people were trying to build to deliver food via drones. Google has confirmed the project (notably never using the term drone, but instead "self-flying vehicles") with this video: Of course, as we've been noting since the TacoCopter days, the big problem here is that the FAA hates drones and insists that they are 100% illegal for any for-profit effort no matter how useful or reasonable.

While most people are comparing this to Amazon's drone delivery idea, or talking about the nature of "instant gratification," it seems like many are totally missing the much bigger thinking behind Google's effort here. Like most truly disruptive innovations, the interesting thing here isn't in just delivering packages faster, but how such a move could totally reshape society -- a vision that the team behind this at Google apparently are well aware of. From Madrigal's writeup, this key part is buried in the middle, but is the most important point. This isn't about faster delivery. This is about how faster delivery can totally change our relationship to physical things:

The idea goes like this: Because people can’t assume near-instantaneous delivery of whatever they need, they stockpile things. They might have a bunch of batteries, slowly decharging in a drawer, or a drill that they use for 10 minutes a year. Each of these things is a personal possession that sits around, embodying all this energy and industrial effort unproductively.

If this sounds familiar, it should: It is the argument—even down to the drill example—that organizations like Worldchanging made in the mid-00s for the creation of “product-service systems.” Those ideas, in turn, became key planks in the original conception of the “sharing economy,” imagined as one in which the world could make much less stuff because efficient, digital logistics would let each asset be used by more people.

“It would help move us from an ownership society to an access society. We would have more of a community feel to the things in our lives,” Teller preached. “And what if we could do that and lower the noise pollution and lower the carbon footprint, while we improve the safety of having these things come to you?”

People like to mock ideas like "the sharing economy" for putting things like homes and cars to more efficient use rather than leaving them idle all the time. But drones that can move things about easily, quickly and efficiently really could absolutely change how we think about property and ownership. Now, for those who are worried about Google, they might not like Google being at the center of this, but it's hardly likely that they'll be the only player in this space.

But this is also why the FAA's restrictions could be so damaging. The FAA, like so many government bureaucracies, has trouble viewing the future. They only view it through the prism of the past. So, drones are seen as toys that might "interfere with airplanes." The FAA is in absolutely no rush to allow commercial drone use (which is why Google's tests are all being done in Australia), because to FAA bureaucrats, what's the big deal? Drones are toys. The fact that they could reshape certain aspects of the way society works doesn't even enter the picture.

But if you're trying to understand where the future of innovation is going, dismissing projects like this as just being about toys -- or even just being about delivering things faster -- means that you're missing everything.

After the dot-com bust, Webvan was often cited as one of the biggest flops -- throwing way too much money at a venture that had not proven its business model at all. But grocery delivery services still have some potential to change the way people shop for food, and Webvan itself isn't quite dead. A growing number of grocery stores (from Walmart, Safeway, Netgrocer, Peapod, etc) are expanding home delivery services. Here are just a few interesting stories about having groceries delivered to your door.

• Home delivery trucks for groceries can produce 20%-75% less carbon dioxide than having the same households driving to stores individually. This conclusion was published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum, and one of the authors says, "It's like a bus for groceries." [url]
• Dozens of companies around the Bay Area are working on online grocery stores and delivery services -- and there still doesn't seem to be an obvious solution to the problem of getting the profit margins right for perishable food deliveries. A bunch of these start-ups are losing money in the short term, but there seems to be a market for delivered groceries. Some details about how the service and fees work still need to be figured out, however. [url]
• AmazonFresh is expanding beyond Seattle to Los Angeles -- slowly building up the re-vamped Webvan service with plans to serve more cities in 2014. Amazon has been working out the kinks of delivering perishable items since 2007, so we might actually see some disruption in the grocery industry. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Having just seen cases where legacy players have felt threatened by more innovative startups that take advantage of more distributed "peer-production" rather than top-down centralized systems of old, it's interesting to see a counter example. Apparently, Wal-Mart is considering a plan in which it tries to get in-store shoppers to help deliver packages to online buyers.

"I see a path to where this is crowd-sourced," Joel Anderson, chief executive of Walmart.com in the United States, said in a recent interview with Reuters.

Wal-Mart has millions of customers visiting its stores each week. Some of these shoppers could tell the retailer where they live and sign up to drop off packages for online customers who live on their route back home, Anderson explained.

Wal-Mart would offer a discount on the customers' shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages, he added.

The company admits that it's just brainstorming the idea at this point, but it's always interesting to see big established companies recognizing that others have been disrupting parts of their core business, and rather than freak out about it, try to take the disruption even further. Of course, this might serve to disrupt other legacy providers, such as UPS and FedEx. Hopefully they won't freak out about it, but who wouldn't be surprised to start seeing stories raising moral panics about how "dangerous" this new plan will be since the drivers won't be wearing uniforms any more?

With a loss of $3.8 billion last year, the US Postal Service is facing a challenging business climate. Mail volume fell to 177 billion pieces for 2009, from 203 billion a year before. Outside consultants have estimated a deficit of $238 billion in the next decade. So, the postal service is now considering making many changes to its business, including cutting Saturday delivery from its regular service in an effort to reduce this shortfall. Eric Zorn, of the Chicago Tribune, goes further and asks "Why stop at Saturday?" Sure, with the advent of the digital age, less and less things really need to be sent in the physical realm. However, don't be so quick to write off the USPS. The postal service still did $68 billion in annual revenue for 2009, which is bigger than either UPS or FedEx. At 44 cents, first class mail is still one of the best deals around -- sending a 1 ounce object anywhere in the country within a few days for that amount of money is a modern marvel. Of course, considering that one-third of USPS revenue comes from advertising mail, any change to delivery windows or rates will surely generate flak from that industry. That said, the USPS has had a history of profitability, so these changes just reflect a desire to return to that state, which is good practice for any business, whether they are in the public or the private sector.

Over the years, I've certainly had my fair share of bad experiences with both UPS and FedEx, but for me, personally, no delivery company has been worse on a regular basis than DHL. Almost every time I've had to deal with the company the experience has been somewhere between bad and ridiculous -- and I've heard similar stories from friends as well, from undelivered packages, to crushed packages -- even to a story of a phone shipped via DHL that arrived with the box torn open and the phone missing. It appears that we individuals aren't alone in our annoyances with DHL. Microsoft is now suing the company for how it dealt with a shipment of Xboxes that were on a train that derailed. Consider this a scaled up version of the old "crushed box" delivery that you or I might be used to. Apparently, the train had six containers full of Xboxes that were damaged -- with DHL refusing to pay for the damages or missing Xboxes that didn't make the rest of the journey.