If you remember the good ole days of the tech boom or happen to have watched the movie e-Dreams then you remember Kozmo.com. 15 years after the failure of Kozmo.com, Amazon is launching their one hour delivery service in Manhattan. Was Joseph Park really 15 years ahead of his time? It seems things haven’t changed in America since then; we want everything and we want it an hour ago.
In 1999 it seemed people wanted same day delivery so was it a matter of execution, lack of technology or has the world grown so impatient that the willingness to fork over more money to have something “right now” has directly created a demand for the service? We don’t see the lack of need or value going away for same day delivery, it’s just a matter of execution on Amazon’s behalf. Highly dense areas such as NYC make sense with a hub and spoke distribution configuration, but it should get interesting if they ever launch it in a widely dispersed suburban area. Joseph Park eventually ended up working at Amazon at some point in time, so now we have to wonder what he thinks about Amazon taking on the marketplace he once wanted to conquer.