Last week, one of the stories hitting the tech press was Amazon’s new patent for “anticipatory shipping”. The idea is simple. Ship an item to a strategic physical center before a customer has even bought it online. Two thoughts have been brewing in my brain during the past few days in reaction to this.

First, I really really really dislike how journalism in general is often extremely irresponsible when reporting so-called facts. For example, news articles often take medical research articles and turn them into pop pyschology information tidbits. The writers take ideas out of context, and use inaccurate language. Article titles are even worse, all in an effort to sensationalize and attract readers. On the Internet, it’s called link bait. This happens all the time whenever any large tech firm acquires a patent. In fact, it’s really silly since these large corporations apply for and get patents all the time. Most of the time these don’t even make the news cycle. But occasionally, some tech writer has to meet a quota, starts rummaging through the patent bin, usually picking Apple, and then blows the whole patent out of proportion. In reality, these companies have R&D divisions that file for patents all the time. It’s really not that spectacular. Remember, a patent is just a conceptual idea. There’s no actual tangible technology yet. I’m guessing 97% of patents filed by companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft never result in actual consumer products. Probably 80% of them don’t even result in any actual real technology implementations. They are just ideas, vaporware, as it were. So I’m really really really PO-ed when the tech press misrepresents companies. In the case of last week’s Amazon patent, do a simple Google, and you will get the following:

Amazon Wants to Ship Your Package Before You Buy It
- Wall Street Journal

Amazon plans to ship your packages before you even buy them
- The Verge

Amazon to ship things before you’ve even thought of buying them?
- CNET

Amazon says it can ship items before customers order
- USA Today

I call this irresponsible reporting. Amazon has not claimed that they will do any of the following headlines, yet the press has made these leaps. The press has the right to guess, speculate, and churn the rumor mill regarding future products and services. But they are WRONG in writing these headlines. At least with Apple rumors prior to an iPhone release, writers always qualify themselves accordingly. In this case (and in the case of most patent-filing news articles), said company does not issue any press release. (Someone please correct me if Amazon has officially responded to the anticipatory shipping patent.) Compare this with Jeff Bezos going on 60 minutes to talk about their shipping drones, several weeks back. This is real. This is in the pipeline. And this is being officially communicated by Amazon. They even have a site promoting it. It’s called Prime Air. So now the general public thinks both Prime Air and anticipatory shipping are Amazon-official, that they are even complementary. They are not. This is irresponsible journalism. It is poor communication.