Amazon is such an interesting company to watch. They do really dumb and goofy stuff, all the time, in very visible ways, but under the radar they've got the largest cloud hosting business in the world chugging along devouring everything in its path that most people don't even know about. I mean, none of my non-technical friends know AWS exists or what it is, and few realize Amazon is one of the most powerful and influential tech companies in the world.
This drone stuff even feels like a distraction so that nobody notices what Amazon is actually up to. It's currently so far from useful, but it does generate a lot of PR for Amazon, and the timing is not at all subtle.