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This is the bilingual post in English and Vietnamese. Vietnamese is below.

Đây là bài viết song ngữ Anh-Việt. Tiếng Việt ở bên dưới.

English

A small calculation before the big discussion

Before we talk about drones, about robots, about the giants, let us do a small calculation in our heads.

Picture a delivery driver with twenty packages to deliver in one morning. In the first scenario, all twenty addresses sit in the same apartment complex and a few streets around it. The driver parks once, walks, knocks door after door, and finishes before noon with time to spare. In the second scenario, the same twenty packages, the same driver, but the addresses are scattered across a sprawling suburb, each house a few kilometers from the next. The driver drives all morning, with most of the time spent on the road, and may not finish until late afternoon.

Same number of packages. Same person. Even the same distance on the map if measured as the crow flies. But the real cost to deliver those twenty packages differs by several times over. Not because the packages are different, not because the driver is diligent or lazy, but because of one single factor: whether the delivery points are close together or far apart.

This calculation is small, but it contains nearly the entire secret of one of the fiercest competitions happening right now. Because when you understand why the two scenarios above differ by several times over, you understand why some delivery companies can be fast and still profit, while others can be fast and burn through billions of dollars before vanishing. You understand why Walmart and Amazon dare to promise delivery in about thirty minutes, and why that promise is both an opportunity and a trap. And you understand a rule that applies to many other businesses, including ones that never touch a single truck.

This whole article is just the expansion of that little calculation into a way of seeing. We will not begin with technology, because technology is the answer, and we need to understand the question first. And the question, it turns out, was turned into a rigorous problem nearly seventy years ago.