The failure of the Segway

[Josh]

I was reading an entirely different article (about Google's technological visions) that made reference to the Segway and how dramatically wrong it went, especially in contrast to the vision of its inventor and the various backers and hypers around it, including Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.

Curiosity piqued, I went looking for a good postmortem on what on paper seemed a brilliant and well-engineered piece of equipment. My own take has been that the Segway failed due to the Rule of Cool, which essentially says that no matter how brilliant your invention is, if it makes people feel dorky they're not going to touch it. The safety biz struggles with that a lot- much redesigning went into safety glasses so that they'd at least mimic cooler brands of glasses in order to encourage people to wear them. For my own part, I used to catch some flak for wearing a vented hardhat because they had a dorkier look about them. Never mind that it weighed about half as much as the conventional lid and kept your head much cooler... rule of cool.

The postmortems essentially confirmed that but does give some hope for the future:

Techdirt

Why Segway Failed To Reshape The World: Focused On Invention, Rather Than Innovation
from the that-ain't-the-solution dept

In January of 2001, word began to leak that Dean Kamen was working on something amazing that would change the world. If you were paying attention to tech news, you may recall it was everywhere. There was some book deal about it, and we were told that it was going to change the way cities were laid out and would absolutely revolutionize transportation. It had the blessing of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr and was amazing. But no one knew what it was. Hell, it didn't even have a name. It was referred to either as IT or Ginger -- and there were all sorts of rumors about what IT might be. Eventually, of course, IT was revealed as the Segway. And while it was sorta kinda maybe cool, it hardly came close to living up to its original billing. It was expensive and not really all that useful for most people. Segway, the company, has gone through a merry-go-round of new CEOs and new strategies, none of which have gotten it out of a niche market.

Recently, in talking about how the Netflix Prize helped demonstrate the value of openness and collaboration when it came to innovation, rather than hoarding and taking the "inventor-knows-best" attitude towards things, Mark Blafkin of the Association for Competitive Technology (a tech industry lobbying group who tends to be a patent system supporter) took exception to what we said about the value of openness and collaboration instead of focusing on patents, by noting that Dean Kamen has also put a lot of effort into collaboration and prizes to award innovation, but also is a strong believer in patents (and, actually, making them stronger).

In response, I pointed out that Kamen's thinking on patents may actually explain part of the reason why Segway has struggled so much over the years. In believing so strongly in patents, it shows someone who tends to believe invention is more important than ongoing innovation, even as there's a growing body of evidence to suggest the exact opposite is true. Invention is the original idea, but innovation is an ongoing process of taking a product and adjusting and adapting it to the market. And we've been seeing more and more studies that note the innovation part is so much more important in determining the success and the economic contribution of a product.

So it seems like perfect timing to see Paul Graham's recent essay about why the Segway failed to change the world. He focuses mainly on the fact that the Segway basically makes people look dorky -- and that a better design might have helped more people find it enticing. But at the end he notes:

Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they'd had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they'd have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they didn't have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

Exactly. Again, this highlights the difference between invention (believing that you alone have come up with the perfect idea for a great product) and innovation (the ongoing iterative process of going back and forth with the market to test and understand what the market wants and how to make your product meet their needs). By focusing so much on the invention, Segway missed the real opportunity for innovation, and that's caused all sorts of problems for the company.

They're correct in attacking the closed-source nature of the development here. I'm not a big believer in totally open-source work- eventually you hit point of design-by-committee that attempts to please everyone and functions well for no one. However, no matter how brilliant the mind, nobody can encompass all elements of a radical concept such as the Segway, and here the critical failure in marketing killed a great idea. Kamen had a great vision- short-range transportation being facilitated by vastly lower-impact vehicles with an eventual shift in urban infrastructure to accommodate this shift. It's a prospect that I'd like to think is still on the table, but it does seem that Segway itself will continue to fail to deliver. In the meantime, I do see more and more lighter vehicles in use- trikes, upgunned golf carts and the like, so the demand is there.

Interesting tidbit from the other article that the first article linked.

My friend Trevor Blackwell built his own Segway, which we called the Segwell. He also built a one-wheeled version, the Eunicycle, which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the rider isn't pedaling. He has ridden them both to downtown Mountain View to get coffee. When he rides the Eunicycle, people smile at him. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: "Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo?"

Why do Segways provoke this reaction? The reason you look like a dork riding a Segway is that you look smug. You don't seem to be working hard enough.

Someone riding a motorcycle isn't working any harder. But because he's sitting astride it, he seems to be making an effort. When you're riding a Segway you're just standing there. And someone who's being whisked along while seeming to do no work—someone in a sedan chair, for example—can't help but look smug.

It's an excellent point. I mean, how can somebody riding in a car feel superior to somebody riding a Segway? But it is about the postural quirks. I think of forklift operators- in the conventional style of forklift, you have a driver who's facing forward, both hands engaged on the controls, that forklift driver looks they're working. With the variety that have the sideways seat and the right hand does all the primary operation, it looks like the operator is just slopped in a seat fooling around with their right hand, while the left hand is just sitting and doing nothing. It's the same work, requiring the same attention to operation, but the configuration change totally changes the appearance of involved effort.

Point being that I do believe there's a future for a Segway-style device, but the postural dynamics will have to change sufficiently so as to give an illusion of dynamism and effort to the operation of the machine. It's ridiculous, but it's what we have.

[General Havoc]

There is something almost ineffably ludicrous about watching someone on a Segway. It seems nearly impossible to ride one without looking, for lack of a better term, dorky. I never thought about a comparison with a Sedan Chair, but it weirdly fits, despite the wildly different posture.

There's a certain degree of dorkiness that one can overcome with bullheaded practicality. I see vented hardhats at most construction sites nowadays, for instance, and things like bicycle helmets are useful enough and close enough to the non-stupid-looking line (indeed, I'm sure there are many who think they are chic) that opposition was progressively overcome. That said, I still don't think the largest problem with the Segway was its lack of coolness. The thing was incredibly expensive ($5,000 or so), with high maintenance costs thereafter as the batteries for it were proprietary and expensive as well. It had a top speed of 12 MPH, putting it below the speed of even a moderately-skilled bicyclist and into the skateboard/golf cart range. Moreover, the thing looked and felt so different than anything else that came before it that nobody outside the company had the slightest idea what to compare it to. That, combined with a lack of focus on municipal marketing resulted in it getting banned from sidewalks throughout much of the country, and having otherwise unfavorable legislation passed regarding it. All that on top of the aforementioned rule of cool issues contributed to its downfall.

That's not to say the Segway didn't have uses (and frankly, I shouldn't be talking about it in the past tense). Security staff at conventions or casinos love it, because it's suitable for use indoors, turns and stops on a dime, and can be dismounted in a second, none of which is true of a bike. People with mild disabilities or impediments to long walks I'm sure find the Segway extremely useful, and it is easy enough to use that tour companies can give one to people who've never before used it and take them on a guided tour. But ultimately, while the cool thing did contribute to the Segway's failure, I don't think it became a niche product because it looked stupid. I think it became a niche product because there simply was no market for it to be anything else. There's very little reason for someone to fork over five thousand dollars for a Segway when you can get a Vespa for half that, an electric bike for an eighth, or a bicycle for as little as a twentieth of the cost (a tenth if you want a decent one). All three of those will go faster, negotiate steeper hills, have lower maintenance costs (that may no longer be true, but it certainly was back in 2002), and, of course, won't make you look as dorky (no, not even the Vespa).

There's certainly a niche for the Segway, and I'd like to see them do better than they did. But those dreams of revolutionizing mass transit (by which they meant the transit of the masses) were never going to pan out, irrespective of the coolness factor.

[Josh]

Cost is the factor I hadn't brought up- good catch on that.

That said in terms of transit of the masses, I think it's a better option than some of the others purely for the lack of speed.

Rustic bumpkin that I am, I wasn't even sure of what this 'Vespa' critter that you were referring to was until I looked it up. Where I'd differ on the Vespas, bikes, and so on is that the speed differential over pedestrian traffic is substantial enough that they aren't effective in a broad-sidewalk sort of transit area, whereas the Segways are far safer in those areas.

[LadyTevar]

Should I be surprised there are absolutely NO Vespa Dealers in the entire state of WV?

Pity, I've seen them about town, they're not bad little scooters.

[General Havoc]

Cost is the factor I hadn't brought up- good catch on that.

That said in terms of transit of the masses, I think it's a better option than some of the others purely for the lack of speed.

Rustic bumpkin that I am, I wasn't even sure of what this 'Vespa' critter that you were referring to was until I looked it up. Where I'd differ on the Vespas, bikes, and so on is that the speed differential over pedestrian traffic is substantial enough that they aren't effective in a broad-sidewalk sort of transit area, whereas the Segways are far safer in those areas.

That much is true, but unfortunately a lack of what I call "Municipal Marketing" led to the damn thing being banned on sidewalks in most of the country, including out here in California. The company decided to take the stand that the Segway was a medical device, like a motorized wheelchair, something that nobody really believed, instead of actively trying to convince people that, due to its lower speed, it was perfectly safe to put among pedestrians (which it basically is). As a result, people using it had to do so in the street, where it couldn't come close to matching the speed of even urban traffic, nor accelerate as a motorbike, scooter, or bicycle would. Independent of people hooting at you from cars (which must get frustrating), it was also quite dangerous to drive around cars, in the same way that trying to walk up a lane of traffic would be.

But really, all this frustration pales next to the fact that the thing cost as much as a used car. It turns out that $5,000 figure I quoted was the discounted price, and the full at-launch price was closer to $7,000. For something that is, at best, a replacement for a bicycle or scooter, that's an insane price to demand. As a result, it fell into a niche market, where I'm happy to see it has at least built a positive reputation.

[Josh]

Depending on the neck of the woods, 7k is a fuckload more than a used car. Most I've ever spent on a car was 3500.