Member-only story
Design lessons from the grim fate of the Segway
The Segway failed because it solved no actual problems. Electric scooters and e-bikes are thriving because they do.
Why did the Segway never take off?
Over at Slate, Dan Kois ponders this question in a rollicking essay about the benighted two-wheel device. Kois had a remarkable front-row seat to the introduction of the Segway in 2001, because he was, as he notes, heavily responsible for the crazy explosion of pre-release hype. He was a young book agent, and one of his authors had gotten exclusive access to Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway. The book proposal quoted Steve Jobs saying that Kamen’s invention would be “as significant as the personal computer,” and Jeff Bezos calling it “revolutionary”.
But Kamen was wildly secretive about the Segway. So the book proposal literally couldn’t even mention was the device was. And this, as Kois points out, was part of what created so much hype around the Segway. When the book proposal went out to the publishers, the mystery about “It” produced frothy buzz, and the book sold for a hefty $250,000. The proposal was quickly leaked to the media, and then to the gestational extremely-online crowd of the early 00s … and soon there were magazine pieces, news hits, TV segments and discussion boards feverishly wondering, what the hell was this thing?
This, Kois argues, helped killed the Segway. Sure, the device had many, many problems, as he points out. It was, at $5,000, wildly expensive. It made you look dorky. But Kois suspects that another fatal blow was that the soaring hype made the actual invention seem like a crushing let-down. (“That’s it?” asked a baffled Diane Sawyer, when Kamen unveiled the device for “Good Morning America”. “That can’t be it.”)
“Was it my fault?” Kois wonders. If he hadn’t created that overoxygenated hype cycle, maybe the Segway would have done just fine. Maybe it’d have slowly found its user base, and not been remorselessly parodied on South Park and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
