There’s a good case for this
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@inthehands I think this is a good thought exercise, and helpful to reflect on when considering new products.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Kamen's messaging at the time was along these lines, that electrified personal transportation could change the world in substantial ways, it just happened that Segway was the *only* version in existence.
@inthehands Another good thing to keep in mind when thinking about the Segway is that it was a byproduct of, and a way to fund, the development of the iBOT, a wheelchair which allows users to be eye-height with standing people, use counters and other objects designed for users at standing height, and ascend/descend stairs.
It was and still is a revolutionary product for accessibility, but definitely did not benefit from the lambasting of the Segway.
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@annehargreaves
Yet the high injury rates from class 3 e-bikes have not slowed their adoption. And speaking of injuries…have you ever heard about cars?@inthehands I found this about injury rates although hard to relate it to no. of users as no. is hard to assess
https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/10.1308/rcsbull.2024.71Isn't the problem with Segway type devices that they are risky for the user on the road but dangerous for everyone else on the pavement? Similar to scooters which were banned in the town centre where I live as a result of interacting badly with pedestrians.
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The micromobility revolution was •right there• 25 years ago, if only we’d been willing to go for it, if only we’d been able to see it. That’s…what, 15? 20? years head start on how it’s unfolded.
That’s a head start I really wish we’d had on the current climate disaster that’s unfolding. But no, we were too busy making fun of it for being nerdy.
@inthehands huh, yeah you're right. I remember laughing at "we're going to restructure our cities around this" in 2003 and now .... we are.
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@inthehands the direction still has some significant problems: useful in cities but less so else where and only accessible to some people. Tech tends to favour groups unaffected by problems like that. I reckon that some of the negative reactions comes from people clocking that the product is borne of a vision of the world that doesn’t include them.
@benedictc @inthehands
If Uber’s model of violating all the labor and other laws was aroundAnd losing money so the winning scooter outfits run at a state subsidized loss to make them available for everybody almost for free
Then Uber would’ve been all over the place and gotten some competition and maybe after some improvements taken off
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To be clear: the Segway as released was •not• a very good product. But it was not a worse product than, say, the Apple-1, which was also clumsy, nerdy, impractical, expensive. ($3400 in today’s money and it didn’t even have a keyboard!)
Yet in the latter case the response was “This is the future! Let’s do this! Let’s figure it out!” And with the Segway, the response was “How mockable, nobody should ever try to build anything like this ever again!”
A crumb went down the wrong way with micromobility in 2001, and I’m not willing to lay that entire at the feet of one product’s marketing team. We collectively screwed up.
ETA: This •started• as a thread about e-bikes and e-scooters; scroll up
@inthehands Yah, that's because you're wrong about why Segway failed.
Good inventions happen when the underlying technology is mature enough to support them. The Segway didn't fail to vanguard the micromobility revolution because influencers thought it was dorky; the Segway failed because the underlying technology wasn't cheap and small and lightweight.
If Segway had done a successful marketing campaign to somehow make Segways cool; and they had launched Segway 2.0 with the underlying design flaws fixed (move the wheels inline, lose the gyro) it STILL would have been expensive, short-range, and heavy. Because battery technology was not even close to ready.
You're lending way too much weight to the idea that we got scared of looking dorky.
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To be clear: the Segway as released was •not• a very good product. But it was not a worse product than, say, the Apple-1, which was also clumsy, nerdy, impractical, expensive. ($3400 in today’s money and it didn’t even have a keyboard!)
Yet in the latter case the response was “This is the future! Let’s do this! Let’s figure it out!” And with the Segway, the response was “How mockable, nobody should ever try to build anything like this ever again!”
A crumb went down the wrong way with micromobility in 2001, and I’m not willing to lay that entire at the feet of one product’s marketing team. We collectively screwed up.
ETA: This •started• as a thread about e-bikes and e-scooters; scroll up
@inthehands
I still don't agree. 'We' reacted as an appropriate immune system to a billionaire-hyped proposal.
Scooters are working now because cars are fading back.
A billionaire proposal was never going to subtract from cars. It was only going to subtract from existing facilities and future planning for bikes and walkers. That's how power works.
This was not a 'We missed it' 25 years ago.
It's an opportunity now. -
To be clear: the Segway as released was •not• a very good product. But it was not a worse product than, say, the Apple-1, which was also clumsy, nerdy, impractical, expensive. ($3400 in today’s money and it didn’t even have a keyboard!)
Yet in the latter case the response was “This is the future! Let’s do this! Let’s figure it out!” And with the Segway, the response was “How mockable, nobody should ever try to build anything like this ever again!”
A crumb went down the wrong way with micromobility in 2001, and I’m not willing to lay that entire at the feet of one product’s marketing team. We collectively screwed up.
ETA: This •started• as a thread about e-bikes and e-scooters; scroll up
@inthehands Consumer marketing is somewhat random and all about stories, I don't know why the popular narrative for the Segway was so bad but it does seem like it set the "micromobility" idea back a bit. An interesting question is if a better introduction and a bit better sales would have accelerated the rapid battery and motor improvements that make the $120 hoverboard possible now.
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…I’m asking us to pause all of that entrenched reaction, and think about why our reaction was:
“What a bad product! How douchy! Ha ha!”
…instead of what was in hindsight probably a much better reaction:
“Oh, what a good idea for a product •direction•! All-electric human-sized transportation…huh, that might just change the world! If we can improve on this very clumsy first attempt at execution….”
@inthehands I see the point, but I know for a fact that the specific way the Segway bombed made investors skittish; there might have been petrochem anti-marketing involved, but I think they didn't see it as enough of a threat.
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@inthehands I see the point, but I know for a fact that the specific way the Segway bombed made investors skittish; there might have been petrochem anti-marketing involved, but I think they didn't see it as enough of a threat.
> the Segeay bombed made investors skittish
This exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.
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I periodically think about the hype around the Segway, how luminary types were over the moon for it in private demos but then the general public decided it was uncool, and think maybe actually the luminaries had it right and it’s the public that biffed it.
@inthehands I recall it was mostly that they built a lot of hype and then the resulting product didn't seem to match.
But really, all the hoverboards, onewheels, etc. are the Segway successors and you see tons of them.
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The micromobility revolution was •right there• 25 years ago, if only we’d been willing to go for it, if only we’d been able to see it. That’s…what, 15? 20? years head start on how it’s unfolded.
That’s a head start I really wish we’d had on the current climate disaster that’s unfolding. But no, we were too busy making fun of it for being nerdy.
@inthehands It was not right there. Technology had to improve to make the devices cheap and useful enough to be mass-market and viable for things like bike shares. There is no reason to think that that would’ve happened faster if Segways had been more popular. You’re just trying to give moral valence to your nostalgia.
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@inthehands It was not right there. Technology had to improve to make the devices cheap and useful enough to be mass-market and viable for things like bike shares. There is no reason to think that that would’ve happened faster if Segways had been more popular. You’re just trying to give moral valence to your nostalgia.
Your last sentence is wrong: I mocked it mercilessly at the time, and now wonder whether I should have done a better job spotting the good direction buried in the bad product.
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Your last sentence is wrong: I mocked it mercilessly at the time, and now wonder whether I should have done a better job spotting the good direction buried in the bad product.
@inthehands In that case, I don’t think you need to worry. The good products were appreciated pretty quickly when they came out.
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To be clear: the Segway as released was •not• a very good product. But it was not a worse product than, say, the Apple-1, which was also clumsy, nerdy, impractical, expensive. ($3400 in today’s money and it didn’t even have a keyboard!)
Yet in the latter case the response was “This is the future! Let’s do this! Let’s figure it out!” And with the Segway, the response was “How mockable, nobody should ever try to build anything like this ever again!”
A crumb went down the wrong way with micromobility in 2001, and I’m not willing to lay that entire at the feet of one product’s marketing team. We collectively screwed up.
ETA: This •started• as a thread about e-bikes and e-scooters; scroll up
@inthehands IDK I think Segway was vastly overpromising and underdelivering, and they were pitching a specific product and people responded to that pitch and that specific product. I think their campaign would've been analogous to if the Apple-1 promised to replace paper completely. It wasn't there, and I would argue, it couldn’t have gotten there within the window of a couple product cycles.
Certainly Segway's success at building hype and failure to deliver on it didn't help move us forward but it's really hard for me to gauge how far it set us back. I don't think anyone could have made a good alternative until lithium ion batteries got a bit better and a lot cheaper. And when that happened in the mid twenty-teens, we did see a Cambrian explosion of e-bikes, one-wheels, electric skateboards, battery powered scooters, hoverboards, etc.
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…I’m asking us to pause all of that entrenched reaction, and think about why our reaction was:
“What a bad product! How douchy! Ha ha!”
…instead of what was in hindsight probably a much better reaction:
“Oh, what a good idea for a product •direction•! All-electric human-sized transportation…huh, that might just change the world! If we can improve on this very clumsy first attempt at execution….”
I use a powered wheelchair to get around town, I live micro transit.
Keeping it real, the president of the company accidentally died riding one, that's not great press.
I've ridden a segway and if you've done something like surfing it's pretty intuitive, but by the same token people get the wobbles, particularly when they are stressed.
You can't go grocery shopping on one, you can't bring your kid with you like you can with a bike trailer, there's range anxiety (trust me, range anxiety is REAL).
If I'm in my wheelchair (or you're on a bike) and there is a kid running around, or someone is crossing the street carrying a big thing, in my chair or on a bike I can very reliably stop and not move. Staying in place on a segway is a continuous process.
There are also a lot of places I can't go in my wheelchair that you couldn't get to on a segway either.
The person I know who loved his used it to commute to and from his white collar job along a bike path, which it did well.
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@retech @inthehands @Nicovel0 I guess I should clarify that the Epstein file releases included pictures of Kamen on Epstein's island with Epstein (and Richard Branson), and there is at least one photo with a woman in an inexcusable position.
Epstein also discussed in his emails people he knew who, as guests of Kamen, attended events for Kamen's youth robotics org.
For all the good Kamen did for the world with his intentions, it's well past time to separate the man from his work.
@glnfld @inthehands @Nicovel0 I am not disagreeing with you in the least. I just did not know.
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RE: https://indieweb.social/@jaredwhite/116465986868807844
There’s a good case for this
I think the lack of being able to carry things, and the importance of that, cannot be overstated
Especially at the time when the Segway was being introduced, 50% of the population could not buy clothing with pockets that would hold a wallet
How do you carry your purse on that thing? Let alone your child and a couple bags of groceries?
And, if the thing had a reasonable range, what percentage of people are comfortable standing up all the way across town?
Scooters came in after messenger bags, which is a big deal. Many of them have baskets on the front. You can put one bag of groceries, although probably not two, on the platform between your feet. I wouldn't recommend putting a baby there...
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@glnfld @inthehands @Nicovel0 I am not disagreeing with you in the least. I just did not know.
@retech @inthehands @Nicovel0 100% just providing context for anyone who might come across this
