Scooter this, buddy.

[chipotle]

Back when the Segway HT--a/k/a "Ginger" and "IT," the two-wheeled scooterish thing--was first revealed, I found myself defending it against a lot of people making incessant, often ill-informed jokes and derisive comments. It reached a point of high irritation, I think, because so many of my friends and acquaintances are sf/fantasy fans who often tend to be more starry-eyed than I, yet when something real came along, by and large they weren't willing to even give it the benefit of the doubt.

Well, poking around a bit just now led me to two articles about the Segway from Dan Bricklin. The opening paragraph of the first article, written before Bricklin had gotten to use a Segway hands on, begins:

Make sure you understand disruptive technologies. Their first incarnations often seem like toys compared to existing technologies. The Segway embodies lots of disruptive technologies. I'm pretty familiar with a previous one: The combination of electronic spreadsheet and the personal computer. The combination was first viewed as a toy compared to "real" computers and financial forecasting tools. It only sold about 10,000 copies in the first 10 months and was barely mentioned in the business press for a couple of years.

Bricklin is understating things a bit when he says he's pretty familiar with spreadsheets--he wrote VisiCalc. If you're interested in the Segway, whether as fan, skeptic or just someone who likes to think about the future, read both of Dan's articles.

Comments

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

My God. Visicalc was the very first piece of software I ever saw, period. I was five, and it was 1981. My dad had taken me to a friend's home office, and he was showing off his Apple II+. We eventually bought it from him and took it home...

And yeah, I'm frustrated about the Segway, too. I think Kamen has himself and the public image he crafted to blame, in part, and I don't know if a short-range personal vehicle was the way to go with this. I would've been much happier to see a two-person vehicle with some storage space and weather shielding. But it's sure as hell a better idea than a city jammed with SUVs on the morning commute, most of them with precisely one occupant. A lot of my hopes rested on that little scooter.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I suspect that bigger vehicles using this technology are at least in planning stages now, and that they chose the HT concept because they have specific target markets in mind. Given that I tend to be more of a long distance traveller, the HT isn't practical for me, either--although if I lived and worked in the same urban area with a commute of, say, three miles one way, maybe that wouldn't be the case. Part of the thinking might actually come from observing all those SUVs and cars carrying just one person into work: instead of trying to change our single-person riding habits--we're all too attached to our transportation independence to like the idea of being dependent on other people's timetables, it seems--try to change the transportation method to let us keep those habits in an efficient, environmentally friendly manner.

There's another practical commercial reality in doing it this way, now that I think about it--if you come up with something that directly competes with the automobile, you get the automobile industry lined up against you. Historically speaking, a true startup (as opposed to new market entrants backed by established conglomerates, like Kia or Hyundai) would be better off going into the ring with Microsoft than trying to take on Ford and GM out of the gate.

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

I think the issue with the auto industry that you mentioned is a major strike against it. One of my real problems -- and I love the concept, in theory -- is that it's just not a very effective piece of displacing technology, and without that I'm not sure that it can be sufficiently disruptive. One argument for Segway is essentially 'if we changed the pattern of our lives, this would be a MUCH better technology than the automobile', but the trick is that first it needs to be a better technology for the current pattern of living. While it's a very tempting technology for some applications, the truth is that more people live in the 'burbs than in NYC, and I still just don't see it truly fitting their lifestyle. This isn't to say that it won't get some use; I even expect it to end up commercially viable. But I have a difficult time envisioning it as a 'change the world' vehicle.