I still feel like Segway needs a case study regarding how they were able to garner so much hype before it was announced. I remember the breathless "change the world" articles quite well (from nearly 20 years ago, yikes!). This sentence from the Wikipedia article is, well, humorous: "John Doerr speculated that it would be more important than the Internet".
Was really baffling to me at the time how they had such amazing PR.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I remember the build-up leading to release where they were talking about it literally changing mankind. "Cities will never be the same" and all that. I wish I could find some of the articles - and then when it released it was like... so... a scooter? How is this changing life? What's your plan for rainy days? Oh... we just get sopping wet? Ya, not going to change cities and close down all roads.
Yeah it was funny. It hit so far below the hype expectations, many (myself included) thought the Segway wasn't even "IT", expecting the real announcement to come later.
Modern transportation in cities is a very hard problem that we're still trying to solve. At some point Segway looked like it might be what we needed since it looked like nothing we had ever tried before. It was small like a bike but you were standing up, it was all electric and super easy to use. It was not really a stretch to imagine that this could be the future of city transportation.
I mean, remember the hyperloop? It solves a different transportation problem, but there are many parallels. When you take the time to think about it you can see that it doesn't really add up, but man if it could it could be amazing.
It was also a time before social media, mass consumer internet, and all the high-tech things we take for granted today. It was a futuristic device that looked and sounded fantastic with no real competition. People were amazed by the balancing tech alone (and there was a similar wheelchair prototype).
I remember spending far too much time on a forum built around what “it” was, called theitquestion.com. Nobody knew what it was going to be so there was a lot of speculation. Personally I was extremely disappointed by “it”.
>This mysterious invention, reportedly created by National Medal of Technology Award winner, Dean Kamen, is on everyone's lips and has captured everyone's imaginations.
Precisely. There was a lot of press about a "secret" transformative invention w some mysterious tech related to transportation.
Before it was revealed, I remember reading an article where the author said something like, "we're pretty sure it's a 2 wheeled electric scooter that self corrects it's balance."
I remember thinking "this doesn't seem worthy of the hype."
That being said, even though it didn't revolutionize transportation, its use was certainly more widespread than I had expected.
I think the era--to the grandparents' point--was a significant factor. Back then we still believed in immediately transformational technology. There was a widespread belief that an aviation or space-travel breakthrough was imminent. There was hope for incredible new energy sources. Effectively, there was a collective hope that there were undiscovered realms of physics that would unlock a completely new period of human history.
We have made amazing technological leaps in the last 20 years, but you don't have to go far searching Hacker News to find articles complaining about evolutionary progress instead of revolutionary.
I wonder what Gen Z thinks about technological progress. As a millennial that straddled the analog-digital divide, I took huge leaps of progress for granted. My friends and I compared American and Soviet fighter jets, we compared horsepower in muscle cars, we compared specs on processors. We also tinkered with everything, and nearly every system could be easily understood by poking at the internals. Now, what's the point?
Anyway, that's a long way of saying that the Segway hype is a generational thing, I don't think we'll ever see anything like that again.
Those years before the digital transition held a lot of optimism and general hype around what the future would bring. The lack of constant media stimulus also let imaginations run wild. It reminds me of the fantastical predictions of the 70s with jet cars and robot maids.
> It was also a time before ... mass consumer internet
I remember reading about its launch on mass consumer internet. (Why do I feel like people place the date for the start of mass consumer internet too late?) Here is a contemporaneous article from Time Magazine's website, which is a pretty mainstream, mass consumer publication: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,186660,...
In 2001 people still had dialup with AOL CDs. ISDN was the expensive corporate line. DSL was the fancy new broadband. Palm Pilot's and other mobile organizers were still common. Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
Some people I knew had cable modems in 2001, and a few years before that. Though I read an article much like the one I linked on a 56k modem. (not AOL)
I think my first wifi gear was ~1 year after that. Orinoco chipset. That was a bit ahead of most people at that time though.
But yes, this part wasn't there:
> Constant internet everywhere you go didn't exist.
Not all their PR was fantastic, in Atlanta they were shown off in the airport and for postal service employees. The trouble was in both cases the pictures were of very obese employees of either organization using them.
I remember back thinking the only market was government, there were references to the ADA in the article as well.
Do you think they had good PR though? I would have much preferred to ride a Segway to work than to bike (sweaty/helmet hair) or take public transit (delayed/crowded) but a Segway is just so... dorky.
Their tech got a lot of PR hype but the actual product didn’t get nearly enough hype to sell it to their potential customers.
A lot of it was because of how vague they were - codename, the idea that cities would be designed for it, etc. I remember that really clearly. There were some vague comments and enthusiasm from trusted tech names. So, before launch, they had everyone desperate to find out what it was.
You can't really force that level of hype. It was a genuinely new form of transport that people wanted to think about. It was basically viral and eventually it wasn't cool anymore
But it stuck around for 20 years and saw a lot of real world usage in the mid 2000s. You can't really call it a fluke if people buy it for that many years in a row-- there is some utility there
Something short of "bigger than the internet" ("people familiar with the matter" really did call it that even before it was revealed what it was) can still be a popular product. In recent years, as commented here, there were a bunch of new entrants to the category, so yes it was useful to somebody.
Did it? That's news to me. I've only ever seen the Segway used for city tours. I've honestly never seen it in a different context. Seems like a marginal use of a marginal tech to me...
Edit: I lie! I once saw it used by a kids' magician at a birthday party. Pretty marginal use, too.
Going by anecdote, I've seen them used by many mall cops, city tours, downtown cops, some Taiwanese military unit used them as a meme, and some rich people here in the US owned them in their house literally just for fun. I think they were going for less than 10k used so that was play money for them.
Again, that they are going out of production shows that they are definitely not bigger than the internet. But they certainly aren't vaporware or even a failed product. Someone somewhere made a profit, and someone somewhere got non-zero utility out of it
Well, that's a trick you can pull exactly once. The next time Dean Kamen launches something I'll just ignore it completely until my life intersects with it in a natural way. Consider that burned.
It’s not much different from all the autonomous driving stuff that was going to mean kids today would have a personal robo-chauffeur for the rest of their lives and would never need to get a license.
That's different. It's one thing to hype something up, but then the capabilities just aren't as futuristic as advertised (I think most people agree fully autonomous cars would be revolutionary), but with the Segway it was completely hyped, then when it was released everyone went "THAT'S your 'world changing' invention??"
Was really baffling to me at the time how they had such amazing PR.