Lessons from the awkward life and death of the Segway
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
As a product it was very interesting, but it had pitfalls. It wasn't exactly clear where to store it. The people who saw it all had houses and garages, but for the everyday user in the city hard to figure out where you would put it after each use. Even bicycles are challenging to store in NYC, which is why Citibike is interesting.
The second problem and much larger was the price point. If you want something to succeed you have to price it so that you can gain mass appeal. The $5,000-10,000 price point is a dead zone. As consumers we almost never spend this amount of money.
We spend hundreds of dollars all the time.
We spend a thousand or two thousand dollars infrequently, but we do it. Computers, vacations, some furniture.
But when you get to $5,000+ that is a price we pay very rarely. It is actually more common to find something more expensive, such as $10,000+ for a car, then to find $5,000. As a result it was hard to figure out where that price fit in.
Also, no one thought of subsidizing the cost. With the iPhone, it's expensive, but you have the carrier to subsidize the cost and more importantly create a monthly payment plan. If you could at least convert $5,000 to some sort of monthly fee that would help.
So what they really failed at is distribution. In fact if they planned around distribution they could have actually jumped on the entire citibike, jump, etc market before it ever existed.
It would also mean that customers wouldn't need to pay $5,000 out of pocket and instead could pay per use or a monthly fee.
Often people discount distribution when it comes to product market fit and failures.
Lastly, riding a bicycle is rather awkward. Think about learning it as a kid. It's counter intuitive. A bike can't stand on it's own, you have to pedal to go, if you stop it falls over. Though it is extremely unintuitive, it is cheap, you can try it, it has a culture, and is a rite of passage. So we learn this behavior even though it doesn't make sense.
The Segway is also counterintuitive in some ways. Looking at people riding them, never gives you a sense of confidence. There are also plenty of videos of people falling off of them, similar to bicycles.
But with a much higher starting point you aren't really tempted to try it, or even have access to one to test it out to see if it becomes intuitive or not.
Lastly, our cities aren't designed for this type of commute. People drive, they can take the subway, but the number of people that commute outside of that on bicycles is small in the US. In Europe like in Amsterdam, the Segway takes up more space in a lane than a comparable bicycle, so it really wasn't an improvement. And since Americans aren't used to bicycles they though oh wow this is great! Europeans were like for $50-$150 one time I can have a bike that lasts forever, doesn't require charging, takes up less space, and I already own it.
Segway should have quickly introduced a low-priced variant under $1000. Kind of like OneWheel has, although there is no shortage of OneWheel crash videos.
It's a bit like the Chevy Volt, a car that I see criticized on HN and elsewhere occasionally. It was conceived of at a time when future oil prices were uncertain, and, if they'd remained sustainably high, it would have been a huge hit. But Americans have short memories and don't actually care much about the environment, so it was a relative flop.
It actually ended up being the perfect vehicle for living off campus at university, as I learned first hand watching my friends and roommates struggle with all kinds of other forms of transportation. Cars needed to be parked in expensive and crowded garages, bikes were stolen all the time and uncomfortable to ride in the desert summer (in southern Arizona), busses were unreliable, etc.
The Segway was actually totally rideable in extreme heat as opposed to riding a bike. Something about being vertical made the breeze totally counteract the heat. Obviously the no physical exertion helped with the sweatiness as well.
Did anyone use motorized bikes?
But mostly I think it’s because it was really heavy and perhaps novel enough. Nobody ever messed with it, even though the city I was living in was pretty bad in terms of crime rates.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98raEtSgqs [2] https://dammfine.com/projects/funwheel/
Scooters look kind of silly, too, but they at least won't break the bank.
Should there be some sort of subsidy for 'things that last'? Or 'year beyond average lifespan that thing is still in use'?
It feels like companies will actively try to avoid making durable things if there isn't.
When you bought Adobe Photoshop, you never needed to update it.
Likewise, if you buy a Honda or other well-engineered car, you'll be able to get a decade or more out of it.
Thinkpads used to last forever and were user upgradable.
Tesla is introducing micro-payments and unlockables. I think other auto makers will follow suit.
Why can't farmers repair their own John Deere equipment that they "own"?
Everything is turning into recurring revenue.
The tech was impressive, but you can't drive it anywhere in UK (illegal on roads, illegal on pavements), costs a lot more than I've ever spent on a car, everyone seemed to crash quite badly riding them. If it had been an affordable, sit-on, road legal vehicle perhaps it could have lived up to some of it's hype as the future of transport.
After that much hype, of course it was a disappointment. If it had been pitched as a mini version of small electric industrial carts, such as the ones seen in big industrial plants, no one would have been excited about it, but it would have been a minor seller.
This is the second article about the Segway which mentions its durability as a minus.
If you define a major innovation as one that will have to challenge the established habits; then first and foremost, diffusion of a major innovation requires time, not money. To be understood, desired and finally accepted by the market/society. That’s why all major innovations I can think of started from very niche applications, and then patiently won neighboring niches, one after the other, slowly improving in the process, till they eventually became mainstream, sometime after several decades. This diffusion process generally spans over the lifetime of several companies. One example here: automobiles, around which our cities were ultimately redesigned.
It’s difficult to rewrite history, but had Segway started small as you suggested … it may have been more successful in the long run, as a concept and maybe as a company. To really change the world with some major innovation, starting small and targeting niche applications is the way to go.
That GOB, always on his Segway.