Judging the 'Segway'

Last Monday the inventor Dean Kamen finally unveiled his famous “Ginger” secret project. As many people correctly guessed last January, Ginger is a new electric scooter officially called Segway and notable primarily for its gyroscope-powered, automatic propulsion system. Step onto a Segway, think about going forward, and the gyroscopes under your feet sense a slight forward tilt in your posture and promptly whisk you onwards.

Segway should be a phenomenon when it hits the market sometime next year, for the simple reason that there are hordes of people like me who get really excited when they hear something is “gyroscope-powered.” Some of these people, unlike me, can afford to spend $3,000 on gyroscopes, and they will scoop Segways up faster than authentic Klingon food at a Star Trek convention. The real question for Kamen and his blue chip investors—and for the American pedestrian, who may never feel safe on sidewalks again—is whether the Segway will become a truly mainstream product, taking the world by storm the way people like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs think it will.

To answer that question, we need to look to the history of invention and to the notoriously difficult study of the diffusion of innovations. Often lost in the study of such things is the fact that for every Model T, Apple Macintosh or DVD, there are 10 failures, like the Edsel, the Commodore 64 and the Laserdisc. By analyzing the path that successful technologies take to acceptance and the roadblocks that stymie the failures, we can at least hazard a guess about the Segway.

One possible way to analyze this path, called the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC), was developed by researchers observing Iowa farmers’ adoption of hybrid corn during in the 1930s. The TALC divides the population based on how enthusiastically they will embrace a new product, process or other technology and has been significantly revised by the venture capitalist and author Geoffrey Moore. Moore’s theory predicts that, if Kamen’s product does penetrate beyond technology enthusiasts, it will follow a clear path to mainstream adoption that has been similarly followed by almost every new technology of the last hundred years.

At the front of the TALC are the enthusiasts, the people who buy one of everything to take it apart, see how it works, and then claim to all their friends that they thought of the same idea, but better, back when they were working at Apple in 1985. These people, who represent only about 1 to 3 percent of the population, will buy the Segway. Behind the enthusiasts are the visionaries who will see before their counterparts the advantages they can seize by adopting a new technology before anyone else. They know that the Segway will not do 100 percent of what they need, but they’re comfortable with the risks of an 80 percent solution if the rewards are great enough. For the Segway, these might be businesses like police departments, amusement parks, the military and the postal service, and they represent maybe about 5 to 8 percent of the total market.

Beyond the early adopters—the enthusiasts and the visionaries—lies the Holy Grail of technology markets, the multi-billion dollar markets held by the pragmatic majority that tech startups try so hard to woo. The problem is that the majority thinks very differently from the early adopters. They want complete solutions; they don’t like to take risks. And that means that a product that does everything right for the early adopters will never sell well to the majority unless the company making it drastically changes the way it markets the device, stressing its 100 percent reliability, its compatibility and its easy functionality. For Kamen, it means that for exactly the reasons he will be able to sell the Segway to the geeks and visionaries he will find it difficult to sell to everyone else, unless he can adapt on the fly. Moore calls this problem The Chasm—that is, the chasm between the early adopters and visionaries—and makes a nice living writing books and teaching seminars about crossing the chasm.

The question then, is, do I think the Segway will cross the chasm from the early adopters to the majority? At this point, I would say no. The product is trying to fill a gap between walking and driving, but in big cities, this gap has already been filled by taxis, subways, buses, bicycles and rollerblades. If the Segway were as cheap as bicycles and rollerblades, then its technological advantages and the fact that it’s self-powered might help, but at $3,000, it’s a tough sell. Kamen should be able to make a living selling the Segway to businesses and visionaries, but the product will never alter the urban landscape as much as Steve Jobs thinks it may. All the gyroscopes in the world can’t change that.

Alex F. Rubalcava ’02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.