Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger" (2003)

&gt;&quot;I think the emphasis of this conversation is wrong,&quot; said Bezos. &quot;You have a product so revolutionary, you&#x27;ll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it?&quot;<p>Bezos and Jobs were right. Bicycles have been around since the 19th century and yet city planners are still struggling against mainstream political opinion to be able to set aside dedicated space for their use. If most cities currently only barely tolerate bicycles, the Segway was certainly dead on arrival.<p>I think Jobs&#x27; idea for starting small at universities was a bit better of an idea than Bezos&#x27; idea of starting in a small country. Davis California for example is the most bike friendly city in America (20% mode share). That would have been the perfect place to start.

A (feeble) plug for my hometown, Manchester NH (where Dean Kamen is currently located): I just visited the Millyards and they have apartments there that would cost $3500&#x2F;month in Boston (more in SF) for $1400&#x2F;month, Dean just pledged $300 million to biotech startups right there. Not much nightlife but not many distractions either, and they&#x27;ve put these beautiful restaurants in the old mills. It&#x27;s about the same distance to Boston as Palo Alto is to SF. So if you want to drop off the grid for a while to focus on developing a product it&#x27;s a great place to get started. Yeah.

Segway and Google Glass went through similar product image trajectories: immense pre-launch hype, then turned into a dorky status symbol perceived as being for tech-obsessed rich buffoons only, and riddled by regulatory problems concerning its public use.<p>Yet Snap seems to be doing quite well with its Spectacles resurrection of the Google Glass concept. Maybe Segway will also come back once someone cracks the design and youth-friendly branding?

&gt; &quot;Its shape is not innovative, it&#x27;s not elegant, it doesn&#x27;t feel anthropomorphic,&quot; said Jobs, ticking off three of his design mantras.<p>I was wondering what exactly did Jobs mean when he said that the design was not &quot;anthropomorphic&quot;. I mean, the shape of an iPhone does look very different from that of a human figure.<p>EDIT: perhaps he meant that it wasn&#x27;t ergonomic?

Using a Segway on a college campus would be great.. Wish they had convinced campuses to buy them for students.<p>The unveiling was so lame.. People wearing khakis and super lame helmets and going over little bumps and looking so non-cool.. I watched way back when and was like... Uh... No.. First should not have helmets on.. Should have been very attractive people and should have showed how quickly they could get from point A to point B in style and comfort and convenience..

I would say that ultimately the Segway was a failure, but that perception is partially affected by the hyperbolic hype that preceded it. I wonder what its own inventors think.<p>How popular did they expect it to get? How did they expect people to use it? How did they not foresee the backlash to its incredible dorkiness? Would a smaller, handle-less form factor (like the Chinese clones now known as &quot;hoverboards&quot;) have been possible with the battery technology of the time?

This makes me miss Steve Jobs, a lot. So much of what he says seemed dead on about the struggles Segway faced. For all his faults, I think he had a great sense about what consumers wanted and loved about a product, as well as what would frustrate them or turn them off, and I think it&#x27;s been one of Apple&#x27;s struggles since he passed.

&quot;suspected, as did Dean, that Doerr was setting them up for an ambush on his home turf&quot;<p>Why the ambush? Was John Doerr previously trying to deliver the same message (that the product wasn&#x27;t ready), but needed Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs&#x27; firepower to finally convince Dean Kamen? The article only hints at it, but this sounds like there&#x27;s a bit more drama in the Doerr&#x2F;Kamen relationship.

It&#x27;s hard to believe that if it was really going to take over the world, it would have mattered at all how it was launched, what the initial design of it looked like, who got a meeting the &quot;king of Singapore&quot;, etc. Those sound like elements of a fad, not a lasting and significant part of technology.

A really good book about this is &quot;Code Name Ginger&quot; which is not the blind glorification that such books can be.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Code-Name-Ginger-Behind-Segway&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1578516730&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1484699980&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=code+name+ginger" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Code-Name-Ginger-Behind-Segway&#x2F;dp&#x2F;157...</a>

&quot;Screw the lead times. You don&#x27;t have a great product yet!&quot; - Steve Jobs<p>Advice every struggling startup needs to hear. Great products are rare and the best way to succeed is not to settle on product quality.

I think seeing pictures of Woz on his Segway put me off the idea. He seemed to balloon since getting one.