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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Remember the Segway?

Sure, that's the thing that was going to revolutionise transport and is now used to to play polo at corporate team-building days, right?

Not sure what you're getting at here. Is it your contention that Kamen talked about it too soon, or too late?

The Segway got a lot of pre-announcement hype. It was referred to as "It" and a lot of well-connected people were allowed to see It and talked It up (at least in quotes splashed around the news) and the hype was way too much for the actual thing. Which got a "That's it?" response from most people and the press. It was supposed to be revolutionary, as big as the PC. It was a scooter.

It was revolutionary in the self-balancing aspect.

I don't think it's the hype cycle that killed the Segway so much as the unwillingness of really any national government or major municipality to encourage people to whizz around on pavements using a powered device.

Nowadays, regrettably, that horse has bolted, and all sorts of sociopaths think foopaths are the right place for their badly-maintained future-electrical-fire on wheels!

Self-balancing may have been revolutionary, but not as revolutionary as the PC, which is how it was playing out in the news at the time (pre-announcement). Though maybe that's a matter of opinion, but I doubt most people think that a self-balancing scooter is going to change the world, which is how it was getting hyped up. The hype really did help kill it because expectations were way too high, and the cost ($5000 or so, used car prices), and then it ended up with the public image as the thing tourists and mall cops used.

> It was revolutionary in the self-balancing aspect.

What exactly did it revolutionize?

Ah yes... "Project Ginger" was promised to fully revolutionize society, bigger than the Internet, etc. People do seem to forget how old the tech-hype circus is, and with a lot of the same promises, always "too early yet" with the promised benefits lying just around the corner.

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