Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

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> The classic example of selling cars when they were invented is that all customers ever asked for was faster horses.

I look at the Segway as a counter example. Maybe people really did just want a faster way to walk through a city. No offense to Dean Kamen —- he has a very impressive set of accomplishments.

I fully support performing user studies to better understand the problem domain and the feature space. I think your bullet points illustrate some of the challenges in finding the right balance. Unfortunately, I’ve run into way more Segway builders than I have car inventors. They build something based on founder intuition or just bad user studies and then glibly dismiss customer requests as calls for faster horses. I lack the time, energy, and desire to adapt to whatever custom workflow is added because I supposedly don’t know my domain well enough to know what I want.

There’s probably a B2C and B2B split in there, but I’ve never seen that distinction made in application of some of this advice. I know you aren’t advocating for the outright dismissal of user feedback, but I’ve seen that interpretation time and time again. I’d love for us to get a new metaphor or apocryphal story.

People obviously wanted a Segway, they just didn't want it at that price point.

People even obviously wanted a Segway in Europe, where the cities have impressive support for bikes.

If People hadn't wanted a Segway (but way cheaper) we wouldn't have the streets littered with cheap electric scooters everywhere you go.

> People even obviously wanted a Segway in Europe, where the cities have impressive support for bikes.

Maybe impressive by US standards but don’t underestimate us, we managed to transform perfectly walkable / cyclable cities and dense rail networks into car centric cities and highways everywhere in less than a century.

I don’t see how it’s obvious people wanted a Segway. Cost is one problem. They’re also large, making them difficult to store at either end of a destination. They’re a nuisance and safety risk for pedestrians. Riders kept toppling them. They’re an even bigger problem than scooters when the battery dies mid-journey. I’ll grant some people were really enthusiastic about them, but I don’t see that translating into mass market appeal.

Even if I’m dead wrong and there’s a throng of people just waiting for a Segway fire sale, it doesn’t invalidate my point. If your product solves the problem by ignoring the economics of your target customer base that’s just as problematic as building the wrong product.

Electric scooters have seen a lot more traction. Both teams can’t use the supposed Henry Ford quote to say the customer doesn’t know what they want. Or, rather they can, but that doesn’t mean they have any more of a clue than the customer does.

My point is maybe we should stop being so antagonistic to the customer. You’ll find no shortage of instances where the customer is wrong. But there’s plenty of others where the customer is right and the product team is wrong. I’m tired of dealing with products that think they know better than me because they think they’re inventing cars.

> My point is maybe we should stop being so antagonistic to the customer.

I don't see anyone being antagonistic. The attitude you are thinking of antagonism to me is more like: we're treating them like all other humans, namely lacking good articulation skills and rarely going in deeply analyzing what is that they truly want.

And it's not about customers being "right" or "wrong". It's about making a sale. And many customers will not give you several chances.

Hence, the strategy of "do your absolute very best to figure what they really need even if that means not immediately accepting what they say they want as the truth" is optimizing for the very limited amount of tries to get it right.

It's quite logical IMO and there's nothing antagonistic or demeaning in this process.

> Electric scooters have seen a lot more traction

Style is a big factor. Segway riders look awkward. Scooters—with the feet placed in front of each other—streamline the body and look more natural.

How in gods name did we get Segways 20 years before kids could grab a simple electric scooter?

Somebody invested a lot of time and money with an incredibly single-minded focus.

> I don’t see how it’s obvious people wanted a Segway.

I assume what bryanrasmussen means is: Any city-dweller will see electric scooters, electric unicycles, 'hoverboards' and e-bikes from time to time.

So the makers of the Segway were correct in identifying a demand for an urban transit option other than walking, bicycles, cars, mobility scooters and public transit. They were correct in making it electric, about the speed of a fast leisure cyclist, with a range a little above 10 miles, and operated from a standing position.

However, they were incorrect about the price and size. Segways were 10x too expensive (even ignoring inflation) and at 100lbs+ were too large and heavy to carry inside or on public transit.

It wasn't just the price point, it was the bulk/footprint of the thing being fairly non-pedestrian friendly and difficult to transport/store. Scooters are a massive improvement in that regard.

it's pretty common that the first iteration of a piece of hardware is big.

Of course, but the problem is the lack of adoption didn't really push it to become smaller or substantially cheaper and more accessible. A modern Segway has a similar footprint.

In fact I’d even say that people didn’t need cars but that cars created so much opportunities of extending human cities that once we got there, we made ourselves dependent of cars.

And in retrospection, it was hardly a good direction to take for our future.

So, well, it seems plausible that what people really needed was just better bikes and trains but that they all bought into the car "freedom" marketing.

I completely agree with you. Sadly though, we inhabit a reality where the first semi-solution to a problem wins. That something is pervasive is IMO 95% of the time about whether it was first to market -- not if it was solving the problem perfectly.

Cars and many internet protocols (and software) are a perfect demonstration of this tendency.

It's not just marketing though. Cars do provide a level of freedom not given by other forms of transport. I say this as someone who started to drive relatively late in life, it completely changes what options are open to you on the weekend for example.

Ok, let's go back and change things as a thought experiment. How could this have played out differently (in America).

Are you suggesting that America could be as large and diverse as it is now just using bikes and trains?

Are you also suggesting most of the 230 million US drivers would prefer this as a better solution?

> just using bikes and trains

Some times it looks like nobody even know street-cars existed anymore.

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