Good Idea! Now find a better one.

If all new technology starts out in a niche, why create a mass market hype storm for your technology?

This is the question we’d like to put to Dean Kamen after reading his Time Magazine interview. His Segway Human Transporter has not enjoyed the sales that the hype before its launch implied.

The “it” device, the “ginger”, will redefine transportation. Future cities will be molded to accomodate it. Urban planning theory and instruction will be forever changed in the wake of the elegant juggarnaut that is Segway.

This was the hype. But in Kamen’s own words, how do new technologies develop? Roll the tape:

You know, computers were in a niche market for the first few years… cars were a niche when they were first made, airplanes were a niche when they were first made. Every new technology starts out that way.

But did any of the inventors of cars, computers and airplanes actually expect their inventions to achieve mass market adoption overnight? Did they send out armies of lobbyists to cities around the country and even the world to change the laws to accomodate their inventions?

No doubt they wished for mass adoption and as visionaries, they could certainly see it. But they also had to deal with the reality that their ideas, as Kamen recognizes, had to start out in a niche. Toys for the weathy, experimental military systems, small initial installations, these are the places that those new technologies expanded from.

And does the Segway have a niche? Yep, two of them. The first is people who need to do a lot of walking for their job: Postal workers walking from house to house, Warehouse workers who walk miles each day indoors, security guards with large perimeters to patrol.

The second group are people who can stand but have significant difficulty walking. So much difficulty that many are forced to use wheel chairs. With a Segway, they can stand and move with virtually the same mobility as everyone else with the added, and quite frankly huge, benefit of being at eye level with other people.

So why not start with these two niches? As a business expense or a medical expense for quality of life, $5000 is quite reasonable. Why not learn from those customers before pushing out into new markets? Would the cars and airplanes that did well in small niches have done well in the larger market or did the technology require further refinement or even reinvention?

But perhaps the greatest argument against the hype filled launch of the Segway is this: The Segway was presented not simply as an enhancement to but as a replacement for walking.

Walking is one of the most fundamental aspects of being physically human. It’s a form of transportation and expression. To argue that walking should be replaced by a self-balancing stick is a really tough sell.