A recent email conversation with my product marketing professor, Ely Dahan, led me to compare the Segway (in its newest incarnation here) and the new fad in San Francisco touring, the GoCar.
Professor Dahan taught me many things - but the one he always harps on is the importance of considering cost when planning new products. The brilliant minds behind Segway missed that detail (and continue to miss that detail, with their latest inventions rumored to cost almost as much as the original flops - on Wired's blogs here). The people behind GoCar figured it out.
The GoCar is extremely cheap to build - from the photos, it appears to be a go cart, built from off-the-shelf parts, with only one drive wheel (making steering much lighter and cheaper) and some GPS software. A new one probably costs less than $2,000 to make. It's proven technology, simple to use, and - while not exactly safe - a fun thing to do. And, while it's no Ferrari, you don't, in the words of one Segway-hater, look like a "geektard" when driving it.
The Segway, on the other hand, is the ultimate geektard ride. Cool people wear helmets - when they're snowboarding, extreme skiing, biking in the Tour de France, or skateboarding upside down over a plywood jungle. Cool people do not wear helmets while navigating their way through downtown sidewalks. Cool people might blow $2000 on a go cart (or rent a GoCar for $20-50ish an hour). But $5,000 for a gyroscope-enabled geektard-mobile? Not cool.
I'm no oracle, and won't predict the future of products and companies - at least not publicly, where I can be humiliated for it later - but I will wonder out loud about how the new off-road all terrain version will sit with the target market - will it enable them to get out and see parts of the world fobidden to them, or will it just put them in perilously contact with cool people doing extreme sports - like hiking - and send them into a depressive self-destructive spiral of doom?
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