People Who Don't Get It

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He's smiling because he's taking your money.

About 4 weeks ago, Segway, the folks who make the geeky little scooter, was sold to a British investor, and as a result, the earlier investors will lose their money, to the tune of something over $150 million dollars.

Well, Mercury News Columnist Chris O'Brien looked at what happened, and waxed poetic:

In this case, though, what's fascinating is not just the money, but who gave it. Jeff Bezos of Amazon chipped in. And closer to home, so did venture capitalist Doerr and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

I'm not gloating over their failure. Their successes have made them legends, and for good reason. It turns out, though, that despite their foresight and immense personal fortunes, they remain human and fallible. Just like the rest of us.

You see, they didn't just think the Segway would be successful.

They expected it to change the world. In a hype-filled month such as this, during the lull between the Google Nexus One and the Apple iSlate, it's good to be reminded how rare it is for such lofty expectations to be met.

Why did people believe this? Because Dean Kamen was a "Genius".

He had at the time designed the AutoSyringe, an automated injection/infusion device, a mobile dialysis machine which was highly commercially successful, along with the iBot, an all-terrain wheel chair.

I remember when the Segway was called "It", and later it was called "Ginger", and when people like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos were saying that it was going to change the world.

Then "It" came out, and it was just an electric scooter, and kind of a dorky one at that.

The turn of events with the Segway, where it is largely reduced to punchline (see Paul Blart: Mall Cop) is not surprising.

What is surprising is not that a bunch of people thought that it would be a commercial success, which didn't happen, or the initial investors would have gotten their money back, but rather that somehow or other people came to believe that it would literally change the world.

If there is a lesson to all this it is that the folks who are giants in Silicon Valley and related industries are not any more likely to see the next big thing than anyone else, and that they are where they are because they got lucky.