Kaymans business plan calls for the Segway to be introduced by post office employees and police. When the public sees them aboard a Segway, they will want one too.
Go to your local park. Look for the 12-14 year olds. Seems they are already aboard scooters. Give them 5 years, send them to college, and good old dad will be buying a Segway instead of a car.
Granted that at $1.25 a gallon for gas, there isn't a great market for the Segway, but at $3-4/gallon, desire goes way up for the short trips.
A quick and dirty cost benefit analysis ( I admit it is dirty, who knows the maintenance cost) makes the post office recoup the cost of the Segway in 4 years.
Geek factor goes down when everybody is dressed like a geek. Look at back packs.
Point well taken. My first computer (bought in 1990 for $700 on sale) had no hard drive, 64K of RAM and ran at about 8 mhz. No Internet; you connected to local bulletin boards. There was Compuserve, but at $12.50/hour, it was a damn expensive chat.
Nerdness coming out here: As heard from the man who claimed to be "turned into a newt" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail...
"It got better."
Automobiles were something between a joke and a rich man's fad for their first 15 years. Those got better, too.
My point is, that while Kamen maybe has invented nothing worthwhile here, maybe he has. It's too early to tell.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody"
Bill Gates actually said that in the early days.