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One of the hardest truths for any technologist to hear is that success or failure in business is rarely determined by the quality of the technology. Betamax was better than VHS; the Mac operating system is superior to Windows. Even in the transportation business, there is the cautionary tale of Preston Tucker, who in the 1940s designed a "car of the future" packed with such safety innovations as a padded dashboard, disk brakes and safety glass--a car so far ahead of its time that only 51 were ever produced. In fact, the annals of high-tech history contain remarkably few cases in which the most innovative technology has emerged triumphant in the marketplace.
This is the sort of thing that keeps Kamen up at night. There are countless others. High on the list are congenitally skittish regulators who will decide if the Segway is safe and if it will be allowed to roll on sidewalks.
Kamen maintains, with characteristic chutzpah, that Segways are "even safer than walking." Only slightly less emphatic, and slightly more plausible, was the verdict of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which began reviewing the device last May. According to Ron Medford, a senior CPSC official, the Segway has "safety features that are far more substantial than we normally see in a consumer product--features closer to those associated with medical devices." (Medford, it must be said, was so impressed that he is taking a sabbatical at DEKA, though he remains on the government's payroll.) To make the machine even safer, it comes equipped with three computerized keys that set speed and performance limits. The slowest setting, now called training mode, used to be jokingly referred to around DEKA as CEO mode.
The sidewalk issue is dicier. In order to ensure that Segways are permitted to move alongside pedestrians, Kamen's regulatory-affairs mavens will have to keep the machine from being classified either as a motor vehicle or as a scooter. At the federal level, the deal is done--though, for a while, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration wanted to classify the Segway as a "powered industrial truck." Technically, final sidewalk authority rests with state and local governments. Kamen is betting, however, that the decision will be made not by lawmakers but "de facto, by what becomes standard practice. If we have police and mail carriers riding on the sidewalks for a year, how is anyone in government going to say, 'It's O.K. for us but not O.K. for you'?"
No matter how inherently safe Segways may be, someone, somewhere is going to kill himself on one. "It's inevitable," says Gary Bridge, Segway's marketing chief. "I dread that day." Never mind that people die every day on bicycles, in crosswalks, on skateboards, in cars. The Segway is the newest new thing, and nothing does more to set hearts afire on the contingency-fee bar. "There are some very deep pockets around this thing," remarks Andy Grove. "I fear this could be a litigation lightning rod."