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But looks can be misleading, as anyone who's ridden a Segway can attest. Just ask Jeff Bezos. On a rainy morning in Seattle recently, Bezos dropped in at a meeting between Kamen, his team and a pair of Amazon execs. The meeting was being held in an Amazon "pick and pack" facility--a warehouse in which employees pick stock from shelves and pack it in boxes for shipment to customers. Kamen had come to sell Amazon some Segways by demonstrating that they would, as Bezos put it, "improve our picking productivity."
Like Grove, Bezos is confident that Segway will make a mint selling to the corporate market; also like Grove, he is less certain about its consumer prospects. "At Amazon, we didn't know at first, and nobody knew, whether people would want to buy books online, and the same is true for whether people will want to ride these," he says. "Walking is a superb mechanism for getting around--I don't see it being replaced anytime soon. And for long hauls, driving is darn good too. The question is whether there's a middle ground, some intermediate zone where these would be better than all the alternatives?"
Just then, Kamen rides up and hands his Segway over to Bezos. As the Amazon boss races madly around the warehouse, hooting and cackling and flapping his arms, someone yells out, "Yo, Jeff, what were you saying about the consumer market?" Whizzing past, Bezos shouts back, "There's definitely at least a consumer market of one!"