Segway Responses

Responses to the announcement of Segway are all over the place. Dave Winer wants one, and says that $3,000 isn’t too much. Slashdot readers, on the other hand, seemed to think $3,000 was too high. Other people have complained about the 60lb weight of the consumer model. My take: the weight prevents people from hauling Segway onto buses and such, which may limit its adoption.

The price is too high for college students and many other categories of people that are good targets for Segway. But, give it a few years… they’ll definitely get the price way down, and may even find some clever ways to get the weight down as well. I can see cheap knockoffs coming along that get rid of some of Segway’s redundancy and other safety features. (Dean Kamen will still win, though, given his patents on different aspects of Segway’s technology.)