Which Do You Offer a Weary Traveler: A Unicycle, a Bicycle, or a Segway?

A guy is walking down a long road. He's tired.

Three trucks pass him, then come to a screeching halt. The drivers hop out. They open the backs of their trucks. They're salesmen!

The first driver offers the traveler a unicycle. It's low-cost and easy to maintain, possessing only half the tires and less than half of the moving parts of a bicycle. It doesn't require any electrical charging system or cables. If you forget to plug it in when you go to bed, it's still ready for use in the morning. Very nimble. Low cost. Agile. And it's pretty cool, too. How about it?

The second driver offers the traveler a bicycle. Of course, everyone knows how to ride a bicycle. Yes, it has more moving parts than a unicycle, but it's easier to use. Yes, you still have to pedal, but how hard is that? It's easier than walking if you're tired.

The third driver is wearing a suit, and he comes gliding up on his Segway. Here's the best choice of all, he says. Turn-key solution. No walking required. Minimal training. The Segway handles all the forward motion for you. You just stand still. Yes, it's more expensive than the other solutions, but you end up doing less work, and you'll have more energy for other activities. Now, let's talk about a charger and a service contract.

Which vehicle does our weary traveler choose?

Which business model would you bet on?

Unicycle Products

Unicycles are exciting and fun, but they require our traveler to learn new skills. I'm going to bet that most people reading this post think that the unicycle is the least likely choice for our traveler.

Yet how many companies bet their business on weary, overworked customers learning new skills (programming languages, complex UIs, etc.)? The novelty and supposed low cost of an approach blinds companies to how things look to a customer. Even if the customer isn't consciously opposed to novelty, he or she is just not likely to get around to learning new skills in order to realize the vision promised by a vendor.

Segway-style Products

At the other extreme, we have Segway-style products. Ingenius. Turn-key. More maintenance overhead. If a novel programming framework is a unicycle, an enterprise software suite from SAP or Oracle is probably more like a Segway. Lots of features. Minimal tinkering for end users. High cost.

Bicycle Products

The bicycle is somewhere in between. Our weary traveler still has to do work to ride a bicycle, but he already has the skills to do it. Yes, there's potentially some maintenance involved, but bicycles are so ubiquitous, there are repair shops everywhere. And maintenance costs shouldn't be exorbitant. So, yes, the bicycle doesn't eliminate all work, but the traveler can begin riding right away without breaking his budget.

My guess is that he hops on the bicycle. (Unless he's also wearing a suit and has the budget and corporate mandate to go for the Segway.)

(In 2007, 18.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States.)

Moral: Even in a tough economy, a bare-bones, low-cost product will have difficulty gaining traction if it requires customers to change their habits and do things they've never done before.

As always, comments welcome.

Unicycle photo Creative Commons Copyright (some rights reserved) by Julian Meade.