From what we know now, the invention code-named Ginger could turn out to be as big a deal as the automobile, penicillin, or nuclear fission. But more likely, the transportation-related device (probably a scooter) created by eccentric inventor Dean Kamen will shake out as disappointingly as cold fusion and Boo.com. Whatever the case, when Ginger finally does manifest itself next year, Kamen might wish the volume had been a little lower on all the pregame hype.
For a recent example of the erosive power of hyperexpectations unmet, Kamen need only look back a year ago when Transmeta's low-energy Crusoe chip was set to change the face of computing. Now, Transmeta has lost IBM's, Compaq's, and Dell's support, and it has to compete with an upcoming low-power Intel chip in Transmeta's target market, notebook computers.
Ginger had all the ingredients for a robust buzz soup. Kamen, the 49-year-old founder of Deka Research and Development, has come up with many transportation and medical breakthroughs, such as the intravascular stent implanted in Vice President Dick Cheney's heart. More importantly, Kamen and a group of in-the-know tech luminariesââ,¬"-including Jeff Bezos, über venture capitalist John Doerr, and Steve Jobsââ,¬"-have been tantalisingly vague about just what the invention is. But in a book proposal sold to Harvard Business School Press for US$250,000, Kamen and his touters predicted that Gingerââ,¬"-also known as ITââ,¬"-would force architectural restructuring of cities, among other sweeping changes.
The story quickly swept the news media and the Internet. Even Bezos's Amazon has set up a microsite offering to sell Gingerââ,¬"-although "price information" and the very identity of the item are "not yet available."
But why Ginger? At about the same time, the Californian who had invented the Skycar was testing his four-passenger model of the Jetsons-mobile for the first time. Why was his invention relegated to the aft of the S.S. Zeitgeist while Ginger rode proudly on the prow?
"Inventors propose and society disposes, and most of these single-bolt-out-of-the-blue inventions fail," says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley denizen and director of the Institute for the Future. "Most of the inventions that really change things turn out to be parts of [bigger] systems."
Saffo, who professes not to blame Kamen for the hyperbole explosion, nevertheless says that the inventor "likes to compare himself to Thomas Edison, and that's especially apt in ways that he never intended. Edison's best invention was himself."
Actually, a society that handled the New Coke letdown gracefully and still believes in Bill Clinton might not be too rattled by a less-than-revolutionary Ginger. "I think it's a generational issue," says David Holtzman, CEO of Opion, a startup that has developed a method for measuring buzz through a service called Realtime Trends. "In my life, most things that have been built up like this have tended to be a disappointment: Halley's Comet, the year 1984, and Y2K. Everything tends to be anticlimactic."
In that case, Kamen might need to work on his spin-doctoring if not on his science, suggests Steve Johnson, cofounder of omnibus gossip sheet Plastic.com. "It must be killing him," Johnson says, "that he already sold the rights to the book."
