I'm not so sure you didn't. You keep bringing the conversation back to "hacking", and I'm really unclear as to why. Are you trying to equate hacking to product design? Because neither Apple nor Segway were hacking anything - they both saw a consumer experience they wanted to deliver, and then designed a product that was supposed to deliver it. Both companies took a focused, highly planned approach to delivering their respective experiences. That's just about as antithetical to the "try this and see what happens" hacker mentality as it's possible to get. The only real difference between your examples was the size of their respective markets. (I say that because the few people that buy Segways tend to be outspoken about loving them. Or maybe that's just Woz.)
Now, if the question you were trying to bring up in the first place was "Do we have any indication that the product designed here actually has some appeal to its target market?", I would find your statement a little more credible.
I'm not so sure you didn't. You keep bringing the conversation back to "hacking", and I'm really unclear as to why. Are you trying to equate hacking to product design? Because neither Apple nor Segway were hacking anything - they both saw a consumer experience they wanted to deliver, and then designed a product that was supposed to deliver it. Both companies took a focused, highly planned approach to delivering their respective experiences. That's just about as antithetical to the "try this and see what happens" hacker mentality as it's possible to get. The only real difference between your examples was the size of their respective markets. (I say that because the few people that buy Segways tend to be outspoken about loving them. Or maybe that's just Woz.)
Now, if the question you were trying to bring up in the first place was "Do we have any indication that the product designed here actually has some appeal to its target market?", I would find your statement a little more credible.