A month or so back, Greenlig.ht moved into new, larger digs – a sublet space in NoMad. (For those keeping score, that’s North of Madison [Square Park], the central upper 20’s. My brother maintains that you can make any New York neighborhood hot just by renaming it with a smart acronym, and therefore suggests buying up property at the [otherwise rather financial and stodgy] southern tip of Manhattan, then rebranding it as NOSFERATU – North of the South Ferry Terminal – then raking in the returns. But I digress.)

The new space, which is fairly cavernous, belongs originally to a guerrilla marketing firm that’s since moved most of their team out of town. We’ve taken over the majority of the floor, but the marketing guys have hung on to a couple of desks at one end, and continue to use the office to store all kinds of previously-used guerrilla marketing stuff.

Our conference room, for example, is divided off by a wall of giant CRT TVs, once used in the early 90’s as an MTV advertising installation. The waiting area features both a Shark Week table (missing the requisite great-white-bite-shaped chunk) and a giant Dunkin’ Donut.

And, most interestingly, the space houses a small fleet of Segways.

When the Segway first came out, I was dying to ride one. But, as the Segway craze quickly passed, I started to think I’d lost my chance. Until, walking into this new space, I discovered a dozen of them, neatly lined up and plugged into wall jacks. They looked a bit worse for the wear, held together in some places by layered duct tape, but they were real, honest-to-God Segways nonetheless.

My Greenlig.ht colleagues and I have, obviously, taken the Segways for countless spins around the office: straightforward drag racing, obstacle-laden steeplechases, even Segway polo, using rulers to smack around Bank of America promotional rubber bouncy balls.

Yes, it holds itself upright, and, yes, it’s impressive to control forward and backward motion by leaning rather than by gas or break. But actually steering the thing, using it in a real-life situation, feels clunky, unwieldy, mildly unsafe.

A few weeks in, it’s clear to me why the Segway never really took off. It wasn’t too much hype, or not enough, or even the rather high price tag. It was that, well, Segways kind of suck.

As the old saw goes, you can’t polish a turd. It’s a good reminder that business, while not easy, is at least simple: if marketing won’t save you, there’s not much you can do but make a truly excellent product in the first place.