AW84 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
youngs_modulus wrote: ↑Tue Nov 06, 2018 8:52 pm
There’s no cabal of executives rubbing their hands together at the prospect of taking money from naive enthusiasts by fabricating “improvements” that aren’t improvements.
That's exactly what the industry is doing.
No, it's really not. You're being paranoid. The bike industry isn't run by Monty Burns.
AW84 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
Frames are about as light as they can be without becoming dangerously brittle. Groupset component weights have either stalemated or in some cases actually gone up. Wheels, stems, handlebars, cranksets, they're all virtually as refined as they can be. The industry has painted itself in a corner and it has to BS us to continue selling things...
Sure, bikes are pretty great these days. But "bikes are pretty great these days" has been a valid observation for decades. Bikes were pretty great in the 1970s, too. Silk sew-ups and frames made from silver-brazed Reynolds 753! But then the '80s brought indexed shifting, clipless pedals and cassette ramps that allow shifting under full power. The 1990s gave us carbon forks, the aheadset and deep-section wheels. The 2000s brought sub-kilo carbon frames and power meters; mountain bikes got tubeless tires and rear suspension so good it became the default even for XC racing.
So I'm not buying your argument that no substantial improvement is possible. I don't even know where you get that idea.
AW84 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
[The industry] knows a middle-aged dentist will spend anything if it can convince him that new technology will make him ride like a pro, when reality later proves otherwise.
You might want to find a new, less credulous dentist. Have you ever met a rider (regardless of career choice) who believed that upgrading their bike would result in pro-level speed? I haven't. "Dentist bikes" are totally a thing, but I've never encountered an out-of-shape-but-wealthy rider who believed that equipment was a substitute for fitness. Why do you object to the idea of people spending lots of money on bikes, regardless of how fast they are? I like to think that these consumers subsidize R&D for the rest of us.
AW84 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
The industry is unlikely to do an about-face and convince us that rim brakes and 9-speed drivetrains are the way of the future
And this what sparked my initial reply: the assertion that the industry would generate fake information to "force" the market to revert to an earlier standard. I asked for specifics, but never got any. You just agreed that isn't likely to happen, so I guess I've made my point.
AW84 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 07, 2018 4:45 am
but it will certainly sell you on the significant benefits of things and all of the testing it's done to prove it that will never amount to a hill of beans in the real world.
This is very important: the vast majority of bike industry marketing types believe what they say. Many of them don't have any real background in science, so they often say things they believe to be true while the engineer in the next cube does a facepalm. Yes, it's up to marketers to get people to buy stuff, and they often get overenthusiastic about doing their jobs.
In a previous life, I was a reporter for the main US bike-industry trade paper. I talked to plenty of bike-industry marketers and heard some very silly claims. But maybe 90% of the time I was told something I knew to be false, the marketer believed what he or she was saying. I'll invoke Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
