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Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions of Specialized Bicycles

Bikes, Swine 2 Responses »

Jan 132012

Today, a special weekend bonus post in honor of facing down the big guys without flinching.

Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions of Specialized Bicycles:

Stop picking public fights with kids much smaller than you.
Once engaged in fight with kid much smaller than you, stop closing eyes and scratching blindly at opponent while screaming hysterically.
Propose introducing new bottom bracket standard, BBFU78, out of pure spite.
Institute mandatory 30-day waiting period before communicating with Legal Department.
Mid-day company wide massages now mandatory.
Free “hippie dipshit” anger management consultant from company dungeon.
When Mr. Sinyard gives you press release he typed himself, tape original copy to inside of latest Bicycle Retailer and Industry News and tell him everyone thought it was “awesome.” Burn after 10 days.
Finally gain courage necessary to put on favorite Sidi shoes for morning commute to work.
Abandon fruitless patent litigation against Apple regarding “device one touches.”
Erase Volagi Liscio with Photoshopped “S” logo from 2013 catalog.

Are You Specialized?

Bikes, Swine Comments Off

Jan 062012

Friday, and it seems Specialized has taken a break from dastardly deeds long enough for the world of bicycles and commerce to briefly focus on other things. I, for one, am moving quickly, before they drive a bus of puppies into a lake. So this post isn’t just about Specialized; it’s about actually being specialized.

The point my last few rants have been building up to is this: little guys can compete. Even against corporate giants within the same market. Amazon included. More specifically, brick and mortar bike shops can compete against online retailers. Online.

The elephant in the room for me as I was reading that letter from Mike Sinyard was just how repressed these dealers really were. The impression was that the Internet is this giant shadow that’s slowly passing over all of them, and all they can do is hoot and throw sticks at the darkness. Usually, it’s so fundamentally depressing to see this reaction that I’m hard-pressed to even address it, but this fear of change has been rampant in the bike industry for years now, and I think it’s time independent dealers started using the opposable thumb Darwin gave them and using tools. Instead of taking the isolationist approach that Sinyard advocates in his letter, why don’t more dealers sell products online?

Here’s why this isn’t such a crazy idea.

I’m not talking about dropping a 20,000 item catalog on your site and trying to go head to head with major e-commerce retailers. I’m talking about small steps to drive top line growth and sure up your reputation as a great bike shop. The technology and capability has never been easier to put an e-commerce application in place, and, if you can manage to use Quickbooks, you can safely and securely sell products to people all around the world. Furthermore, you–yes you, little bike shop–can compete against Amazon. Why? Because–if you’re a quality shop–you have one thing they don’t. You’re a real bike shop.

For that exact reason, the Internet needs you as much as you need it.

Here are some steps you can take to make it happen.

Understand It’s All About Communication

All the Internet gives you is a megaphone. If you’re fond of yelling stupid and offensive things–or more often just boring ones–you should find a voice for your business before taking it online. What is your real mission as a business? What do you stand for? In short, what’s your story?

When I started my tiny brick and mortar and e-commerce bike shop from a 1,000 square foot building, I never intended to compete with Amazon. My goal was to connect with a subset of dedicated cyclists based on a mutual love of bikes. The plan succeeded because the objective was first and foremost to communicate. Over the years, I’ve met many conventional brick-and-mortar bike retailers interested in becoming more active in e-commerce, and the most frequent misconception I hear from them involves communication: they incorrectly believe selling online is about things outside their comfort zone–pricing and assortment. Successfully selling online involves those things, in the same way brick-and-mortar selling does, but that isn’t the sum total of the experience for consumers. Communication is. Brands like Amazon incorrectly skew this perspective for small retailers. You’re not going to be Amazon, but you can be a more successful version of you, and that starts, not with asking yourself what products you’d sell and how to price them, but what you stand for. Details, like returns policy and email response turnaround time, work themselves out based on your overall plan for customer service, and the vision you have for taking care of your customers. The same qualities that make a great bike shop valuable to a walk-in customer, make that shop valuable to a site visitor online.

Know Your Strength

You can compete against Amazon because you’re authentic. You’re also an authority. Jeff Bezos doesn’t tell me which hydraulic disc brakes he likes best, and I wouldn’t care if he did, but if you grew up riding bicycles, and tried a bunch of things, and know what it’s like to have a rear brake fail fifteen downhill miles from home, I’m all ears. You, sir, are authentic.

Or at least you should be. Unfortunately, there are bike shops that have nothing to say. Their owners could just as easily be selling microwave ovens or dog food. These shops–regardless of how successful a ground game they may have, don’t transition as well to the digital world. Why? Because they primarily define themselves based on price, not service, and you’re not going to compete on price. Nor are you going to be able to keep up with the service demands of selling online, unless you believe in what you do, and are passionate about doing it well. Good shops are good shops, regardless of channel. Knowing that not everyone makes the cut is all the more motivation for quality shops to take their services to more people.

Focus on Your Core

You attack Amazon by knowing more about your products than they do. You know who has a strong defense against Amazon? Competitive Cyclist. Why? Because they’ve created value for the consumer that is tied directly to their brand, not just the products they sell. The key is content. Amazon, for all their size, absolutely cannot compete with a retailer who feels passionate about the product he or she is offering, and demonstrates in-depth knowledge. Avoid Amazon’s “one-stop shop” and “be everything to everyone” general philosophy and focus on what you know. This does two really great things: starting off, it minimizes the product information you have to manage, and it also lets your create more compelling content about fewer items, instead of phoning it on on many. For the brick and mortar retailer looking to explore e-commerce, focusing on a small subset of your most core products makes you capable of truly presenting those products–including accurate specs, high-quality information, videos and images, all curated by people who know what matters. That, not sticking your head in the sand and conceding e-commerce forever, fights Amazon.

This method is also particularly effective against Amazon because, like all large companies, they’re slow to react. If your shop employs a DH racer, and that’s what the culture of your shop is generally all about, you should be on the cutting edge of DH equipment. By the time Amazon realizes a new product exists, you could have sold three, or thirty, or three-hundred. At better margins than Amazon will ever see. Knowledge really is power.

Give the People Something for Nothing

This concept is the most difficult and is beyond just counter-intuitive to brick-and-mortar retailers: it’s toxic. But consumers are used to getting apps for free, using their G-mail accounts, and sharing information with their friends for free. What should your specific value proposition be for your site visitors? That’s up to you. It need be no more complicated than a weekly review of a product, or a helpful tip about maintenance, riding, or nutrition. Again, focus on what you already know, so that this is less of a chore and more like writing a note to a friend. Though it’s less obvious, brick-and-mortar bike shops are doing this constantly for customers on their showroom floors. Translating it to digital content is a new and unique challenge, but one that’s well worth it if you’d like to succeed.

More bike shops should be selling their products and their expertise online. In painting Amazon as the boogieman, gobbling up IBD sales, Specialized paints a pretty bleak picture of a future huddled around–and even more dependent upon–only a small assortment of products, but this is far from the only option.

The Internet continues to be defined by expansion, not regression. If you want to catch it, you jump where it’s going, not where it’s already been. Look at Etsy and Kickstarter and Facebook, and the common theme is specialization, the ability to communicate with and market to a core group of like-minded individuals who share your interests. So are you “specialized”? If so, you have a place on the Internet. You can choose to ignore that place, hide from it, or even rage against it, or you can find connections within the enormous pool of potential customers who would truly appreciate your shop’s love of bikes, humor, and dedication to service. Both Specialized and Amazon want to come between you and those customers, but companies still profiting from limiting peoples’ choices and building barriers to direct communication are not going to fare well in an economy that increasingly values the free and open exchange of goods and ideas between people. Open communication with your customers is the side to be on in this battle.

Tweens

Bikes Comments Off

Oct 042012

Can’t help but spend a few paragraphs taking issue with a reprehensible letter Specialized sent to their dealers, urging them to keep drinking the red (I believe that’s trademarked?) Kool-aid–oh, and just happening to mention that Cannondale sells their bikes at Costco.

Yes, as independently reported by yours truly, Cannondale bikes did make an appearance in Costcos. But the actions of a rogue distributor selling bikes against the company’s policy–a distributor Cannondale has since reportedly shut down–is clearly not the same as Cannondale selling bikes in Costco. For Mike Sinyard to attempt to kick Cannondale in the nuts while they were already hurting would come off as shockingly poor taste, if we hadn’t come to expect it.

Specialized clearly wants to boot all other brands out of brick and mortar shops, and constantly issues the mantra-like refrain that these companies don’t have the best interest of independent dealers in mind. They’re very straightforward about wanting to take over the majority of brick and mortar stores. I suppose that’s why there so many Specialized dealers in the city of Portland. (Why, they’re do dedicated to the LBS that they just have to open up the guy down the street from you, too.)

But the lengths to which they’ll go seem strained lately, as in this Cannondale thing. Really, guys? Did you really feel good about writing that letter? Yes, Cannondale has supply chain issues, and, hey, I guess they deserve them. That’s what you get for making your bikes overseas, whereas Specialized, they, um, well . . . .

To accuse Cannondale of selling in Costco based on an unauthorized incident might be tactically opportunistic, but it’s also just cheesy. Following the criteria Sinyard applied to Cannondale, Specialized is selling their frames direct to dealers on-line. Sure, they’re counterfeit knockoffs, but–following Sinyard’s reasoning in attacking Cannondale–a bike brand is always responsible for the actions of others, regardless of whether those others are selling product to big box stores back into the U.S. without your knowledge, or selling knock-offs on the internet.

Anyway: cheesy. Believe it or not, I think more of Sinyard and Specialized than I let on, but they continue to do things that just strike me as beneath them. I’d be cool to see Specialized apologize for that letter, but I don’t think that’ll happen.

In other news, I’ve avoiding discussion of 650b bikes lately–for no apparent reason, other than I’m just waiting for them to catch on. Like everyone else.

I’d’ve thought I’d come back from Interbike bearing tales of 650b domination. Hoardes of 27.5-inch-wheeled bikes descending on Las Vegas and 26-inch-wheeled bikes on life support. Thing is, it didn’t happen this year.

Sure, there were 27.5 bikes around–some quite nice, but it was also pretty clear that this wasn’t the year. Next year could be a whole different story.

The challenge, of course, is figuring out where we’re going with all these wheel sizes. Given the amount of full-suspension bikes capable of fitting a 27.5-inch wheel into their current molds and geometries, it’s inevitable that they’ll have a much bigger presence soon.

We’ll know they’ve arrived once we see them in Costco.

Boss Cog and the Coming Malaise

Bikes Comments Off

Jul 112012

So the 2013 S-Works Enduro is the first brand-spankin’ new bike I’ve seen sporting SRAM’s 1×11 system, and it finally brings some perspective to that cassette–which completely obscures a 160mm rotor. That’s a big gear. In stark contrast to all the haters out there, I think I’m in love with this gearing. And how nice is it that Specialized is putting a custom Cane Creek Double Barrel and an e*thirteen guide on there? I gave them a hard time over the Volagi thing, but credit where credit’s due: spec on that bike shows what I believe we can only describe as “soul.”

And we can use all the soul we can get, given the shitstorm that’s slowly trundling everyone’s way: Lance versus USADA. Based on everything that’s come to light so far, the only thing we’re certain of is that there will be no winners in this. If he’s guilty, everything’s going to suck for a while. If he’s exonerated and deals a body blow to an agency trying to police a clearly skunky sport, it won’t be any better. Short of coming out of retirement to win three more Tours with a Pfizer-developed transparent body chock full o’ internal sensors displaying vitals and chemical balances directly to the web, cycling in general better enjoy this year’s Tour. I’m afraid it’s going to be all downhill after the Pyrenees.

Big Dogs, Little Dogs and Long Tails

Bikes, E-commerce 2 Responses »

Jun 222012

Rick Vosper has published a really interesting post over at BicycleRetailer.com. Based on fresh data from the Gluskin-Townley group’s National Bicycle Dealer Association (NBDA) report, Vosper seems to pretty effectively dispel the myth of a “Big Three” stranglehold on independent bike dealers.

Except that maybe he doesn’t. As Vosper puts it:

Turns out there’s a total of 143 bike brands active in the US market (down from 150 last year). Moreover, in terms of which brands are tops in which shops and/or markets, it’s not Trek, Giant, or Specialized that leads the pack. Not Raleigh or Cannondale or Haro or Diamondback or Schwinn, or any of the top brands we’d all expect.

On a purely representative basis, the leading brand in the country is . . . ‘Other.’ And it has been for years.”

The suggestion is that smaller companies are, in aggregate, a serious force in the U.S. bicycle industry.

As much as I’d like to believe that, I just can’t. In the past, I did quite well with niche brands, and I wish others could too, but empirical data derived from something I call “walking into any bike shop in the U.S.” suggests neither Specialized nor Trek need fear any smaller companies.

A part of the disconnect might be the method used for gathering the data. According to Jay Townley, whose group conducted the research, the data was gathered “based on a survey of more than 300 independent bike shops,” where “the basic question” . . . “was to write in their bestselling bicycle brands, not numbers, but bestselling brands based on unit volume.”

Um, OK.

So the questioning was maybe a little subjective. Could that affect things? Poor Trek and Specialized tend to suffer from what I like to call the “Nickleback Syndrome”: they make shit-tons of money even while shop rats sometimes think it’s not cool to be a “Trek shop” or “Specialized shop.” That’s just the “freedom” twitch, wherein a dealer or shop rat doesn’t want to believe he’s bought and sold based on the whims of his vendor. No one admits to liking Nickleback. Yet they still come to your city and get suck all over it. Go figure.

But how accurate was the data? That’s the question. It’s possible the official Gluskin-Townley report describes how rigorously the data was checked against inventory management systems, etc. but, given my experience in bicycle retail, “rigorous” just isn’t a term that comes up all that often (come to think of it, “inventory management” doesn’t even come up very often).

I’m also not entirely clear how to square the notion that Specialized, Trek and Giant still likely dominate “in terms of total unit sales,” without being a “bestselling” brand. To me, then, this report raises more questions than it answers. Sure, we have Redline, Fuji and the QBP brands chipping away at market share, but if they’re effectively doing that, then how could it not be reflected in sales? As much as I want to believe in this report, taken at face value, it seems to suggest dealers are primarily flooring bike brands that don’t make them money.

What’s more, they’re flooring bikes that don’t make them money despite the pressures from their Big Three overlords to knock that shit off.

Seems wrong.

It’s possible the data is just skewed. We know “more than 300 independent bike shops” were used for this analysis. In the absence of hard data, we have to assume “more than 300” effectively means like “302.” If there are roughly 5000 IBDs in the U.S. that’d be about 6% of them that were polled. If we figure we’re down to 4500 IBDs and sort of put a thumb on the good news scale here, probably the most we can get is about 7-7.5% of dealers surveyed in this sample. Statistically, this should still be enough to give us a pretty accurate reading (low margin of error), but there tends to be wide variance between IDBs, meaning I could find 300 shops in the U.S. that don’t carry Trek or Specialized. Usually every larger town has one of those “also ran” shops that can’t get one of the Big Three (and may well be a better shop than those that can). This matters.

So I’m questioning how reliable this data can be–or even if it has any intrinsic value whatsoever. If you don’t sell Trek, you don’t represent them on your floor. If you polled 7% of the shops in the U.S., how many of those shops were selling Trek or Specialized? Wouldn’t that affect the results? When you can’t get the big brands, you represent the smaller brands. Call 300 shops that don’t sell Trek or Specialized, and you get a snap shot of what life is like at the bottom of the retail food chain, not how healthy the Big Three’s grip is around the neck of the U.S. bike dealer.

In other words, “representation” is a bullshit made-up term. More usable data would seem to be what revenue each brand is generating for that representative sample of retailers across the country. Ask each shop: what are your top ten bike lines, in terms of revenue? If your shop is filled with Raleighs because you can’t get Trek or Specialized, then way to go for you and Raleigh, but good luck breaking the $1.5M sales mark. What really matters is this: are you able to compete with the shop that has Trek or Specialized? That’s the real question. The report suggests an interesting variation based on total sales revenue: “At $300,000 or less, Trek is #7; Redline is #1. At $3000-5000, Trek is #2,Raleighis [sic] #1. Where Trek has its hold is in the million-plus-dollar retailers. Trek is not #1 in all regions of the country, nor are they #1 in all size stores. It varies.”

Well, yeah. Your store’s revenue varies based on whether or not you sell Specialized, Trek or Giant. If you can’t get those lines, good fucking luck making more than $300k a year. Wouldn’t that seem to be the opposite of Vosper’s point? To suggest this is evidence of some kind of “representational” pattern, I submit to you, is the worst kind of tail wagging dog argument. “Where Trek has its hold is in the million-plus-dollar retailers.” Yes, the ones making money.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Vosper has written a fascinating article, I love what he’s clearly wishing and hoping for here (even if I can’t believe in it), and I have a great deal of respect for what the Gluskin-Townley group tries to do (gathering data in this industry is like bailing out a leaking canoe with a spork), but don’t let’s get to dreaming up scenarios where the little guys can compete based on some mystical “representation” number. Vosper’s evocation of the Long-tail theory is apt here, but maybe not for the reasons he suggests. The vast majority of small shops cater to a smaller and more eclectic segment of the industry because that’s the only brand real estate left to them. Those smaller shops aren’t successful because they don’t have any of the Big Three brands–they’re successful despite not having them. It’s a testament to how hard most of those shops work to take care of customers.

The New Face of Progress

Bikes, Gadgets Comments Off

May 172012

Last Tuesday I predicted we’d eventually see the end of bicycle component standards and interchangeable parts as we know them, and on Wednesday I predicted standards would be replaced with distinct “ecosystems.” After that I rode some bicycles and fell to blathering on about electric bikes.

If all that seemed to be leading up to the announcement of the insane 50mph-top-speed, more-torque-than-a-VW-Jetta, and completely proprietary Audi e-bike, I promise it was completely coincidental.

My powers of prediction are just that uncanny.

If there’s anything on this bike that’s standard or currently available, it’s those German Skyway Tuffwheels, but even the transmission and shifting seems to have been either cooked up by Audi, or developed in partnership with a much smaller company. Yes, every once in a while we see a bike like this flicker around the edges of reality without ever materializing, but one of these days it’s going to happy. Here’s why:

It’s never been easier to design, engineer and mass produce parts. Audi just purchased Ducati; do you think they can’t afford an $1100 MakerBot? Word is, they also know something about designing products and bringing them to market. But that’s not even the best part. These days a tiny, innovative company like Acros can partner with a company like Audi, and see some truly amazing shit get made. It’s starting to make more sense for companies like Audi to take a page from the Silicon Valley playbook, and buy or partner with smaller companies, than it does for them to keep reinforcing the big guys. And that’s because the smaller companies are able to build pretty amazing things.
Why the hell not? Remind me again why a company like Audi needs to spec Shimano or SRAM components to create a new type of vehicle? Audi built this bike as battery research and a PR stunt–i.e. using a fraction of their marketing budget alone.
Times they are a-changin’. This isn’t a mountain bike. It’s some sort of mountain commuting Red Bull wannabe trick bike/social media center (it communicates with your smartphone and Facebook). The entry point for a completely new company isn’t going to be an existing category (like Honda’s faux-entrance into DH racing); it’s going to be a completely new type of bicycle. Nobody knew they needed an iPhone until Apple showed them an iPhone. Apple, Audi–whatever–if somebody creates the bicycle version of the iPhone, consumers will buy it.
The old network is crumbling. Really it is. The argument that no shops would carry something like, and thus it would never get traction in the U.S. market is such a blatant example of asshattery that it’s more sad than amusing. What would it cost Audi to make these and distribute these, never mind a company like GM or Toyota building one? The economy of scale for production and services of one of the world’s top ten car manufacturers is staggering. Using a fraction of their resources, large manufacturers could create a quasi bike industry to support their “mobility vehicles”–let alone do something economical, like buy an existing distributor and simply add their own products to the mix.
The other old network is crumbling, too. If you really think the few truly independent bike shops left in the U.S. would turn up their noses at the idea of selling something consumers want–and they can get easily–then you haven’t tried to put a kid through college lately. For every Trek and Specialized dealer in the U.S., there’s a guy across the street who wants a shot at the title, and some of them are better shops anyway.
Bicycles are spilling into mainstream America like oil from a ruptured pipeline. And in an entirely new way, too. This isn’t just Lance-worship and trends. The skinny jeans crowd has sold their skinny jeans but kept their bikes. Fat people are riding bicycles while smoking–not to get in shape, but to get somewhere, and cities that don’t even want to be cool are having to install bike lanes. American consumers are finally sick of telling the neighbors we fell down the steps again, and that Big Oil really loves us.
That social media thing. No, seriously. How elaborate a distribution channel do you need these days, when you can leave a bag of money on Zuck’s doorstep and reach a few million qualified leads? There is no barrier to reaching consumers these days.
And speaking of Facebook . . . . There are companies who could do this without blinking. Google’s investing in self-driving cars, mobile phone manufacturing and wind farms. Free cash flow at Google in 2011 was just over eleven billion dollars. To offer some perspective, the last time I checked, total sales of the entire U.S. bicycle industry were right at six billion dollars.

Maybe none of this will happen. Maybe bikes will keep on just as they are. From what I can tell, though, the idea that a change is coming seems more realistic than ever.

All Ball Bearings Nowadays

Bikes Comments Off

May 082012

All Ball Bearings

One advantage to simultaneously working forty-two different jobs within the bike industry is the connections you get to make. Not just between people, but between ideas. At this point I have a different hand in retail; wholesale and manufacturing; design and engineering; and media and journalism. Actually, some of those are feet, maybe a nose, and an ear. It’s quite the game of Twister I have going on.

But that degree of “fly vision” I have lately–a weird kind of 360-degree view of how things are working–makes wearing the many hats pretty interesting. I might notice a cause one place, the effect in another. On the surface, none of the things I’m doing seem to have anything to do with one another, but the patchwork starts to make sense when I step back from it, and you can really see trends and movements. One day I may even be able to see the imaginary construct that is the bike industry as all Neo-green ones and zeros.

One of the intersections I have going on right now involves organizing product categories, writing product copy, and thinking about current “standards” for frame bottom-brackets and head tubes, and the more I look at each of these things, the more I realize something about where we’re headed as an industry.

Standards are going away.

I mean that literally, mechanically-speaking, not as a kind of moral judgment (though there are definitely some shady characters in the business). From a design standpoint, I think we’re approaching a time when each bike is going to be its own unique animal, with fewer and fewer options for swapping parts between bikes. We’re talking about the extreme extension of “system engineering” here, and depending on your perspective, that’s either the key to having the strongest, lightest bikes possible, or a hell unlike any of us have ever experienced.

It all starts with ball bearings. Consider how ridiculous it would be if companies manufacturing full-suspension bikes had to buy their pivot bearings from SRAM or Shimano. So why do they bother buying headsets and bottom brackets? For now there’s still an advantage to letting somebody else worry about making those, but the window on that seems to be closing. Poor Cane Creek and Chris King make about 700 variations of internal, external, zero-stack, straight, tapered, mix-tapered and holographically chamfered headsets, but none of them fit a Ridley, because why the hell shouldn’t Ridley just make their own even more ginormous diameter lower bearing? Carbon fiber has largely changed the way we think about bicycle frames: if you’re spending the money on a mold anyway, why not just have it include almost everything you need–everything but the bearings themselves?

And even if you don’t make your own headsets and bottom-brackets, what’s really left to engineer and market about a Press-fit 30? How different can one brand’s BB30 be from another’s? About all you can do is release a ceramic bearing option–the headset and bottom-bracket manufacturer’s version of adding another child to a sitcom family.

It’ll all start with the ball bearings. Everything else will take a while, but try to think of a component a bike manufacturer hasn’t yet tried to make.

Disc brakes? Remember AMP? Any poor Coda owners still out there?

Crankset? That design Specialized bought from the recumbent company seems to be working out just fine for them.

Stems, bars, saddles, seatposts and tires? Bontrager.

Suspension fork? Cannondale banged their head against that wall until it finally cracked (ambiguity there’s entirely intentional so’s to appeal to both fans of Lefty forks and to the detractors, but you have to admit, they’re here to stay). Even Specialized keeps wrapping Fox and RockShox guts in their own shells, and that’s exactly how proprietary is going to happen. You won’t see Fox and Shimano going out of business. Your shit just won’t be able to move from one bike to another any more.

And maybe that’s not such a big deal. You don’t buy a Honda CRF frame and then build it into a full bike (well, most of us don’t, anyway). But the key is that this stuff has to work. If system-engineering proprietary parts are where we’re headed, there should be a noticeable advantage in things like performance and durability. Look at what Santa Cruz did for suspension pivots. They redesigned the shit out of an otherwise standard issue generic bearing, but the result was way better pivots, so nobody’s bitching (or if they are, they should take Santa Cruz up on the free replacement offer).

It’s all ball bearings nowadays. Let’s hope that if proprietary happens, it actually makes life better. Jury is still very much out on that one.

Build Your Own Overlord

Gadgets Comments Off

Apr 052012

Within three years, any five year-old will be able to design and make a robot like this, designed specifically to rip the heads off Barbie dolls.

I have a confession to make: I am the Google+ user. You knew it had to be somebody, and thought it might even be someone you knew, and turns out, I’m that guy.

In my defense, I don’t use it in anything like a “social” way (that’d be like talking to yourself on the subway). When I see something of interest on the internets, I send it to my own private stream at Google+, like taking a note. It makes me feel hip because I’m using The Cloud.

But it’s mostly just me on there, along with some snake oil salesmen blathering about how to use Google+ for your business, and Google employees like former CEO and current Chief-“Why the Fuck are You Suing/Investigating Us Now, Too?”-Ambassador of Non-evil, Eric Schmidt.

As I do anyone whose posts I can follow, I consider Eric a close personal friend, and today he let me know about something really interesting.

The end of humanity.

More specifically, the really cool capitalistic side of it. Here’s what Eric sent to me:

An amazing project from MIT, Harvard and Penn aims to make print-on-demand robots a reality for the average person by the end of the decade. This is what the future will look like.”

And then this link to MIT’s site. To summarize, MIT is spearheading a project to develop “a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours.” Project leader and principal investigator MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Professor Daniela Rus, is quoted as saying, “We believe that it has the potential to transform manufacturing and to democratize access to robots.” According to the MIT article:

Researchers hope to create a platform that would allow an individual to identify a household problem that needs assistance; then head to a local printing store to select a blueprint, from a library of robotic designs; and then customize an easy-to-use robotic device that could solve the problem. Within 24 hours, the robot would be printed, assembled, fully programmed and ready for action.”

Yes, we’ll be able to “print” our own robots, designed to do what we want them to do.

Of course this means we’re all going to die, but, admit it, this is so much cooler than the Matrix movie bullshit way you thought robots would end up killing us all.

Thomson Titanium Handlebar

In less grim manufacturing news, I hope I get to see more of Thomson’s suddenly expanding line of products. Bikerumor.com mentioned these again today, and what appears to be the reality of some new Thomson components is pretty exciting stuff. Like a lot of people searching for bolt on and forget bike parts, I’ve been a fan of Thomson stuff for a whole bunch of years. It’s sort of wonderful beyond words to see them potentially expanding not only their level of technology (dropper seatposts!), but materials (carbon road bar!). And they’re going to try to keep production in house as completely as possible? This might be the first shots in a revolution of genuine high-quality bike parts that don’t look like they came out of the same factory making Gummi Bears and wall clocks for Wal-Mart.

I just hope the insta-bots let me live long enough to see it.

Most Absurd German Bike Award, Winner Announced

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 212012

As I slouch slowly toward my new Portland life (so far I’ve only managed to put my waterproof Gore pants into a large bag and “visualize” driving for three days), I can already feel a kind of kinship with the bike culture there. It’s pretty creepy.

Case in point, my first annual Most Absurd German Bike Award (MAGBA), which I intend to award occasionally, considering the endless supply of candidates who seem to be constantly vying for this award. I’d fully expected this to come down to a pair of German automobile manufacturers’ “innovative” bicycle designs. This would make perfect sense for me, as I’ve featured the Porsche bikes already, and my deranged rambling usually focuses on the sad and tragic intersection of bicycles and corporations.

But today I find myself suddenly and inexplicably compelled to swerve way off course and include in the finals a German hippie bike dude’s useless DIY art bike project. Yes, my attention this morning is drawn as much to part-time devil for a clutch manufacturer and full-time weird old dude, Didi Senft’s homemade “Rake Bike” as it is to this ridiculous BMW mountain bike.

Which of these is the Most Absurd German Bike? It’s a classic battle: the little guy, hell-bent on creating a bike so profoundly stupid that even he himself will not be able to fully understand why it exists; versus a giant corporation, obsessed with efficiency, performance, and innovation, creating a bicycle so comically outdated as to become its own kind of performance art.

In considering the sheer absurdity of both bikes, I have to give the win to BMW on this one. It was close, but BMW scored major points for creating a near perfect replica of something Specialized would have built in the late ’90s. Didi brought some game, no doubt. It’s not every day you see a bike that could disembowel both its rider and dozens of shocked onlookers. But any time you’re dealing with bicycles built for art’s sake, the details matter, and it’s the little details of the BMW that stand out.

That classic 1-1/8″ head tube alone might have secured the win, but combined with the over-the-top aluminum hydroformed main frame and (apparently mandatory on cheesy automaker bikes) Crank Bros. wheels, the BMW really pulls away. As if for good measure, BMW phoned in every aspect of this frame design to a “close your eyes and pick from the catalog” Taiwanese factory, but chose to make a big deal about the stem design, which looks ghastly. They also wisely chose to opt for a piece-of-shit Kalloy seatpost and, clear mark of a champion, interrupted seat tube with pierced intersection/trailing top tube nub.

When you think about it, Didi merely made a bike out of rakes. BMW, however, has created a bold counterpoint to the resurrected German Bauhaus art movement, creating a bicycle that proves rationality is way overrated, and that mass production really is the polar opposite of artistic self-expression. Seen in that light, this gloss black, hydroformed homage to early suspension design is up there with Warhol’s soup cans, which I hear Didi Senft is welding together and hand-painting into an enormous pedal-able likeness of Marilyn Monroe.

Touché, Clutch Devil. See you next month.

And Just Like That, Hydraulic Road Discs are Here

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Mar 072012

Get used to seeing the non-drive side profile of road bikes.

Thanks to Facebook, we have a pretty accurate idea of exactly when the next major change in cycling took place. Before Cyclingnews drove the point home, phone camera shots of Colnago’s C59 Disc had already begun to surface. Given the time difference between the U.S. and Taiwan, it was around 3:30am that my friend Chuck posted a few photos of the Formula hydraulic disc levers on the C59 and TRP’s Di2 hydraulic levers. So let’s call it: 3:30am Eastern, Wednesday, March 7th, 2012, disc brake road bikes arrived.

Volagi certainly called it, and they deserve a lot of credit for taking a risk and going off the front of the pack so early. It’s moves like that that give small companies a foothold and a chance to grow, and it certainly looks like Volagi has the wherewithal to welcome more and more companies aboard. Personally, I tend to think the Liscio frame design Volagi’s created is actually pretty unique even without the disc brakes and leaf-sprung top-tube/seat stay design Specialized liked so much. In some ways, the Liscio has more in common with “adventure” brands like Salsa than it does Colnago’s new C59–and that’s exactly why Taipei’s unveiling of hydraulic disc brakes on “pure” road bikes is so significant.

But what does it all mean? Should you panic? Rejoice? Hoard canned food? Here’re some things this will probably mean:

Electronic shifting will become standard equipment on all high-end bikes. Yes it will. You need the interior space of the hood for a hydraulic master cylinder and piston, leaving no room for the clock-like shifter mechanics we once knew and loved. Big Winners: Shimano. Big Losers: SRAM and Campy. (Campy made a valiant effort there, but everybody is going to design around the Shimano electronic shifting system.)
At least some crazy shit is bound to happen. Yeah, Tyler shouldn’t have been scrubbing his brakes so much on that descent, but the bottom line is that weird shit always happens when there’s a tectonic shift in the cycling industry, and there is a vague whiff of “let’s see what happens” out there regarding hydraulic discs on road bikes. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, some small percentage of chaos will occur around this, likely including a whole lot of carbon fiber recycling. Despite all the amazing stress analysis and structural design programs out there, plenty of companies proved unable to build a basic ‘cross fork that didn’t howl like a banshee, and plenty of carbon fiber frameset manufacturers still find out the real durability of their stuff once the warranties start piling up. And let’s not even talk about wheels. Big Winners: Mayhem. Dentists. Big Losers: The unsuspecting.
“Road” techs are going to get their asses handed to them. Plenty of great mountain bike mechanics can’t set the angle on STIs or Ergos to save their lives, but I’ve met more than a few bike techs from highly regarded boutique road-specific shops whom I’d not let within a kilometer of my hydraulic brakes. Most of these guys are gifted bike techs who just happen to lack any mechanical aptitude whatsoever–meaning they can install the hairiest of power meter equipment and they never forget to unwind their torque wrenches after each use, but changing light bulbs around the house is a challenge, and they haven’t the slightest idea what makes an automobile go. With even the best instructions, there are just fundamental mechanical things you need to know in order to make hydraulic disc brakes work consistently, and genuine road bikes with hydraulic disc brakes are going to force the issue. Big Winners: UBI, Lennard Zinn. Big Losers: The unsuspecting.
Cyclocross bikes are going to be awesome. Seriously, electronic shifting with hydraulic disc brakes? A few possible cases of “rotor brand” aside, you’ll be able to tell the guys with the hydraulics, because they’ll be the ones riding one lap up on the field. At least until their bikes need serviced. In most ‘cross conditions, the differences will be dramatic. Big Winners: The 1%, sponsored athletes. Big Losers: Canti’s, “Suicide Levers,” people who race ‘cross in nice weather.

Now we sit back and watch each brand decide whether to adopt or not, and when. By this time next year, the road disc thing likely still won’t have sorted itself out completely, and we’ll be looking at the first waves of major 650b wheel size adopters. Sometimes, I’m happy not to be a product manager at a bike company.

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