April 22, 2015, 10:05 a.m. -  Lee Lau

#!markdown Tibor. I can't keep up. I'll respond here. First I didn't want to make up some stuff I don't know. Literally there's billions being driven to, for example, social media marketing analytics to try to figure out what makes things go viral. Rather than some disingenuous tripe about cause and effect imo it's better just to answer I don't know and move on from there. At the outset lets say I argue with your proposition that the 93% are just going to follow what reviewers or shops or media in general tell them. Let's talk about the 7% because that's the interesting part. They're the enthusiasts. The first movers and imo for smallish less mature industries like biking or say ski touring they have IMO arguably disproportionate effect. What biking has done is pay disproportionate attention to the first movers/7%. You see those first movers congregate in silos which the internet has allowed. They geek out over 650b, or over 27.5+ or over 29 before there was general market adoption. And the product managers or engineers are predisposed to be those geeks who get all hot and heavy about latest or greatest. So then there's a feedback of mutual enthusiasts geeks getting excited about new stuff for the sake of new stuff. But then mix in the top line factor of driving revenues which is latest and greatest and flashy and cool. I'd speculate its marketing and sales and product management etc. They have cost pressure. They have lets get new stuff out because new stuff drives sales pressure. They have personal biases from being bike geeks. So then you get all the miscellaneous new standards/crap being released to the market. IMO again that's industry and enthusiasts/7%/early adopter cycles. That's a combination of a large portion of the bike industry being a small silo'ed gong show with small testing groups and short-term lead time for pretty much everything. It's also a combination of latest and greatest mentality among enthusiast consumers and industry. Then bike media piles on for the most part trend-follow but with the one-off rare introspection article (this article is a perfect example) to show off their credentials of authenticity. This is speculation. I've not worked in the product development/marketing/sales cycle. I have been in the reviewer hype-generation cycle but am pretty much done with that for biking