Quoted post said:We've got Tons of companys, all making basicly the same bike already, under different names. KHS, Giant, Specialized, Marin, Trek, Cannondale, Iron Horse, Fuji, Pacific Cycles, Yeti, ect, ect. They don't work with you..they make a few models of bikes, with different frame sizes, and thats as custom as it gets.
Basically the same bike? 🙄 I guess there's no difference between a Giant OCR, Scott CR1, Specialized Roubaix, Look 585, Cannondale CAAD8, or anything else then. Let's not even begin with mountain bikes, where there are so many varieties and nuances on suspension design it's virtually impossible to not find one that matches your riding style perfectly..
Yes, each manufacturer makes a few models of bikes, but this is done with their own take on geometry, materials and construction, weight vs. longevity, stiffness vs. compliance, etc... and the sheer number of 'non-custom' manufacturers (the thing you're proposing we get rid of) virtually guarantees that you'll be able to find something that matches both your riding style and physical measurements.
Quoted post said:The bikes are inherently the same, with minor variations in frame geometry and construction. Even that is minimal, since the vast majority of these manufactures all get their bikes made out of the same chinese factorys.
Just because some companies may contract out their manufacturing to the same off-shore factory (or a factory that happens to be in the same country as another), doesn't mean the design, manufacture, or QA/attention to build quality is identical.
Quoted post said:I don't think the correlation with Home Depot is right either. Generic bikes are sold out of a generic store, and it would be expected, like at a car dealership, that they have a good, trained staff of car mechanics(er, Bike mechanics in this case) to help fit, fix and get you going on your generic bike.
A generic bike to call my very own! It will fit so well with my white Toyota Camry, in the garage of my McMansion situated in an exurban cul-de-sac full of fittings and knick-nacks from the Super Walmart 20 km down the road! 😉
Quoted post said:Anyway, you would have smaller bike shops still, that sell more 'exotic' bikes and also work closely with custom builders to get you a unique, custom ride tailored to you. Even the price of custom bikes would be lower, because Shimano and other component companys would be selling in higher volume and thus less price. Not only that, they'd have the same, friendly, highly skilled bike mechanics your used to dealing with today.
I don't think anyone is doubting this. There will always be the Richard Sachses and Serottas of the world. The issue a lot of people have with this idea is that in order to get a bike that matches their exact requirements, they'll end up forced to go to these no-expense-spared custom builders, because the wide variety of mainstream choices offered by the current marketplace no longer exist.
Quoted post said:I work in a local Computer shop, thats how we are, hell we even have customers that will sit with my co-worker and they'll kick back a couple beers together while they work on his computer.
No doubt your prices, especially at the low to medium end, have no hope in matching what Dell can offer. (Let alone some of those crazy loss-leader sales they run from time to time)
It's quite likely that customers choose your shop because you offer this level of service and attention to detail, despite the fact that things cost a little bit more.
Quoted post said:This is a aboslute farce. Bikes are already being mass produced in china by most of the 'big' producers.
Only the mass-produced, decent yet cost-effective and not all that 'exotic' ones. The bikes purchased by people who want a modest yet reliable set of wheels. Basically, it's simply a reflection that the production efficiencies you propose, for all practical purposes, already exist in the sectors of the bicycle market where it makes most sense.
Quoted post said:I totally disagree, since 8 years ago..how big was your hard drive? Not much I bet..if you had a 10 gig you were king of the hill. Not even a decade later we have 750 Gig drives.
I think you're conflating capacity and technological development, with reliability and quality of manufacture. The two are not interchangable.
Quoted post said:Have you ever looked at a Dell omniplex made back in the late 90's? I have..I have had the displeasure of working on them. Trust me, I think I know this more then you..computer quality HAS gone up. I'd rather have a largely plastic computer that looks decent compared to the corrugated metal, 2 ton eyesores we had not too long ago.
This may just be a humble cycling forum, but I think you'd be surprised at the varied backgrounds we all have..
External appearance of quality and ease-of-maintenance is not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the compromises in engineering which have meant that many components are built to be barely 'good enough for consumer use', so that they can be sold cheaply.
The computer industry went through a very ugly race to the bottom in the early 90s. Forever chasing a better price point, system board and component quality went down the tubes. The time of cheap and nasty Kalok hard drives, PC-Chips motherboards, and the unforgettable 'fake cache' scandal (This is my favourite. They would mount solid plastic cache-chip-looking blobs on the motherboard, and then hard-code the BIOS to report cache was present -- this saved a good $10 or so on manufacture, and hey, all motherboards look the same, so they must all be the same, no?)
Fortunately cooler heads prevailed in the market and stopped the chasing-price-at-all-costs insanity. Still, nowadays we still have modern examples of similar antics happening:
* hard disk manufacturers stripping their warranties and load-ratings bare, trying to placate consumers with a line such as, "You don't really need hard disks that are that reliable. Look! You'll save $20!" Fortunately customers fought back vigorously (data is a valuable asset), and now you can buy higher-quality hard disks again (for a nominal extra charge, of course.. a charge that's higher than what the cost saving was in the first place)
* unscrupulous CPU distributors (and some retailers) re-marking processors with a higher speed-grade and surreptitiously overclocking them
* power supplies that are bundled with many low end cases, that are utterly unable to cope with the load ratings they are specified for.. the resulting 'brown-outs' on the logic voltage lines causing system corruption and instability.
* the 'leaky capacitor' fiasco. Some major manufacturers of passive components switched to a cheaper 'counterfeit' dielectic medium for their capacitors, which over time causes excessive gas build-up in the can, causing them to 'pop' and leak [censored] all over circuit boards. Despite these leaky caps being used by almost all circuit board factories in the early 00's, only a handful of companies even admitted there was any problem.
* the Apple iBook logic board fiasco. Revision after revision of notebook logic boards that had critical weak-points, with the replacements continuing to fail, Apple sometimes refusing to honour repeat warranty obligations and/or using it as an opportunity to sell an extended warranty (!) It took a class-action lawsuit to get anything to happen.
I could go on, but I think that's enough to illustrate the point of what happens when you concentrate on price as the sole arbiter of 'progress'.
Quoted post said:As it is in the Bike world, this is what you get for service: A Warranty that baisicly says "It has a life time warranty..until it breaks".
That most definitely hasn't been my experience.
About 8 or 9 months into buying my first road bike, the rear rim started cracking at the eyelets. Rim was replaced with a higher quality replacement. No fuss, no charge.
I bought a second-hand lightweight wheelset from one bike store, and rear spokes started having a habit of breaking. After it happened for the second time, they called the wheel distributor for new set of spokes and rim, and completely rebuilt the wheel. No fuss, no charge.
I'm going through a 'warranty' claim right now with the suspension fork on my mountain bike -- except technically speaking, it's no longer under warranty. The fork internals crapped out, covering my wheel and front disc brake with gooey junk.
The bike shop (who I didn't buy the bike from!) fixed up the front brake at no charge, while overhauling the front fork at their standard regular service fee. However problems still remained, so they got the shock expert from Cannondale in to overhaul it again, free of charge. Problem still present. The fork then went under more intense scrutiny at Cannondale's regional office, who have pronounced the shock dead. Their response? We can replace the fork for you, or if you want to pay a little extra, we'll give you the option of upgrading to a better model.
Not bad for something they had every right to throw back at me and say, "Yep, dead fork, no warranty. Have a nice day! By the way, don't use your front brake"
Compare this to the universally bad experience people tend to have with computer industry service and support. Heck, forums just like these are a great example... the tech help given in cycling forums such as these is often because people don't want to bother going to their LBS for service, or they want to learn about stuff. And if the problem is too hard, the catch-all solution to the problem is, "This sounds difficult. Drop by your LBS and get them to sort it out"
Compare this to computing forums, where the tech-help boards are full of people who have all manner of problems with their computer, forced to rely on those forums for help because the manufacturers' [censored]-poor excuse for customer support has left them high and dry.
Quoted post said:A hit or miss system of LBS's to repair your bike, and a custom fit job..if you want to spend the extra 200 dollars for it. This might seem insignificant to someone spending a few grand on their bike..but to some one only willing to put down 400, thats a 50% increase in cost for that "customized" fit you get at a lbs.
I don't expect these fly-by-night bike shops you're talking about to be in the business more than a couple of months, with the sort of behaviour you're talking about.
All the shops I've seen go through a fitting and at least some sort of customisation process for all the bikes they sell, be it a $200 low end mountain bike for the local paths, or a $12,000 Carbon-Unobtanium alloy road bike.. along with free servicing for the first few months, as componentry beds in.
Quoted post said:Of Course, when Oil runs out 20 years from now, and we don't have any other method of transportation..that could all change. Then like it or not, the model I described above will be the one that the industry switches too. Then again..it wouldn't last, since us lazy humans don't like to use our muscles for anything...
Unfortunately though, for the very same reason cars lose favour, we'd be forced to localise industries -- in light of skyrocketing energy costs, the act of shipping generic bikes from massive factories half way around the world will lose its price advantage.
Taken to its extreme, it gets worse: in the process of all this mass-consolidation we'll have destroyed the very industry that could have blunted the fall. We'd be left with a batch of bikes in the Taipei dock-yards we can't possibly afford to bring home! 🙁
Heck, even the regional just-in-time logistics systems (economically efficient only due to the low cost of energy and transportation) would start to become unfeasible. Forget bikes, think of what will happen to the Wal-Mart business model itself, that so many supermarkets and other 'critical' shops now rely on :eek: Scary thought. Let's hope it doesn't get to that. (Worse still, the oil doesn't have to run out as such, it just has to get sufficiently expensive)
Quoted post said:Its nice to think about it though, in my opinion..and I still would like to see at least some of the major generic bike producers merge.
Don't worry, those in the industry that share your view (at least to some degree) have carved out their own place in the industry. The great thing about the free market is choice: that we can both get what we want, according to our own priorities: it doesn't have to be one way or the other.
The Trek bicycle group is a merger of Trek, Klein, Gary Fisher, LeMond, Bontrager, and probably a few others I can't remember. Giant is a massive manufacturing concern based in Taiwan. They contract out their massive factory production space to anyone who wants them to do their dirty work. All according to the customer's unique design and QA standard of course.
There's enough economy of scale in those two juggernauts alone to produce the benefits you want. Except pesky Gary Fisher and LeMond, they're ruining the Grand Generic Dream by making their own unique designs that are completely different to Trek's :p And how dare Giant allow their contract customers dictate their own terms on design and quality. Gotta eek out that extra 0.1% of operational efficiency.. 😉
On the retail side: there already are massive bike store chains selling quality yet not-so-exotic bicycles, at a price point that beats the smaller time bicycle brands and retail stores. If that's the purchasing experience you're looking for -- there you go. Vote with your dollars, the free market in action.
Quoted post said:I am so sick of looking at a specialized, then a Trek, then a KHS, and see not a damn real difference between them..when they could be working together to make their generic bike at a lower price with better technology. Thats my idea in a nutshell.
Maybe you're not looking hard enough.
Some of the lower-end bikes from each company are quite similar; this is mainly because in that part of the market, the margins are so thin, there is no "wiggle room" to allow for R&D or anything too fancy. It has to come from the higher-end, higher-margin bikes and trickle down to the cheaper ones as manufacturing costs allow.
Mass rebadging of the same generic item has often shown not to work in many sectors that have tried it. Let's take for example the car industry, which has tried it many times, often with failure. One of the few that have been able to make it work is VAG: the "VW Golf" chassis design (let's say this is roughly analogous to a bike frame) is used on the VW Golf/Beetle/Jetta, Audi A3, Audi TT, Skoda Octavia, and Seat Leon. The only way they made it work is by a having significant amount of differentiation from one version to the next (build quality, handling traits, interior appointments, form factor etc.)
In a complicated system of components like a car, there's scope to use only a few basic platforms like this and still provide enough differentiation for each of them to work in the marketplace. For something simple like a bicycle frame, it's easier for each company to just design and build their own frame according to what they want.
