Quote:
Originally Posted by unterhausen
When I looked at the "brands" page at Power Meter City, that clarified things for me a little. That's a lot of brands, it's not like Stages was competing against 4 companies anymore.
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Right, and when you have the situation where everything is outsourced to Taiwan this is actually a pretty simple system once everyone knows how to build them. You are inevitably going to have new brands come along.
PMs started out as niche things that were so expensive because they required a bunch of new engineering and development, at some point we hit some kind of inflection point and they have become commoditized. The computer parts were probably fairly expensive to develop 20-25 years ago, but now it's all commoditized and my guess is something like a stages barely has $25 worth of electronics in it and all the R&D for new stuff is a much bigger component of the cost.
If we end up with a bunch of Asian brands that cost less but work just as well as everything else those will cost less and there will be no real reason not to use them, especially if they are just tacked onto Shimano/SRAM/Campy cranks or spindles or spiders or whatever.