On 12/3/2017 4:18 PM, AMuzi wrote:
On 12/3/2017 5:59 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
In what seems to be perennial efforts to churn the market,
mountain bike designers went from 26" (ISO 559) to the ones
knicknamed 29" (ISO 622, same as 700C) because they claimed
the 26" was too small. Then they soon claimed the 29s were
too big, so they started selling what they called 27.5"
(584, same as 650B), supposedly "just right."

Does anyone know how successful the latter size has become?
Is it a dominant size now? Does it look like it's going to
stick around, or is this likely to become an orphan - as in
"nobody uses that any more"?


No idea.

http://www.bicycleretailer.com/studi...r#.WiSTRUq99PI


As I've mentioned before, in bicycles or any other industry, success is
wholly due to management's intellectual gifts. Failure has a thousand
causes, all external (weather, commodity prices, regulations, trade
flows, The Fed, politics, rim diameter, BB format and so on)

27.5 seems to be the new super-standard size, being an acceptable
compromise between 29 and 26. Definitely an advantage to the larger
wheel size on mountain bikes. It's not surprising that sales of the
newer wheel size bicycles are increasing, but if sales of mountain bikes
overall were down then it probably means lower sales of department store
quality bicycles.

Still a few 26" wheeled mountain bikes at the LBS for shorter riders,
but not many.

There are factors other than "management's intellectual gifts" in any
industry, factors beyond the control of management. Look at places where
bicycle usage has plummeted, and the reasons go beyond what management
could control. In China, massive investment in mass transit has made
transportational cycling much less necessary. On my alma mater's campus,
where almost everyone used bicycles to get around, the distances between
buildings, and the distances to off-campus housing have increased as the
university has expanded and bicycling is less practical.