Originally Posted by Thylacine
This is a very narrow parochial view, Alan. What you are assuming is that there is some quantifyable difference between telling someone inhouse how to make something, as opposed to telling someone in the shop across the road how to make something. In fact, all you're doing is making gross assumptions about quality control, as if someone who outsources manufacturing is throwing caution to the wind and doesn't care about the end product.
This is of course utterly ridiculous. It puts manufacturing on some pedistal like it's some black art that needs to be reveered. The cold hard reality for anyone that has anything to do with design and manufacturing, is that there are many, many facilities that have the ability to manufacture exactly to specification. It's not magic. It's a matter of quality design and quality control.
What's a heck of a lot more scarce is quality design.
Example - Do you honestly think that say if Apple Computers bought out all their suppliers and therefore owned the machines making their components that the quality would improve? Did you see Specializeds quality slip when a large chunk of it was purchased by Merida?
A reverence for manufacturing is cute in a 1950's kind of way, but it really has no emphasis in a post-modern world where design is king.
well - no, to pretty much all of this.
If the manufacturing is done in a contract plant, as most of it is. Then the completed frameset is brought to a facility for application of decals - the company applying applying the decals is not a manufacturer - it is a marketing company.
Most bicycle companies of any size now-a-days are not Mfgrs. they are marketing companies and that is what Alan was saying.
You can buy the same bike with 9 different names on it. It is getting to the point where having a bike from a Mfr. will mean getting custom.
Not a parochial view at all, a realistic one.
Not just in the bike biz, in most biz's these days.