Carbon spokes aren't necessarily a bad idea (it's been done successfully), but THESE carbon spokes are a bad idea.

The R-Sys is a cautionary tale to companies so anxious to sell a gimmick as innovation that they willfully ignore the warning signs that it maybe ain't such a great idea. Mavic clearly put too much emphasis in "new, radical," to the extent that they put the cart before the horse in designing for newness and radicalness before they designed for... good. For the R-Sys to change the way we thought about wheels would have required it to hold together a bit better. It may be that tubular carbon spokes acting in compression really are a great idea (though I don't think so - poor aerodynamics, and what do they do so much better than wire spokes?). Unfortunately, that great idea is now groaning under the weight of bad PR. No one's going to try something like this for a while. Well, okay with me. The R-Sys was never that great a wheel, even when it didn't explode.