jaxgtr

Ugggg.....well buy you time pedals now, beat the rush before they go down the tubes or quit making them.

https://bikerumor.com/2021/02/22/sra...w-acquisition/

GlennR

Damn capitalists. They're as bad as Apple, Google and Amazon.

merlinextraligh

Capital flows to its highest and best use. Time was dying, but had some valuable intellectual property. So instead of what was good about Time just dying, SRAM is putting capital into it. If SRAM had a monopoly position and was using it to kill viable competitors, your Apple etc analogy could have some traction. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. SRAM while powerful,is hardly dominant, and there are constant new small inventors entering the market.

And a free market system that allows people to steer their labor and money in a way they see fit, and reap the benefits of their success is responsible for all the cool bike stuff we have.

Simple example, Quarq. They invested tons of labor and capital to develop a power meter that was affordable compared to an SRM. Without a capitalist system that gave them the freedom and incentive to risk their sweat and treasure, we wouldn’t have affordable power meters. Of course they sold to SRAM, but the incentive to be able to cash out and see a return was part of what motivated the investment from which we all benefit

GlennR

Powertap.

Don't get me wrong, they can spend their money anyway they want.

Greiselman

Maybe we'll see SRAM power meter pedals in 2022?

merlinextraligh

So I should have said affordable crank based power meter. However, Saris and Powertap proves my point. The same profit motive and economic freedom to pursue your own ideas gave us powertap, and power pedals that are an alternative to those such as Time’s. The existence of companies such as Saris show the value of free markets, and dispel the idea that SRAM is abusing market power.

And BTW, if Apple, Amazon, Google, and SRAM are abusing monopoly positions, that is the opposite of a free market, capitalism, not and indictment of free markets.

GlennR

Sram has only 15% of the market compared to Shimano's 80%.

veganbikes

I get people love Time pedals and are mad by this but is a smart move for SRAM since they didn't have any pedals so they are losing out on parts of the market. Granted I don't really like SRAM I just saw it as a good move for them.

Fox Farm

So the big question for SRAM is will they keep the current Time pedal style or reinvent it? I have been considering switching to Time but don't want to do this and end up with a system and no replacement parts.

merlinextraligh

So SRAM growing, and becoming a more powerful competitor to Shimano should be a good thing for consumers, not an abuse of market power, which your damn capitalist post alluded to.

Marcus_Ti

This is the way these things have always worked in the real world. So yes, it is.

GlennR

You don't know me. My comment was in response to a topic that Sram bought Powertap just to shelve a competitor.
Your "allude" was incorrect.

I've had Sram Rival, Force, Red Red eTap and Rival CX1 along with a few Zipp products.

merlinextraligh

True I don’t know you but I know what you wrote.

You indicted SRAM as a “damn capitalist” and compared them to Apple, Google, and Facebook who have routinely been accused of abusing monopoly positions and stifling competition by acquiring smaller competitors.

My posts were simply that SRAM isn’t abusing a dominant market position, and that the damn capitalist system helps us to have the things we have. Your subsequent posts would appear to agree with that, or at least not contradict it, so I’m not sure what your point is, unless the first post was intended as sarcasm.

And it would make zero sense for SRAM with a 15% market share to buy Time just to shelve a competitor, when That role would if needed, would logically fall to Shimano with 80% market share.

merlinextraligh

The point is that abusing market power is the opposite of free market capitalism. Rent seeking by monopolies is anathema to capitalism. By definition Monopolists are not capitalists. They want to use their market power to avoid the workings of capitalism and free markets

The answer to abusive monopolies is enforcement of antitrust laws, not the elimination of free markets.

So the point would be better made “Damn Monopolists” not “Damn Capitalists”

msu2001la

Agreed. I get that people are upset about what SRAM did with Powertap, but SRAM has acquired many other companies and not done this. SRAM has invested massively in Zipp, for example, and has pushed the brand into new categories and developed many cutting edge products as a result.

Also worth noting that Time was in trouble. Their founder (Rolan Cattin) died in 2016 and shortly thereafter they were acquired by Rossignol Group. Rossignol has been looking for a buyer for Time for a while. They had already sold off the rest of Time's products, licenses, trademarks and their carbon frame manufacturing factory to another cycling start-up company. Rossignol kept the pedal and shoe business to sell as a separate entity for a higher price.

It makes no sense that SRAM would buy the Time pedal/shoe component (which is the most valuable part) just to kill it off, especially considering they don't have any other pedal products in their portfolio.

Marcus_Ti

The point is...if you're going to be strictly and semantically accurate--these 'free markets' things you're speaking of never have and never will exist. Strictly speaking. The way the function now, IRL, is how they always have--and probably always will.

Psimet2001 

Time still has a solid following (myself included) who are obsessed with the ATAC offroad platform. They crapped the bed with their road offerings around the turn of the century. Their time has passed on that market.

SRAM - has always been a company of acquisition. This is nothing new. There was a time they did seem to just waste their money in acquisition to shelve a competitor. I haven't seen them do that in a long time. Every acquisition since they had to pull back from their IPO seems to have been led by a thirst to own the IP. Meyer at Quarq is a visionary. One of the few real ones that I have seen in the cycling industry that also has the power to make marketable products.

The general consensus in the industry is that SRAM purchased PowerTap for the pedals. Time is a proven pedal platform to build off of. Not like they could build on Shimano. Garmin built on Exustar after they had a falling out with Speedplay and ended up with Look. Wahoo bought speedplay seemingly to build off that power pedal idea that Garmin laid the groundwork on with them. All "roads" in power seem to be converging on pedals for some asinine reason. IIRC Powertap was/is Exustar.

Don't forget SRAM is mainly an offroad company. Time has one of the best and most loved offroad pedal systems in the world outside of SPD. Crank brothers has more market share but they also have way more ancillary products than Time did. Time had bikes.....they sold that division off on its own to make way for the SRAM acquisition it looks like. There's some ties within SRAM and Tony Karklins - the guy who bought the Time Bicycle frame business.

Kinda sucks - it's this weird Chicago/Arkansas connection with a lot of people I have been around, who are nice to me, but keep me at arms length. As such I will continue to post stuff like this (I know you're reading this). I tend not to talk smack about good friends but hard to be good friends when you're on the outside.

Psimet2001 

Yerp. No matter what format is attempted to create free markets at the end of the day someone actually owns the market itself and will either knowingly or not have influence over it - regardless of the players in the markets themselves.

"Well now you know"

merlinextraligh

Its more than semantics, because diagnosing the problem correctly is necessary to address the problem. If you conclude that Apple etc are greedy capitalists and capitalism therefore sucks and must be replaced, you get to a very different place than if you conclude Apple etc, are monopolists that are thwarting a capitalist free market economy, then you get a very different answer to how you deal with that threat to free and open markets.

merlinextraligh

and to take it totally over the top. Free markets have functioned to create an amazing amount of wealth, in the world, with 1.2 billion people raised out of abject poverty since 1990, a U.S. where we enjoy a wealth of high end bikes and the ability to pay for them, rising incomes, pre pandemic, for all Americans, and rising faster for lower income and minority groups,

Admittedly, the pandemic has set some of this back. However, the system you denigrate also created pharmaceutical companies, with the capital, ingenuity, and expertise to develop a vaccine in unprecedented time.

So tell the 1.2 billion people raised from abject poverty, and the 5 billion that over the next two years will avoid Covid 19 by vaccines developed by capitalists how bad it’s always been and how much capitalism sucks.

One major problem today is very few people are even aware of the fact that capitalism and free markets have saved over a billion people from poverty. Google it.

But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good narrative.

Marcus_Ti

You mean vaccines funded by government research grants?

Speak for yourself about not letting facts get in the way of a good narrative. Please take your projecting off to P/R.

merlinextraligh

No doubt government funding allowed for the rapid development of Covid 19 vaccines. However, the government didn’t create or manufacture those vaccines. Without the expertise, and manufacturing ability of large pharmaceutical companies which exist as the result of capitalist profit motive we would have no vaccine for many years.

Hiro11

Powertap died because no one buys hub-based power meters any more, not because of some dastardly plot.

Psimet2001 

eh - powertap was selling pedals. They were doing "OK" with them.