There's a concept in business and art called good enough. In both you eventually have to say, it's good enough to please some people and get it out. When vaporware never materializes I usually credit engineering with never being satisfied and pulling the trigger and getting it out.

We all know there's going to be a V2 so get V1 out there, figure out the problems, budget some retrofits and move onto V2. A marketer once told me, it's better to have something and ship it than to be perfect and never ship anything. It's a great way to go broke. Just a thought.

A similar situation happened with a PS3 game called Gran Turismo 5. It was something like 2.5 years late and was the sole reason I bought the PS3. I'll never buy an expensive game from Sony ever again. That and they leaked my personal info to the Internet and I had to put a lock on my credit reports. Thanks Sony. No I didn't mean that.

I like the Contador/Interbike reference. Cheers.

I have a feeling that if the product was almost complete they'd ship it. But if it really has wide variances in power readings they can't ship it. The first thing someone is going to do is to put the pedals on an SRM crank and compare power outputs. If it's off by more than 5% then the sales of the pedals will drop through the floor.

I agree that a $999 price tag would allow them to dominate the market. If you subtract the price of the pedals - about $200 say - it leaves $800 for the powermeter part of it.

If they could get a power meter down to the $500-750 range it'd be a game closer. Garmin is selling computer heads that cost that much - to get a power meter for the price of a well used now-obsolete wired SRM... that would be spectacular.

I suspect the pro team did this and told them to come back when it's closer.

I was planning to hold out for the garmin, but now I'm thinking I may as well not...

mostly because:
1) It's release date is now (much more?) quite nebulous
2) I can get two powertaps for the same price (which is all I would really need)
3) With powertaps, I don't have to switch stuff from bike to bike

You would think that they would at least outfit the Pro team, if nothing else for training and testing.

Agreed, I can't see how it's going to sell spectacularly at current pricing. Needs to be under $1k to start competing with powertaps.

I think they did.

I'm guessing the team said, "Come back when it's ready."

They might have been shocked and surprised that you believed they could do it cheaper. They're almost certainly already using Foxconn or a similar manufacturer, and have lots of R&D to pay off. It's going to be awhile before they can knock 30% off the list price.

By the way, the iBike "power meters" are also well under the $1000 price point, and haven't dominated the market....

The fact that you put "power meters" in quotations tells you all you need to know about that...

That's probably a good a reason as any other. If I had to guess I'd say it's battery life vs. message period (how often it transmits). Not enough transmits then any pedal analysis is useless. Too much and batteries die more quickly. Cheers

Nope...only people at Interbike are the sales people. They know nothing about costs. They said something to the effect of, "you know...that's what people have been telling us all day. I'm really surprised. I thought we were priced competitively."

Besides....cost <> price....the two are detached. Price is set by what the market will bear at a level of units that they want to sell.

They simply missed the target price. Being in the market daily I can tell you that if they came in under $1k then we'd be having threads about how hard it is to find any in stock anywhere. At 1500, anyone is better off picking a powertap, Quarq or other power device that is proven. Especially considering Garmin's extremely poor track record of actually using/testing any of their product combined with the fact that most power products companies have demonstrated that there is a steeper learning curve with power products anyway.

EDIT:...and yeah....iBike is not a powermeter...it's a power calculator.