nsahbti

My 2016 goal is to buy a Ducati and a mountain bike, AND the mountain bike should be the cheaper one

Great initiative!!! I have four great trails I ride on a weekly basis, they are not on the app. How do I add trails for the benefit of you-all? The missing trails are on all the other apps (Great Brook Farm for example)

"sb66. it's the best seller, outperforms everything, graves chooses it over the fad bikes, most their staff also prefer it but the market and shops don't want it??" This indicates to me a fail in their marketing process. If you have such a good product, it is the job of your marketing people to send the right messages out to potential buyers and dealers. If the marketing team cannot do that, you need to think of a change. Yeti will turn to follower from leader if the keep up like this. I have a 66, my fav go to bike, it is good, very good and I prefer it to lots of newer 27.5 I try. Analyzing the MTB marketing dynamics in the past few years, you see everyone trying to message "we have the best bike", Yeti even named it SB (for super bike), there is minimal differentiation, even the videos they use for marketing look the same and present similar capabilities. If you need an example for good marketing check out Santa, each one of their bikes has a clear message about what it is intended to do and who is the target user population, they did not show their 5010 doing loops in the air or big drops cause it is not intended to do so. I saw their video and could relate to the type of trail riding it was intended for. Yeti, you have some of the best bikes out there, just tell people about them!!!

Sorry, Mike Jones, I could not go through more than 26 seconds of the video, the music choice gave me a literal nausea. Hope it is not related to a recent concussion.

And just to be fair with myself, with the manufacturers and with the readers here, it is not only the bike manufacturers I blame here, it is also the parts and component manufacturers who are, in some cases monopolizing specific areas. Take gears for instance, there is a duopole between SRAM and Shimano, prices are very similar and performance is very similar. Same thing goes to shocks, the duopole between Rock Shock and Fox. These component manufacturers are taking way more than they should, we as consumers should seek good products from new manufacturers in order to support competition. A good example is the tire industry with multiple manufacturers, you don't see a tire going for $800, they are within the $35-$80 and you can find very good performers at the lower range. I am only wondering if there is one more entity to blame in this price frenzy, us, the consumer for sheepishly drinking the coolaid and paying the asked price. Don't get me wrong, the bikes and components are great and I think we are at the best time ever for bike technology, it is just the price I am mad about.

So to all you guys who ride an $11000 bike (and probably crash a porsche every other weekend), make sure you wear your Oxford Cardigan to the tracks, you are not in my gang.

I've been riding top line bikes for about 13 years now, before that I rode the "ordinary" Treks. My first top line was a Rocky Mountain TSRX-50 which I got for $2800, friends thought I was crazy to spend so much on a bike, even though it had tons of technology built into it. My latest bike is a Yeti SB66 Alloy frame. The Yeti was $4000, I did not have the funds for the Carbon frame. When Santacruz came out with the Solo and Bronson is when I stopped dreaming of a top line mountain bike as an option, they all now fall into the category of "bike porn" something to see online but never really have. I am afraid my Yeti is my last "every other year bike", I now have to buy a bike every five years, hopefully it does not break. Welcome to the "bike porn" era, where good bikes are like formula 1 cars. Now there is no real justification for these prices. Bike companies used to make a profit margin of 12% in 2003 (I did some work related) and since then just got more efficient, meaning their margins are way higher. tho their defense they spend more on promotions and advertising, but not even close to reducing margin. Looking into cost of goods: the manufacturers claim the technology needs to be paid for and that sophisticated manufacturing process is costly. well here is the news flash: in 2003 the available components on my Rocky Mountain were top tech and manufacturing process just got better since, not the other way around. Today we have automation at an arms length and 5 axis machine tools more available at lower costs, not to even mention, most manufacturers have their frames and components built in Asia (my Yeti frame).

RIDE A MARATHON!!! Trans Alps anyone?

It is hard to argue on this topic without understanding the margins these companies work with. I have a $2000 Kawasaki and they come up with new tech each year. I know for a fact that Kaw puts in a ton of $$ in marketing, sponsorships, and also into R&D.

Worth mentioning where the name 5010 came from: They first named the bike "Solo" but were sued for copyrights. So they changed the name to numbers that spell out SOLO [5010] in a visual way. By the way, if you translate 5010 to inches, it spells @#%$@ in Hebrew.