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Enshittification here we come
For example, the bottom bracket—the tubular bearing assembly at the bottom of the frame that the pedal axle threads through—has long been a fairly standard part.
Ha. Threaded vs press fit. English vs Italian thread. ISO square taper vs JIS. God knows how many types of BB, Hollowtech, Hollowtech II, …
Capitalism is the enemy of the consumer and society. The only people who benefit from moving away from standardisation are the manufacturers, trying to “lock-in” consumers to their products. Whats missing here, yet again, is regulation from governments.
This has been happening for over a decade in cycling. 10 speed and threaded bottom brackets were the last truly standardized bike era where there was marginal cross compatibility. Really, 8 speed was the last time most FD's worked across brands. Shimano is a patent troll, as are Cannondale Trek and Specialized.
The US patent and legal system is colonial era imperialistic nonsense that awards protections to any garbage a company tries to weaponize via the legal system. Defending yourself from these trolls will prevent you from any success with real innovations. The USA allows patents for common sense engineering practices of no note and language that is unclear and vague to enable large companies to suppress any real innovations that might threaten their profitable monopolistic stagnation or inferior criminal schemes to steal ownership like Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, etc.
I honestly hope some group in China realizes that they can leverage open source and standardization to invert their position on the geopolitical world stage. If China officially got behind this kind of standardization, it would benefit them most, but also all of the rest of us by giving us an alternative path out from capitalist exploitation using proprietary garbage. If I could buy a forever-serviceable standard quality Chinese carbon bike of an early 2010’s vintage for under $2k, I would do so and ditch the scam sticker brands all made in one of 4 factories on a single road in Taiwan. Those 4 have colluded to undercut and kill world competition and then instituted a price fixing monopoly. Likewise, I would gladly buy an entirely open and documented RISC-V CPU instead of x86, or a Phone with fully hardware register-level documented SOC/modem over any proprietary garbage with an orphaned kernel using Qualcomm/Broadcom garbage. Making such products in China seems like the ideal geopolitical move and the most world community-ist thing possible. Not to mention it is taking a big step onto the moral high ground.
