Originally Posted by
L8APEXN
"the best innovation in recent years for mountain biking" is the uninformed claim that you made. Droppers aren't some new invention as you falsely claimed.
Yeah, I was indeed late to the dropper party since I was the third (fourth?) guy in my extended group to get one. I was a hold out until I saw how well they held up and how they made riding more fun.
I don't know where you're getting your sales figures but 2004 was the year that they were everywhere in the media (MBA, Velo News, Dirtrag, etc.)
Yours was a very unusual group then. For several years after I got mine in 2005, almost nobody even know what the heck it was. Everyone thought I had a seat post shock. Yes, GD got SOME coverage (that's how I knew about it) as as something new, but nobody was raving about them, and not a lot of people bought them. They were largely written off as a gimmick. I road with a lot of of folks I hooked up with through MTBR in CA from 2004-2006. These are the guys who were buying new bikes practically every year. I saw ONE besides mine.
The fact is that droppers were extremely rare before around 2007, and still uncommon until a few years after that.
Go look at some of the "show us your rigs" threads from MTBR from 2004-2007 and tell me the percentage with GDs you see. Gonna be really, really small.