[stevenwoo]

I agree with you but Shimano has kind of built their entire business in the bicycle market on planned obsolescence, changing the number of gears to make equipment incompatible every few years and then making the highest end shifting electronic (and incompatible with prior versions) when they reached the practical limits of chain width for bicycles (they tried introducing a new standard chain size for bicycles that required replacing all the drive train components but that got rejected by the market, also they had more competitors back then). On the other hand Shimano dominates the bicycle market for bicycle components now and it's still only a tiny portion of their business - they sell a lot more fishing equipment.

[bamboozled]

This is a pretty good point. I also wonder how fixable bikes will be once they're "smart" and whether or not will still maintain "the right to fix".

One of the reasons why I absolutely love cycling, is that my bikes (and those of friends and relatives) are one of the only things left in my life I can fix myself, I save money and learn a lot from doing it, it's rewarding and incredibly cheap.

It would be really disappointing to see parts become a black box, more expensive and disposable.

Leave it to the eBikes I say.

[rhn_mk1]

That's another thing that gives me worries - or motivation. The electronical components are virtually guaranteed not to interoperate with competitor products (I hope I'm wrong though).

While electronics should open new hackability options, I'm afraid that's just not going to happen. ANT+ standard, for example, requires an NDA before you can make an implementation. Bike computers themselves don't have a serious open option (Jazda needs more work before it can be sold).