"So how do we get products designed for smaller riders to succeed in the market?"
before i get to that! one more thing. when you write about the aerodynamics of 650c (when anyone writes about it) there is a pretty big element people tend to leave out. every time i went to the wind tunnel - every time! - to see wheels tested, the same hub, same spoke count, was used on all the wheels. why? because HED (as an example) made a "wheel". a rim. and a hub. and the hub had 80mm of flange width, c:c, and 24 holes or however many.
and i would say wait! same hub, same rim, that's not equity. wheels of different sizes of the same
strength, that is equity!
so finally we had HED make us wheels, 90mm front and rear (because, as you note, less steering torque because less wheel, less surface area). we had these built on special hubs, 60mm flange width. 16 spokes in the front, 20 in the rear. the
men rode our bikes too. at various times we had wolfgang dittrich, jimmy riccitello, jürgen zäck, ryan bolton, spencer smith, kenny glah, scott tinley, scott molina, ray browning, and a bunch i'm forgetting, all on 650c wheels.
we augmented this by building a fork with greater spacing between the blades, like the old wynn fork that tested so well. we had a river of space between this (narrower) wheel and the blades.
anyway, that's something that bugs me, i guess, that the industry has had only enough imagination to copy what we did back in the late 80s and early 90s, but not to really understand and optimize it.
how do we build better bikes? that will sell? i think we have advantages now we didn't have in the early 90s, when i was flogging this at QR and you were flogging it at kestrel (and eventually at cervelo). we have a much better pathway to get our narrative to the consumer. could you imagine, in 1993, a successful consumer direct bike brand? remember the attempts? why can that model work now? we have better pathways to purchase. informational pathways.
and i think this has caused an urgency at B&M. now the LBS doesn't have the luxury to remain imperious, retro, ignorant, chauvenistic. now it's got to hustle. why have 1,500 of these guys come through our fit workshops? because they know they have to hustle now. they have to be better, better informed, nuanced, educated.
further - and i might be wrong about this - i think women are less likely now to passively accept the counsel of men, whether those men are coaches, husbands or the person at the LBS. back then women thought a 650c wheel was demeaning to them. they wanted the big wheel, like the men had. i think the market is sophisticated enough to respond, "do you also want to wear pants that the men wear, that are 6 sizes too big for you?"
and finally, the market has been strangled for 650c frames, but the 650c infrastructure is still there. i didn't have that luxury in 1988, but cannondale (as an example) has it now. hopefully all the people who worked at cannondale during the era of this bike are gone...
so the institutional memory of its eventual market failure won't be remembered, and cannondale will give it another try ;-)
imagine if somebody comes out the gate with a strong 650c narrative and product offering. if it's really true that no one is making 650c production frames right now (road or tri) this might be the very time to do it.
Dan Empfield
aka Slowman