i agree with you that RS has caught up bigtime with the pike and reba line and the rest of their 06 platforms, i have a sid actually and also a marathon, i have had duke, psylo, and pike, so its with some backing that i can say that the marathon line has some great things going for it, for starters its bone stiff, more than any other 30mm fork ive tried (read: pretty much all of em)blue said:
as for manitou, my opinion is similar to the guy that stated that its a cycle, manitou got a window of opportunity when RS went bankrupt, and i think their problem was that they tried to take over the world and started to make fork lines like there was no tomorrow, trying to be the OE kings and that didnt work too well, the same thing had been the bane for RS when they started producing in china which is remarkable in the sense that youd figure they would have paid attention and learned the history of their own market.
plus, in the upper end of the market, their flash/technology strategy didnt pay off too well, because you can get away with an inferior product once but not repeatedly, lots of marketing and nice stickers and wonderfully written hype will only get you so far. so when combining their stubborn efforts to reinvent the wheel (with the associated retooling costs) every year, and the quijotesque fight for the 300usd bike market, well, sh*t happens.
