I've always felt that there are a lot of parallels between bicycle design and digital technology- how standards get picked, how that influences what gets made a

I've always felt that there are a lot of parallels between bicycle design and digital technology- how standards get picked, how that influences what gets made and what is successful and what fails. Is the current parallelogram design of the derailleur really the best? There's no way to find out, because so much already depends on how a derailleur currently works and would be very slow to change. Also consider that the original mountain bike wheel diameter of 26 inches was apparently picked because the import tariffs from asia (a large majority of all bicycle parts are produced in asia) on those goods was significantly lower than larger wheel sizes (small wheels were considered to make a bicycle a children's toys and taxed at a lower rate) Compare that with how we ended up with javascript as the default standard language of the web browser....