Some very fair points, well made. For me, I am probably very sentimental about Campagnolo, but I just can't quite square their current groups in terms of design and functionality with what went before. I can't really see the timeline in design terms. Are they following trends, are they struggling to compete, is SRAM really biting at their ankles?Well, Campagnolo posted record profitability in 2020, 21 and 22 - 23 and 24 have been tougher, admittedly - that's a global issue and in the face of simply ridiculous pricing by competitors who have a massive over-production to cope with ... but what many don't really "get" is that as a family owned business, Campagnolo have many fingers in many pies. I work very closely with them and they are the *only* company I work with, out of about 40 really active accounts, to whom I extend credit terms - and I am not planning to change that - theyre doing OK, having re-invested very heavily in those "boom years" of COVID.
World Tour has less than nothing to do with the health or otherwise of a company - Zipp are unrepresented, for instance - and yet they are wholly owned by SRAM, so if presence / absence in the WT was any metric, they'd be cklased as "dead in the water" too. The same is true of a good many other brands - OK, it's true that as a component makers (of whom there are few) as opposed to a wheel maker (of whom there are many) presence / absence is noticed ... but it's not indicative, or rather, because of the way that sponsorship of components is now heavily influenced by bicycle manufacturer, the picture is a lot wider than it was even 10 years ago - if other component makers are making very attractive offers to OEM based on over-production, it should be no surprise that those bicycle brands will want to push those brands on their high end bikes & therefore, expose them through the teams. I haven't checked yet this year - but in 2023/24, of the 18WT teams, only 8 listed their component suppliers as sponsors or partners ...
Tooling, in terms of the dies etc, for everything Campagnolo have ever made, is still in the factory - but it's not the dies that are the problem. It's the heavier metalworking capacity and the fact that there's a massive opportunity cost in rolling back to a retrogressive product that shares little in materials technology or manufacturing with the current offering.
Maybe (and it's a radical idea that I know some business people have trouble with, I know), but maybe, Campagnolo are happy the size they are ... maybe they don't want to go down the retro line (very un-Italian anyway) and cost themselves a stack of cash to do that, to "grow", only to have to retrench in 10 years time or less - they are currently selling not only everything that they make but - crucially - everything that they *can* make, at the moment. That's where the opportunity cost would lay were they to "go retro" ... what would they have to "not make" or develop, or publicise, in order to make that viable?
The retro bubble based on "wasn't it lovely in the old days" will only last as long as there are people who remember the old days and are in a position to pay for the nostalgia. For one thing, they still have to be active cyclists, or, not to put too fine a point on it - alive. It's a limited timespan thing.
As a practical (and less morbid) example, I bought a Triumph Spitfire 1600 a few years ago - always wanted one in my 20s, couldn't afford it then - bought it and sold it within 3 months - why? Rose tints - I'd forgotten how much better modern cars perform compared to current offerings.
There's a massive risk that Campagnolo would have the same issue - new customers would fit their repro 9s kit and want to know where their 32 x 34 bottom gear had gone and, there would be exactly the same harping on about quality - because we all have those rose tints about how good it was in the old days - you can guarantee, just as when Colnago launched the Arabesque, there were hordes of people comparing it back to their 1980s built Master (which they no longer have to *really* compare it), Campag would suffer the same comparison back to something that never really was.
Half the people here are complaining that the product isn't innovative enough, the other half want to roll the clock back to the latter part of the last century ... so, working 6 years ahead, as component makers do (approx 6y from concept on a new range to commercialisation, same for Shimano, I would guess the same for SRAM looking at their refresh rate) , how to square that circle?
I have no answer to these questions. But I know what I like, and what I don't.