February,
2009-- A
couple of years ago Black Diamond shocked a lot of us by openly
declaring war on Rottefella's effort to establish a "new
telemark norm" with their NTN binding. BD's announcement
that it had a new proprietary binding of its own rocked the tele
world, and the heat was turned up last year when "The
Battle of the Titans"
erupted into a war of words between BD CEO Peter Metcalf, and
then-Rottefella head Ulf Berjerknes. In a singular interview
with a Norwegian newspaper, Metcalf admitted that BD was experiencing
some "unforeseen difficulties" with their still in
development binding, and Berjerknes openly charged Black Diamond
with having promised more than it could deliver, comparing BD's
situation to "asking a little girl what she wants more than
anything else in the world, and when she answers 'a live pink
horse with angel wings and golden hair,' you promise her that
she will get it next Christmas." As one would expect on
our Telemark Talk Forum, BD's effort, once called "The Holy
Grail Binding," was immediately dubbed the "Pink Pony,"
and it soon became clear BD
was indeed scaling back its development effort in order to focus on
final development and production of their first-ever tele and
AT boot line. Today, this "Battle of the Titans" appears
to have settled into a kind of stasis, with Rottefella having
moved forward with its NTN, and BD enjoying no small amount of
success with their new boots.
Does this mean that
BD no longer considers the NTN to be a threat to its own future
plans? Is BD counting on the NTN to fail? We asked Dave Mellon
about this, and we also asked him to comment on the struggle
the NTN boot makers have had to date in bringing to market NTN
boots that are durable and properly optimized for the new system.
Impressively, as he has often done in the past, Dave answered
our questions about all of this "different stuff generally"
with directness and candor.
So what of this
Battle of the Titans? Is it over before it even really got started?
Dave indicates he still strongly believes that there is much
room for improvement on the NTN's feature set, though he acknowledges
also that BD's effort to develop their own proprietary system
has not gone well, and that the current design they have been
working on has led only to a series of dead-ends. Yet I'm left
with the distinct impression that BD still wants very badly to
compete with Rottefella in determining just how we will connect
our tele boots to our skis in the future. And things are not
always exactly how they seem from the outside. It would be foolish
to count BD out at this point, and there may very well be more
than one way for the Utahans to skin that cat.
Once again, for
those of you following the saga of the NTN, and The Battle of
the Titans, here's a generous serving of pure red meat, this
time from a little different angle.
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