1) windsurfing is much harder to learn and not as enjoyable at first (in fact it can be a pain) so people give up quicker
2) kitesurfing, for the new guy, is a lot more spectacular and gets a lot of "wows" on the beach, so it attracts more people
3) I must admit kitesurfing equipment is a lot lighter and easier to carry around
4) Windsurfing, being an older sport, has an "old" image. People generally think its slow and boring, and that you need huge waves to have fun. However things have changed drastically. Take a look at a few videos on http://www.continentseven.com to see what I mean
Now it's all about instantaneous transitions between tricks. Pal Takats's video explains it brilliantly and impressively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW9lncIP4ac
Strongly recommended!
Torstein Horgmo debuted it in 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFGqkq3QqRE
And now they're expected at each X Games: http://snowboarding.transworld.net/1000194812/featuresobf/tw...
Combined with the ease of spreading info was the proliferation of indoor skydiving wind tunnels. Being exposed to a new idea and then being able to practice it in the tunnel for an hour with out having to make 60 skydives means the lag between innovative ideas to wide spread adoption is so remarkably short now.
Edit: youtube.com/watch?v=PPmWOA9cVM4&feature=plpp
PS: Check out birdmen the original dream of flight on netflix and take note of how many times they mention dead people.
I don't jump anymore, but I was active from 2003 to 2007ish. Curious if we've met elsewhere, online or irl... drop me an email if we did.
There are also ones in NC and two near LA. Granted to do one hour by yourself is hard to do you can split it in 15 or 10 minute blocks, which was likely what he meant.
"In the early days, there were small pockets of kiteboarders spread across the world. These pioneers didn’t work in isolation; they were able to share their ideas on sites like KiteForum.com. They posted clips of new tricks that they’d landed, improvements they’d made to their gear, safety tips, amazing new locations, and anything else they thought other kiteboarders should know."
"The lag time between someone inventing a new trick and everyone else catching up is much smaller when the innovators can distribute their ideas instantly."
Think about where we would be if companies didn't have to spend billions of dollars to acquire patents and, instead, invested that money towards driving true innovation.
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm
edit: Just checked and kitesurfing gets three mentions in the index and is the main non-software case study of chapter 7.
Nevertheless, I agree with the author that in the early days collaboration (and competition) between innovative kitesurfers drove the sport forward. Even today the innovation does not come from the main manufacturers who do nothing but repackaging last year's models.
Quadcopters wouldn't have taken off if MEMS gyros hadn't gotten cheap and easier to build with (flat Z-axis), possibly due to video game controllers and smartphones. Electric flight probably benefited from laptops then smaller portables pushing li-ion manufacturing.
If you look at helicopters of a few years ago, just getting a single yaw gyro was expensive.
For quadrotors, you could only get props for the counter-rotating motors in a limited selection of diameters & pitches.
