Bicycle Evolution

Yesterday, I spent about 90 minutes in a local bike shop testing some new road bikes. My first reaction was how astonishing bikes have evolved in the last six years since I last bought one. But now in retrospect, I've changed that view. Lookit, no machine requires as much physical human energy and makes such efficient use of it as the bicycle. Exercise equipment will gladly accept your energy but it does little with it - rarely does it even use this to power it's 5-volt intelligence. So I believe we are extremely sensitive to the slight advances in bicycle design since WE are so intimately tied to the energy system.
For example, those funny little shoes you see on those skinny guys clicking about the coffee shop - do you need those to do any serious biking these days? The reason they developed was because most people bike in sneakers that have evolved to absorb (get rid of) the energy transfer to your foot from all that pounding the pavement. The bicycle shoe developed as a reaction in recent years because you want to maximize your energy delivered to the pedals - so your sneakers are working against you here!
Unlike the automobile, efficiency in cycling is directly in-line with speed and racing. As a result, all the design activities in cycling have been towards that single goal: make it more efficient since efficiency is speed. In automotives, this is clearly not the case. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the engineering design that went into Formula-One racing actually help us all have more efficient cars ! (there problaby is a small tie-in but I can't see it now)

Unfortunately, making the cycle more efficient introduces various contradictory sub-goals: make it lighter vs. make it stiffer, or make it comfy vs. make it fast. Furthermore, since buying a bike is like buying a car (a mode of transportation) but also like buying clothing (many complex interfaces with the human body) cycle manufacturers can make the slightest change in a design that seems, from our perspective to seem like a real technological leap. The danger in all this is that the ignorant consumer (even one who hasn't gone in a bike-shop for 6 years) can often be tricked into Formula-One spec'd racing bikes!