For reasons uninteresting to anyone, anywhere, I installed Crystal Reports XI on my computer at work yesterday. While browsing around the folders it created, I came upon this "images" folder that is used by a sample database:
Upon closer inspection, those bikes turned out to be Rocky Mountain bicycles. Rocky Mountain is a cool British Columbia based company here in Canada that has produced some really great mountain bikes, especially in that golden age when Ritchey and others were perfecting the art. Ritchey even worked with them. Rocky Mountain is now owned by a bigger Canadian company, but is still independently operated and still makes great bikes. I got most of the preceding info from Wikipedia.
I'm totally guessing here, but I imagine somebody developed a database and some Crystal Reports to go with it for Rocky Mountain, and then software people talked to bike people about making it the sample database/report thing as a way of free advertising or something, complete with massively long contracts and an abundance of legalese.
What I would rather think, however, is that some software developer working for Business Objects (which owns Crystal Reports which is in turn owned by SAP) is a rabid bike junkie who worked it in to the product with nobody's permission at all. That (while naive) is much more appealing, don't you think?
R A N T W I C KPPPS - On further inspection, the sample company in Crystal is a fictional one, xTreme bikes or something. Random picture nabbing, Rocky Mountain bicycle lover, or legal arrangement? You decide.
