Once you have sufficient market domination and brand recognition, it doesn't matter much whether you got your monopoly through customer choice, a royal charter, or whatever.
Most customers will never have heard of anything but Shimano and won't accept anything else without a very good reason. No chance with a similar product at the same price. A competitor will have to be significantly cheaper or offer signigicantly better functionality, leaving lots of room for the monopolist to cream off the profits.
Many companies have learnt the hard way the folly of believing that.
No folly in that one: it's the awful truth. People talk about "their Shimano bike" when they bought one in the supermarket, with a big bright Shimano sticker on the otherwise nameless bike......
And two days later I've bought some, and have an eye on some more. Great invention, this Internet thing.
-- [email hidden] (Simon Brooke) jasmine.org.uk~simonOpen ↗ ;; gif ye hes forget our auld plane Scottis quhilk your mother lerit you, ;; in tymes cuming I sall wryte to you my mind in Latin, for I am nocht ;; acquyntit with your Southeron ;; Letter frae Ninian Winyet tae John Knox datit 27t October 1563
Andy Koppe <a n d y @ d c s . e d . a c . u k> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:
SRAM and Suntour have virtually no brand recognition and Campagnolo has it only in the racing bike market, that has to hand Shimano a big advantage. Can't blame Shimano for that of course.
SRAM might have got recognition in the road bike market if they'd made an effort to push the old Sachs range (I've used bits from the New Success group in the past, and they were very good indeed), rather than letting it fall by the wayside. I suppose the problem these days is offering a distinctive alternative to STI and Ergopower which identifies the maker of the groupset straight away; Sachs instead used the Ergo lever, made under licence. Likewise, in the days of groupsets with down tube shifting, Mavic had its fans, despite being pricey (but very robust). But then they started to dabble in electric operation - oh dear :-(
And don't tell me this stuff isn't weird. This was designed for people with size 11 hands ;-)
Might be so. But I like the crankarms and the Cantilever brakes. It seems to be quite hard to get this kind of polished compoments for mountain bikes or low geared tourers today.
Sandpaper 1200 and some chrome polish work like a charm ;-)
