pcb 

Geez, Ben, an awful lot to digest here. Since everything starts off being about me, I have to say that I could be amongst the world's great harp, guitar _and_ piano players---maybe tenor sax, too---if only mastering the instrument didn't require actual practice. Bummer, that.

With wifey briefly out of the house, 7mos into working from home, the living room stereo is cranking out Lightnin' Hopkins, at volume. "That mean old 'frisco, and that lowdown Santa Fe, takin' my baby away...." BTW, I cracked up wifey t'other day when I told her I took a phone call in my car, you know, "over the radio." So I'm still in the world of "stereos" at home and "radios" in the car.

And my eyes get all watery thinking of you blowing your harp for your dad, then retiring the harp. I'm not like, you know, crying or anything. Just got something in my eyes that are making them tear up.

As for industrial/corporate attitudes, I have a very hard time understanding any company that doesn't want to listen to their customers, give them what they want, where technologically feasible and profitable and not, well, evil---and improve the product. Though sometimes you have to look beyond that, and Shimano is a perfect case. Shimano understood that their customers were bicycle mfrs, and the bicycle mfrs' customers were bike shops, and the actual consumer was way down the line. But Shimano brought out modern indexed shifting to an immediate mfr customer base that didn't want it, both because it complicated their buying/mfr lives, and because _their_ immediate customer base, the bike shops, were dead-set against it.

Shimano recognized that making bikes easier to shift (and also to have better braking) would get more consumers to buy bikes, and to actually ride them. Because when the gears clicked they wouldn't just ride it once and hang it up when they couldn't figure out the shifting. Shimano convinced their customers to spec, especially, indexed 600/Ultegra---not like the customers had a lot of choice, the other alternatives being floundering Suntour and unpopular Campy. Dealers hated it, consumers loved it, and that was the summer of "Doesn't click, doesn't sell."

You could segeue to the camera world, where first automatic exposure, then autofocusing, was dismissed as unnecessary, over-complicated and the enemy of creativity. What it led to was a huge increase in the number of people using cameras. But I digress...

I sat in at a Suntour Dealer Advisory Board meeting at Interbike that year, and not a single dealer at the table wanted anybody's indexed shifting. They disliked the idea: too complex, not gonna work, not gonna hold up, Shimano will make it obsolete tomorrow, bicycles aren't toys. This is all before a single bike shipped. The next day one of the dealers came to our booth and handed me a t-shirt they had made, with the Shimano clicky-lever SIS logo, under which was printed "Shimano Is Sh-t."

To their credit, their final conclusion was: but if we're wrong, you better have something ready to introduce next year. Turns out next year was too late.

I don't want to come across as a Shimano apologist, but I think the "Shimano obsoletes things so quickly" thing is, overall, not really fair. You can certainly pick examples where this happened, and in the modern world of indexing components and, now, remarkably, electronic components, keeping things compatible is difficult, and obsoleting them really sticks it to your customer base. But I've got boxes of Shimano drivetrain components and brakes/levers, spanning 30yrs of production, that are all cross-compatible. They maintained the same shifting geometry across the road/atb/hybrid lines for decades. I can take an '90s long-cage 8spd ATB rder and shift it with a '00s 10spd brifter. Heck, it'll probably even cover '10s 11spd. As the world blows past me into 12-13spds, that starts to fall apart, but I have to give Shimano credit for maintaining some important consistency for a very long time.

And I'll also say that the Japanese aren't the only ones who learned about being reponsive to customer requests/ideas. I recall reading something about Nike going to Korea to meet with a Korean supplier, giving them an idea for a new sneaker at a dinner meeting, then being surprised first thing in the morning with a nicely-built/sewn prototype. Just did a quick search and couldn't find any references or links, so apologies if this is actually an urban legend...

BFisher

@pcb, Regarding this point: "As for industrial/corporate attitudes, I have a very hard time understanding any company that doesn't want to listen to their customers, give them what they want, where technologically feasible and profitable and not, well, evil---and improve the product," is the demand for silvery, shiny groupset options really too low to warrant production? A question for all of the manufacturers, really.

They all seemed to sell out fast in the past. Hard to get, but nobody wants to supply? I have got to be missing something.

pcb 

And before retreating to do some actual work, the Shimano-deep-pockets vs capital-starved-Suntour thing was real, but it was a result of skillful management and foresight by Shimano and less-effective management and bad timing by Suntour.

Shimano went public in the early '70s, at a time when going public in Japan was a difficult and expensive process. Companies needed several years of strong profit/growth before they could get listed, and the process of listing involved a lot of paperwork and employee time. I don't have facts/figures, but I don't think Suntour/Shimano were hugely different in size/sales through the '60s. But Shimano used the early-'70s bike-boom business upswing to go public, got a sizeable influx of investment, and expanded. Importantly, as Merz noted, one huge benefit was an expanded design/engineering staff.

To be fair, I don't know whether Suntour was already looking at going public at the same time, or only decided it would be a good idea when they saw Shimano succeed. My involvement with them at a later point in time, when all they seemed to do was follow/copy Shimano, colors my view for sure. But they did decide to also go public, and in the midst of preparations the Mideast Oil Shock hit, leading to increased energy costs, order/sales disruptions, etc. Suntour's financials took a hit, and they couldn't go forward with their listing.

From that point on, the Shimano locomotive just kept gaining steam. It wasn't very obvious through the '70s, into the very early '80s, when IMHO everything Suntour put out looked better, even though so much of the "Suntour" lineup was from other allied JEX mfrs. But by '83-'84, and the onset of indexing, it was a done deal, and Shimano could not be stopped.

One of the sad parts is that if Suntour had been more like Campagnolo, and not tried to go head-to-head with Shimano in every product category and at every price point, maybe they could have survived as a smaller niche player. We in the US were certainly advocating for that. But top management ego wouldn't allow that, and so Suntour went down for the count, up against the rope and pummeled in a flyweight-vs-heavyweight slugfest.

rccardr 

Wait a minute.
There was beer and wine at Eroica? And man-wagging?
I’m shocked! Shocked!

Spaghetti Legs 

It was Wild West outside the friendly confines of the official dinner. Somebody might even have said disc brakes ain’t all that bad.

Thanks for a cool thread folks.

pcb 

Seems to me the first issue is identifying who the "customer" is. The second issue is who's responsible for deciding spec/features/finish. The third issue is how much demand there actually is for silvery components, and at what cost: how many will buy it, at what price point, how many units, how much extra will it cost, how will we manage the extra skus and replacement parts?

Shimano/Campy are unlikely to produce silvery components unless their customers ask for it, or unless S/C have a vision that "if you build it, they'll come."

S/C's customers aren't we end users, they're either actual bike manufacturers (very few of those left now, mostly Giant) or bike branders (most everybody else now, those who have a brand and spec bikes, but don't have their own factories). These are the people that place the orders and pay for the product. After the bike makers/branders, part makers have to have eyes/ears first on dealers, and then on end-users, but dealers are downstream and end users are way, way downstream.

Brand/maker product managers are the folks who decide which parts go on which model. They have cost/margin numbers to hit, every penny counts, and they're ultimately responsible for whether a particular model sells or not. They can have a keen eye on the market and a vision, like Grant Petersen at Bridgestone (and also Grant at Riv, though being the boss/owner, he wears all those hats now), or not, like some of the guys I worked with. You could argue that a smaller brand has a little more leeway to be creative, being responsible for moving 20k units of a model i/o 200k, but since they're buying in smaller qty, they also have less leeway to be creative. Bigger upcharge for a special finish on 20k units than on 200k units.

IME a product manager usually overrules a sales manager, especially when trying to cater to smaller market segments. So a stubborn/prejudiced product manager can throttle interesting/creative, even ultimately profitable and market-expanding ideas. I'm not trying to get overtly political here, I'm mostly meaning "prejudiced" as related to product categories/spec: "only old-timey components are silver," or "road bikes don't need fender eyelets."

So absent a breakthrough vision on the part of the component mfrs, like Shimano had for indexing, thinking that offering silvery components will resonate with end users enough to warrant making them, and pushing their customers to spec them, "somebody" has to succeed in percolating that idea up the food chain. End users to dealers to salesfolks to sales managers to product managers. That's asking a lot.

And it's easy for us on the ground to overestimate how much demand there really is, in unit terms, for stuff we and our buddies really like/want. I'm not saying we're incapable of being correct, but we don't necessarily have a viewpoint that can accurately extrapolate into the hundreds of thousands of units.

Keep in mind that the way the bike industry works is each brand tries to cram as much product down a dealer's throat as possible, tie up as much floor space and open-to-buy as possible, and get the dealer on the credit hook for as much $$$ as possible. Floor Plan City. Make it as difficult as possible for your dealers to buy/stock the other guy's stuff. The dealer is always under threat from their anchor A brands that if they don't buy/stock enough, somebody not too far down the road will also get the brand. New models will likely get introduced before the dealer has sold off the older models. There's not a lot of incentive for most dealers to take a chance on something/anything.

There are always exceptions, natch. A good friend was a rep for one of the Big 3, in a very big, busy, numbers-heavy territory. He had formerly owned his own bike shop, and told me he had the most respect for dealers who wouldn't buy into his program. Not a lot of dealers have the confidence and customer base to say they matter more than their brands, or they don't have to be as cheap on the same bike as the guy down the road because of who they are.

Sidebar to that is the sales reps' income is always capped in a sense. They are given aggressive targets to hit, and if they're successful growing their territory, the sales manager decreases their territory size so they can do it all over again. Threatened and punished if they don't hit their numbers, congratulated and punished if they do.

Golly gee, I don't sound much like a corporate refugee, do I?

And lastly, the covid pandemic has certainly turned everything upside-down. I don't know a lot about the concrete/granular impacts, but it doesn't feel like a good time to get your hopes up for cool neo-retro parts hitting the market.

BFisher

@pcb, I appreciate the insight a bunch. It's easy for us to wee and moan about lack of choices as I described, but most don't have inside knowledge of the industry, including myself.

Your explanations help me understand much better. Thanks for responding.

70sSanO

What really helped Shimano was bringing their shifting precision and speed into wide range mountain bike setups. This eventually migrated onto the road; well it was always there for touring.

The other interesting piece is that no one, except Campagnolo, challenged Shimano hyperglide cassette design and more importantly spacing. Other manufacturers are producing cassettes, and some freewheels, but they are all Shimano clones. No one is foolish enough to deviate from the Shimano design.

Some may point to SRAM mtb drivetrains, but they still use Shimano designed cassettes.

John

pcb 

You're welcome. It's a weird, complex industry, especially being territorial in the US, and and previously entirely comprised of independent dealers. Now with company-owned stores, company-financed independents, and the interet, it's even weirder.

But that also doesn't mean we end users are wrong, or even unrealistic, about lack of choices, or wondering why simple things couldn't be done to improve product.

I had a few of those encounters with product managers. I couldn't get get Trek to make OCLV frames for me to fit 650c wheels, which would've allowed us to tromp C'dale in the Japanese market. I had end users and dealers begging me for 650c OCLV. I knew the mold costs were high, but maybe I could've covered them from my operating profits. What the prod mgr said was: "Did you ever ride a 650c bike? I rode a 650c Schwinn a few years ago, and it was harsh as hell. I'm not making one." Didn't matter that we weren't the target user/market---neither of us did triathlons. Didn't matter that his experience was one bike, one short ride, and not recently. Didn't matter that we were talking different materials, and that the breed might have evolved since he rode that Schwinn. He already decided he didn't like them, and wasn't going to have one built. I tried going over his head, and was told no OCLV, but they could tig-weld anything I wanted in aluminum. We didn't have any competitive advantage over C'dale in tig'd aluminum, so I passed. I could spin no 650c OCLV to my dealers as "Sorry, development costs are too high," but the reality was I couldn't get the discussion going far enough to determine costs and potential profits.

Maybe more pertinent to our interests here, I could never get the prod mgr at Fuji to put fender/rack eyelets on the higher-end steel road bikes. We had an awesome Roubaix Pro, tig-welded Reynolds 853 tubing, which was the bike that had me rediscover steel after 15yrs+ of riding aluminum/carbon. Best-feeling, best-riding bike I had ridden in 15yrs.

I had dealers in Portland/Seattle who loved the Roubaix Pro, but without fender eyelets, they wouldn't touch it. PacNW riders need fenders, it's a hassle to mount fenders without eyelets, and dealers can't afford hassles. Prod Mgr simply said: "Road bikes don't have eyelets. We have touring bikes for that." Oh, also: "I'm not Grant Petersen. We're not Rivendell." I kept trying: "Doesn't add any meaningful weight, nobody looking at that bike will reject it because of eyelets, but many are rejecting it w/o eyelets." End of discussion. I agitated enough that he threatened to return from his next Taiwan trip with a ton of eyelets from the factory and bury my desk with them.

He is a really, really nice guy, I know him from way back in the old days, and we get along really well. We love catching up at shows. But he came up through hard-core crit racing, he had blinders, and he was in many senses a great, successful prod mgr, so his word ruled. No eyelets.

I also had a hard time getting him to spec an affordable road-capable fixed gear. Fortunately I had more than just PacNW dealers wanting one of those, so I encouraged 'em all to shout really loud in his direction. Didn't hurt that sub-$800 road/fixed had spread from Surly to other brands by then. We got the bike, sold 'em out right quick.

I guess he maybe saw some light, because later, long after I was gone, he spec'd a lugged steel anniversary Fuji model.

So it's easier for stuff to not happen than to happen. Sometimes it's because there isn't enough demand to justify the costs, sometimes it's just a stubborn Gus somewhere in the decision chain whose opinion matters.

Apologies to anybody named Gus out there......

Choke 

I can't imagine why we all are having such a hard time remembering that night......

gugie 

Musta been the cookies.