I pen'd th for another thread but thought it deserved more promulgation. Any comments/evidencewelcome.
As a comparison, how do shimano fare against other foreign large scale manufacturers of equivalent parts?
So Hope do well on warranty and spares (we all know this because their stuff seems to break a fair bit), but they distribute themselves, so it's pretty easy for them to send out spares rather than get a distributor to hold spares and do so). A true test (in comparison with shimano) would be how they do abroad - [u]which we know nothing about[/u].
Lots of other wee UK manufacturers fall precisely into this category.
Sram - is their spares situation any better or worse than Shimano?
Magura? Formula?
Campag? - You used to be able to get everything but it was ****ing expensive, but I understand the UK spares supply route is now different (i.e. not Mercian)
Madison stock IMO/E a HUGE number of shimano spares, given the vast number of shimano products available. We have no idea if this due to intentional designer obselesence on the the part of shimano, or Madison not wanting to have another warehouse full of spares they may still have in 20 years, or something else.
It's true that shimano (and sram, Hope, Campag and many others) do change stuff frequently for no performance benefit (as well as introducing many benefits that no small manufacturer could have done - SPD, indexing etc). To blame them alone for that is naive IMO - many consumers want to be sold the newest thing...not just at the lower end but look at the no. of folk on here who are buying newer/more expensive kit that genuinely has no benefit to them whatsoever.
There almost endeth my musings...[u]it's simply not as simple as HOPE = GOOD, SHIMANO = BAD, and, if I dare, [b]THE WORLD IS SHADES OF GREY AND NOT BLACK AND WHITE[/u][/b].
Not much point either in having spare parts available for your whole back catalogue if you're going to charge an arm and leg for them, or require specialised tools to fit, to the point where it becomes more economical to replace the whole thing.
Don't really see the relevance of Shimano being overseas and Hope being domestic. Some companies deliberately pursue a policy of modular development and interchangeability and try to build long term brand loyalty, maybe at the expense of annual turnover of new customers and new system sales.
FWIW - I don't see Shimano as a horrible example of the opposite (although I'm not really interested in non-serviceable disk brakes). Shimano geartrain stuff is very interchangeable and loose ball-bearing hubs (love them or loathe them) are hardly an attempt to exploit a captive market.