Originally Posted by
bikingshearer
The slant pantograph wasn't a Shimano design - it came from SunTour, who held the patent for it until it expired in 1984. This SunTour exclusive is why their pre-1984 RD's shift better than everyone else's pre-1984 RDs. When the patent expired, Shimano jumped all over it and, in one of the earliest exercises in computer modeling in the bike industry, figured out the ideal dimensions for short- and long-cage RDs. Eventually, everyone, even that operation in Vincenza, came around. Well, some didn't, but they died quickly. (Can you say "Simplex"?)
I don't think that's why Simplex and the other French component manufacturers went out of business.
Shimano's adoption of the SunTour slant parallelogram coincided with their introduction of SIS indexed shifting. This was a dramatic change that Shimano marketed aggressively (and it didn't hurt that it actually worked quite well). But OEM bike manufacturers could only buy Shimano SIS components as a group -- drivetrain, pedals, hubs, etc. For companies like Trek who were accustomed to mix-and-match specs (e.g. Sakae crank, Maillard hubs, Simplex derailleurs, etc.) it meant that if you wanted to feature indexed shifting on your bikes, you have to buy the whole she-bang from Shimano. This in turn destroyed demand for non-Shimano components of any type. Even Campagnolo was on the ropes for several years and eventually had to trim their product line drastically and focus solely on high-end racing simply to survive.
Eventually more diversity returned to the market, but not before many venerable companies were lost forever.