I think Shimano's most anti-competitive practice was how they priced their components to OEM bike manufacturers. Shimano bought up small manufacturing shops that made things like cranks and headsets and seatposts until they could produce the "full group". This was not to have the same cachet as the Campy "full gruppo" but instead as a way to present a severely low low price to a bike manufacturer for the full group, take it or leave it. If a bike company wanted to use a different component, like a shifter, the price was the same. Nearly all bike manufacturers said 'what the heck, I have to pay for it anyway, I'll use it."

Grip Shift sued on the grounds of anti-competitiveness and won.

Shimano made Shifter-Derailleur-Cassette/Freewheel compatibility paramount with indexed shifting. If all the other manufacturers of shifters, freewheels, and rear derailleurs had quickly adopted Shimano's uniform cog spacing and early shifting derailleurs (keeping in mind the early-shifting slant parallelogram derailleur was Suntour's patent) they still would have been screwed because as soon as the six speed with greater OLD was introduced Shimano was hard at work developing narrower cog spacing for seven speed clusters. The race to the Spinal Tap 11-cog rear cluster had begun.

It can be argued that Shimano had to go for the "all one brand" approach in order for their innovations to work and they were under no obligation to make their stuff work with other manufacturers products. Even so, it seemed like Shimano was hell-bent on making their stuff not even compatible with their own stuff from last year. And to top it off there were no repair parts provided to bike shops. If it broke, replace the whole thing. If what broke was a several years old, buy a whole new system. I still see some of that from them.

Of course, we C&Vers know how to beat the Man. FRICTION SHIFTING! SQUARE TAPERS!