Originally Posted by
Bianchigirll
dddd yeah I kinda know that but I usually try to keep my answers short. No need to tell me about shipimano and all their tricks I'm always railing against them and their fancy buzz terms like SHipmano Leanear Response (SLR) aka "you can't use a cheaper Dia Compe or ChangStar brake levers with my brake calipers, and STi which mounted the shifters, first on flatbar bikes, directly to the brake levers to prevent mix n match speccing buy bike companies.
I don't work for Shimano, just trying to be fair and perhaps appreciative of all the low-cost and inter-configurable parts from them that so many of us have enjoyed over the years.
Of course the parts makers like Campag, Sram and Shimano test their setups using the parts that they make and offer
during the run of production, and it's quite unfair in today's diverse/competitive market for them to make parts that are suggested being compatible with other-maker's parts.
Nobody does this among the big brands.
When Campagnolo or Shimano state that only their parts should be used as replacements, it is because those are the only parts that they have subjected to their industry-standard extensive testing. Doing otherwise invites huge liability implications with fingers pointing at each other in court, meaning the company goes out of business.
Suntour sold indexing gruppos that passed their performance testing, but made it too easy for bike makers to substitute the wrong chain, freewheel, cables etc, which resulted in too many bikes sold having truly sub-standard shifting performance.
Campagnolo similarly suffered from having done much less R&D than Shimano during their Synchro-shift era, but wisely provided detailed charts showing exactly which chain, freewheel, derailer and shifter detenting disc had to be used together.
As late as the 10-speed era, serious shifting problems could arise from using say a Sram 10s chain on a Shimano 10s road gruppo (notably at it's worst using largest-recommended cassette sizes), but how was this even preventable when everybody was moving independently along their own design path?
Shimano shook things up with the SIS type of indexing and later with Hyperglide-style cogs that everyone else patent-dodged around, so I guess they can be given some blame. They led, others followed, and I get that "integration" is a bad word around here in this context.