Originally Posted by
Flash
I highly doubt that when the Shimano engineers were designing Alivio they sat around a table and said: "let's design a component group that will suck and that riders will spurn in favor of our higher-level offerings"
This isn't how manufacturing works. First, engineers build a decent quality product, shimano xt level, lets say. Then the marketing dept. says, ok thats great, but we also need a product thats costs 30% of that one. And so the engineers have to design a cheap product, which means cheaper, heavier materials, looser tolerances, higher production rates, etc. The result is a product that does not perform as well, but is cheap. Then the marketing dept also decides they need a high end product.. thats where xtr comes in.
Alivio is crap, btw, stay away from it.