Management of Technology and Innovation in Japan

40 A. Takeishi and Y. Aoshima
mud, and dust. It is just as the Paris-Dakar Rally cannot be won using Formula
One parts.
Index systems for road bikes had a simple cable route as the shift lever was attached
to the down-tube of the frame, but the shift lever on mountain bikes had
been on the handlebars (called a finger shifter or thumb shifter), making the cable
route longer and also making an outer cable necessary. 10 This correspondingly
made the application of SIS a complex matter. The inner cable needed only to take
into consideration the amount of inner extension. However, the outer cable is required
to deal with not only the extension of the inner cable but also the retraction
of the outer cable in order to obtain index precision. The outer cable is flexible and
made by wrapping resin, nylon, and copper wire, and retracts in response to the
expansion of the inner cable. This retraction is a major problem for mountain
bikes.
Road racers have two front gears and the difference in the number of teeth is
around 10 between the two gears. The difference in the number of teeth in the
front gears has a great impact on the positioning of the rear derailleur. On mountain
bikes, there are three front gears and the difference in the number of teeth is
around 20. The impact is therefore even greater. When the front gear is changed,
20 teeth worth of slack in the chain must be taken up by the rear derailleur. For
this reason, the functioning of the guide pulley (a spring for adjusting slack in the
chain caused by shifting) also became difficult. Changing gears on a steep slope
with a load on the chain was also difficult. To sum up, the development of an index
system for mountain bikes was much harder than for road bikes in all respects.
Shimano overcame these difficult conditions by fully mobilizing the technologies
that had been accumulated for free hubs, UG gears and UG chains. Maeda Industries
and Campagnolo were not competitive in these technologies. Although
both companies followed Shimano’s lead of making index systems, they were unable
to overturn Shimano’s predominance that was backed by technologies. As a
result the mountain bike market became a place dominated by Shimano. This
strength in the mountain bike market has also been beneficial in the road market.
When the mountain bike market was undergoing rapid growth, dealers and finished
bicycle manufacturers tended to order parts for road bikes and mountain
bikes together. The choice was between SIS and Accushift. It was similar to the
choice between a Windows machine and a Macintosh. There was no parts compatibility
between the two integrated systems. If an order was placed for both
mountain bikes and road bikes, it was easier to use SIS, which covered both road
and off-road than placing an order for SunTour, which didn’t provide good Accushift
for mountain bikes. Even if there had not been a large difference in technologies
for road bikes, the difference in the mountain bike field worked in Shimano’s
favor and spilled over into the road field, with this effect accumulating
over time. Shimano’s share snowballed and SunTour eventually disappeared.
If there were only the road race market, SunTour might have survived. Campagnolo,
which has somehow maintained its strong position in the road race market,
still exists. This seems to indicate that Shimano would not have reached its
10 See footnote 7 for inner and outer cables.