If they aren’t tying the goods together in an uncompetitive manner, there is no case to be had.
I mean; this thread and the internet are littered with examples of anecdotal and reasonably good first-hand examples of SRAM “Doing Discounts if OEM customers bought full… Groups” (and suspension, and wheels, and…). This is no less anticompetitive than the Grip Shift case.
I’d be surprised if it isn’t just an American legal department being more aggressive than a European or Japanese one, although that’s just my gut feeling.
Not that I have a vendetta either way - I’d be happier buying SRAM products if they did proper QC and their machining and tolerances improved but this is not about the products at all.
What? You seem to be missing the context of what was happening before. Someone like Specialized would put a SRAM or Suntour cassette and Truvativ crank (or some other off brand) on low end bikes along with a 105 partial group. Shimano didn’t want that and subsidized sales for the OEM to switch products off mixed groups. Getting a discount on a full group on a website is an entirely different thing. Shimano isn’t making me commit to only using their parts on my bike if I buy a group off Merlin lol.
Maybe I missed it, but I just went through the thread and couldn’t find a single example of what you are talking about…nowhere does anyone mention OEM discounts for full SRAM component spec.
Most big bike manufacturers (Trek, Specialized, Cube, etc.) have been switching to in-house brands for at least higher-specced wheels. Ditto for many smaller boutique brands such as Factor.
For mountain bikes I don’t see much correlation between the brand for e. g. suspension and groupsets. Fullys seem to be designed around a damper of a specific manufacturers and many offer configurations with SRAM and Shimano groupsets. The brand of the fork usually stays the same as well.
On mountain bikes the brakes and groupset are often by the same manufacturer, yes, but that goes both ways. I personally don’t see that as a “SRAM forces bike manufacturers”-type of thing, but rather that bike manufacturers know that people have different preferences when it comes to brakes. And maybe you want Shimano brakes with your Shimano groupset. (If anything, that has pushed out companies like Magura.)
SRAM’s might in the market is much smaller than Shimano. In the MTB and gravel universes, they are slightly bigger, but still smaller than Shimano.
The only stronger correlation I see is between SRAM-equipped mountain bikes and SRAM’s electronic dropper — it simply makes no sense to mix that with Shimano.
Yeah, but that isn’t anything odious in my mind: SRAM and Shimano both sell complete groupsets, and they are always cheaper than if you bought all components separately.