My first “gravel” bike was my aluminum Fuji Sportif that I dimpled the chainstays enough to fit 37’s. Never really felt the need for bigger tires and eventually bought a Domane that I still run 37’s on. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to ride gravel on 45-50’s, but definitely not worth replacing the bike for the couple of gravel races I do a year.
99% of the people on this forum would do a better job as head of product at Shimano than whoever is not doing that job now.
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Very likely not just a problem with the individual sitting in the Product chair, but rather a systemic/cultural issue that comes from the very top over many years. And with many dominant long time market leaders (like Shimano), being slow and deliberate is often a decent recipe for success (until it’s not). SRAM could have much better products for a long time before Shimano would be pushed out as a major OEM provider, so Shimano is going to be risk averse and follow the market rather than innovate (and not risk the expensive screw ups that tend to come with innovation). Not saying it’s right, but it’s a super common approach.
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Even at the basic level of not building a power meter for XTR. At this point, shimano no longer offers a complete system. If you want to run a power meter you have to use a 3rd party crankset or pedals. And their road line is going down a similar path. I dont understand why they don’t better fund development.
They need to buy better. Maybe they should have waded in to the Stages bankruptcy and bought their IP. It seemed to work well, better than their current products.
Taking a long view I don’t really have a love affair for SRAM either. Being a guinea pig for 15 years of their product development is hard to get over. Until this launch this week they couldn’t produce a front derailleur that did not throw the chain off at least 2x per ride. I have a bunch of friends who rode their road stuff and they were unrivaled in being forced off the bike to re-thread their chain at least twice per every ride we did. No wonder SRAM wants to have everyone ride a 1X for all applications, you do that when you can’t make a front derailleur work. Hopefully they fixed it now. As far as power meters go I dont really care as I like Power2Max too much to ever ride anything else - they are bombproof and always work. We need healthy competition for groups, we already have the Great Trek Bike Making Company, we need to have some choices other than the SRAM/ RockShox / Zipp Cabal.
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If you want to get faster you need to spend at least 15 hours a week maintaining your bikes.
I mean, why haven’t they just bought Assioma?