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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Their main bread and butter is components for cars and ebikes, their (power) tools / DIY stuff is like 22% of their business. Or so I learned just now.

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as an aside, I have a shimano e-bike and a bosch one, and the bosch one is leagues superior.

Which feels weird when you consider the pedigree of shimano, but it makes sense when you think what kind of internals an ebike motor would need.. I guess.

I have two Bosch powered e-bikes (gazelle Modeo and Turn GSD) and one DJI Avinox (Amflow PL carbon)

A few years between each bike and very different bikes. But Avinox feels like it has come from nowhere to be on par or superior to Bosch. The charging plug egonicis is 100x better too.

Shimano is famously a company that people in about four seemingly random/unrelated fields/hobbies think of as a specialist brand in that hobby (e.g. fishing).

(They are or at least were originally a bearings company, specialising in things that need to spin with very low friction, and all their seemingly unrelated businesses started from that)

I don't know about the other industries, but within old cycling circles they're also just seen as the group that was first to make good counterfeit goods that were actually high enough quality to use, and their entrance to the market was aided by the fact that existing players, campagnolo and schwinn mostly, were producing junk from junk proprietary alloys in order to compete with 'overseas' components at truly exorbitant costs.

that was 40-50 years ago, so who cares, but Shimano is truly interesting for cultivating so many different opinions.

Bosch also makes the appliances that a lot of people know that aren't branded Bosch.

Actually it's a little bit more complicated: the appliances are made by a company called BSH (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSH_Hausger%C3%A4te) which was originally (since 1967!) a joint venture between Siemens and Bosch, but Siemens withdrew from it in 2014, and since then it's a fully owned subsidiary of Bosch (but still uses the Siemens brand as well as some other brands such as Gaggenau, Neff, Thermador etc.).

Bosch owned Junkers since before WW2, at least heating appliances, I think airplanes where independent. They started rebranding Junkers to Bosch Thermotechnik ~20 years ago. I think they never sold heating appliances in UK under Junkers brand.

Good idea since depending how you pronounce junkers in English it could sound like an undependable appliance.

Another big reason is probably the infamous Junkers Ju 87 dive bomber which also saw use during the Battle of Britain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_87). Or any of the other military Junkers aircraft built during WW2, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers#Aircraft

Maybe… but less likely since few people remember plus we don’t have an issue with Mitsubishi and they built planes that gave us pain as well. What I’m saying is if Mitsubishi had been Mitshit instead they’d likely also feel pressure to change their name due to its sound rather than WWII infamy.

Approximately no one on the US home front had to fear harm coming to them from a Mitsubishi product. This stands in rather stark contrast to the experience on the British home front:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/second-world-war/blitz/blitz-...

Someone in marketing must have put the kybosh (or maybe it's kybosch) on Junkers as a UK brand. For a couple of reasons, really.

Yeah, "Our Ju-88 will heat your home up real quick!" isn't really the optimal marketing slogan.

That has become common now in all industry - for example, in India, Bosch refrigerators uses compressors manufactured by Godrej (an indian company). So their indian fridges aren't exactly "German engineering", unlike their washing machine and dishwashers that are made in-house. LieBherr, another famous Swiss German brand, on the other hand has their own factory to make the refrigerators in-house in India, but their service in many cities is outsourced to one run by Bosch + Siemens (plus one more group I can't remember).

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