If you don't know the answer to that - you may have wanted to think it through a little more.
Manufacturing at scale is hard and expensive. John Deere has been doing it for years, creating the most reliable tractors in the world for decades and has only recently decided to bend customers over to give them the ol' in-out-in-out.
A new brand would need to start from almost smaller than scratch, and have tens of million dollars of investment to even get started producing their own tractors. Then they'd have the uphill battle of a set of people who are extremely reliant on these machines to trust a new company with no track record with highly mission-critical equipment.
It would be an incredibly high-risk investment, with little to no guarantee of success.
Instead, as the article says - these farmers are not buying new tractors from anyone at the moment.
In today's market, your argument doesn't hold water.
A new brand would need to start from smaller than scratch? So what? People start new companies every day.
It would require tens of millions of dollars of investment? So what? We keep being told how capital markets are just sloshing with cash looking for investment opportunities; that one of the reasons for rising inequality is due to the dearth of investment opportunities for the rich to use to seek returns.
They'd have trouble finding customers willing to give them a shot? So what? Every startup has this problem. You solve it by differentiating yourself from your incumbent competitor. When your competitor is so hated that they're getting negative press in national news outlets and state legislatures are being pressured to pass laws, your differentiation proposition is practically written for you.
I'm sure there are tractor upstarts out there trying to get funding. The question is, if they're not getting funding then why not, and why doesn't anybody know about them?
Capital markets are looking for worthwhile investment opportunities. An established ag-implements manufacturer can probably use that sort of risk capital to expand into making tractors, or something like that. Getting a large firm started "from scratch" is going to be less feasible. And these things also take their time to happen, of course.
The moment you started to see any real success with a company like this and become significant competition, John Deere would reverse their equipment-as-a-service DRM-based model, and you would be instantly crushed by their far more familiar and established brand with all the accumulated knowledge and trust people already have. It's so certain that you have essentially no chance of long-term success. John Deere can operate like this because there's no competition, but the second there is competition than can revert to how they were and you are dead, so there's no point even trying.
Brand isn't everything, it doesn't "crush" competitors in markets without winner-takes-all characteristics (i.e. network effects). People buy smartphones that aren't iPhones; people buy burgers not made by McDonald's; people rent hotel rooms not offered by Hilton or Marriott. By the time the upstarts get competitive enough to force the incumbent to act, the upstarts already have branding and market power of their own, and are not so easily crushed.
I think parts availability might be a problem with those, as well as a general lack of knowledge about them. Otherwise, yeah MTZs are simple and easy to fix.
It takes a LOT of capital to build a company capable of manufacturing something like a tractor. And nobody will buy it initially because it has an unknown reliability record.
Look at the article, the farmers all make predictions about exactly how long those John-Deere tractors will last because they have roughly 40 years of experience working with them.
Mahindra is selling small and medium tractors in the US now; I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if they were much more user-serviceable than the American brands people are complaining about.
Yeah, Mahindra has some reasonably large tractors on their website, but the really Big Tractors you'll find from say John Deere aren't available. According to Wikipedia they're the largest tractor seller in the world, so maybe they'll expand!
> If customers don’t want this stuff, why isn’t there a competing company offering non-DRM tractors?
Because modern capitalism is not a system that will magically fulfill customer needs, despite propaganda to the contrary. The way the system actually works is that the wants/needs of the capital-holders take priority over the wants/needs of other stakeholders (e.g. customers and workers). The other stakeholders are often forced to accept minimally acceptable deals, as long as the capital-holders are able to maintain barriers to entry (like large investments in capital).
A new market entrant will likely be tempted (eventually, if not immediately) to implement DRM just like Deere has. And Deere can always drop DRM temporarily if it will let them fend off a competitive threat.
> The way the system actually works is that the wants/needs of the capital-holders take priority over the wants/needs of other stakeholders (e.g. customers and workers).
The capital-holders did not (in most cases) get a "you are now free to hose your customers" card. The cases where they are free to do so are cases where there is a lack of competition. So "modern capitalism is not a system that will magically fulfill customer needs in the absence of competition". But if there is actual competition, and the wants of the capital-holders take priority over the wants of the customers, that's not going to work out well for the capital-holders.
> So "modern capitalism is not a system that will magically fulfill customer needs in the absence of competition".
But modern capitalism, at least in the American context, is a system being drained of competition. Competitors conspire to destroy it by merging and acquiring each other, and the deregulatory economic zeitgeist that's been in force for 40 years means the government has done little to foster it.
Markets tend towards equilibrium, and bitter competition is a kind of disequilibrium.
> But modern capitalism, at least in the American context, is a system being drained of competition.
I agree, and I agree that it's a problem. But it's the "being drained of competition" that's the problem, not capitalism itself. (Well, capitalism itself is something that would prefer to drain itself of competition - even Adam Smith knew that - but for capitalism to work properly, there has to be competition.)
There seem to be two kinds of "draining of competition". First, there's the "just too good" kind. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and (the subject at hand) John Deere may all be of this kind (though Microsoft did plenty of dirty tricks to get there). Economics of scale and network effects create positive feedback loops where one competitor can win it all. I don't really know what to do about that.
The second kind is government-caused (or at least -allowed) monopoly. There's only one electric company here, because the government thought it made sense for there to be. Some other monopolies are less directly government caused, but heavy regulations can make it so that only the largest firms have the resources to comply, and all the smaller firms die.
Government-allowed is when the government approves a merger of firms that are big enough that the merger significantly decreases (or eliminates) competition.
With the government we've had for the last 40 years, I don't know what to do about this kind, either.
Because it would be really expensive to start a new tractor manufacturing business; it would take years to even get prototypes up and running; you'd still have to prove that your tractors were as good as or better than these 40 year old antiques (which they probably wouldn't be at first); you'd have to be able to make something that could meet safety and efficiency standards of today while giving up the advantages of tight control over maintenance; you'd have to figure out how to compete with the dealer, mechanic, and parts networks that represent a huge advantage of the existing players; and you'd have to figure out how to do all of that without running out of money. It's probably a twenty-year project. You up for it?
Nope. If you did, I'm pretty sure the EPA would shut you down. Emissions regulations aren't quite as strict for tractors as for cars and trucks, but they are headed in the same direction. I don't think it's possible to meet emissions without computerized controls. And once you've put hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of electronics on the tractor, it's hard to resist the temptation to add DRM.
I think that you would have a hard time getting EPA approval if you starting making brand new copies of legacy engine designs. A new diesel tractor engine has to meet EPA Final Tier 4/ Stage IV standards. I don't know what would stand in the way of making a knock off of the 4440 chassis and transmission that uses a new Cummins or other crate engine though.
This problem was created by regulation. It's not clear that markets can work when governments grant monopolies, and don't restrict the ensuing vertical integration. The only solution is to grant weaker monopolies.
Punjab state of India is pretty much Agriculture based, & have options of Ford, FarmTrac tractors as well as John Deere, Scot, this year models as well as from 1970s; along with local Indian Brands like Sonalika, Preet, Mahindra being equally good or better.
Mahindra tractors are based on the old International Harvester models I think. They sell them in the US also.
They look pretty cool, simple and repairable, but I don't know if they make ones the size of commercial John Deere tractors. All the Mahnindra tractors I've looked at were small.
Living in a rural, Norwegian area, I can remember seeing the following brands of tractors recently - Fiat, Zetor, Case, John Deere, New Holland and Massey Ferguson. I've probably not paid attention to at least a couple more - I am not a tractor aficionado...
