My understanding is that farming equipment is quite specialized, but I fail to see how no entrepreneur has capitalized on making "old school" tractors today. The immediate retort is that John Deere's approach is maximally profitable-- but is it? Sketchy websites host hacked firmware giving farmers the freedom to work on their own tractors anyways. The equipment manufacturers have lost their goodwill with farmers. From the ashes could rise a new firm that doesn't try to act so, well, crony. Even if they didn't end up as big as the incumbents, there's no doubt a profitable business exists with ephemeral sales of farming equipment that don't mandate expensive maintenance from your company's people.
nobody wants an "old school" tractor that needs someone in the cab driving it. Modern highly-integrated farm equipment is a massive boost for productivity and a massive reduction in costs.
There's a different discussion to be had as to why there hasn't arisen a company that shears the sheep a bit more gently, but generally on the whole the market doesn't want the old-school tractors. This article is not the overall shape of the market. Farmers generally want to farm, not be software/hardware engineers developing their own tractor guidance systems.
As for that topic, generally markets are not as efficient, modern businesses operate at such high scales that it's extremely difficult for competitors to enter the market. It took Elon Musk to do it for the auto industry, that's the scale of funding and production that you need to compete. It's an oligopoly, not an efficient market.
techpeople like ourselves are the last ones that should be pointing fingers, we are the ones who created the whole "as a service" model, and created the basis for closed firmware that users have no right to access. It's our business models applied to a different market, and it's just as noxious when we do it.
It’s not like I can go take a look at the firmware of the processor I’m typing this on, now is it? Why doesn’t someone just start up a new CPU company that lets me see everything?
(and yeah some people like RAPTOR are trying but that’s the shape of the problem, it’s a niche desire and there’s enormous startup costs, and established players can easily drop prices for a few years and crush you, so realistically it’s not a market that can be efficient.)
Markets aren't going to do this stuff on their own. If you don't regulate them via something like right to repair, they'll skin you as roughly as they please and crush any upstart who tries to do things "the right way". Welcome to the Free Market - a truly free market is rarely "fair" to competitors or pleasant to customers.
You can go with non-John-Deere equipment and get a relatively cheap and simple tractor. I'm not sure about the minimum you can get in terms of electronics.
A big challengefarm equipment manufacturing companies are facing are related to emissions controls. A 40 year old tractor doesn't give a rip about CO2 emissions, but new equipment has to meet the strict standards. This means you've probably added a computer to fine tune performance, or perhaps you're simply operating moderately less efficiently than optimal.
A number of years ago, some dust control laws were passed. If farmers were to follow the letter of the law, their harvester would have needed to spray water to prevent dust from the gravel road, and needed to do similar out in the field (harvesting corn is very dusty). It would be hopelessly uneconomical, and would have absolutely killed efficiency in harvesting. It was talked about on the farm radio programs pretty extensively in the context of "the politicians don't get what it takes to farm. These sorts of controls sound great for factories, but they're not adding nuance to the bill for farmers, and it's unrealistic they we could follow the law if we wanted to."
> The immediate retort is that John Deere's approach is maximally profitable-- but is it?
If your profit has to come from sales, but a lot of theirs comes from locking you into a maintenance profit, isn't this a big problem, when they can lower their sale prices much lower than yours?
See what happened when printer manufacturers figured out it was more profitable to sell you ink than printers, even taking a loss on the first sale. They all had to do it once one did. Everyone knew the printers were getting cheap and terrible, but still very few wanted to pay 2x as much on the initial purchase.
With games and other software as well, we see more and more monetizing with ads, DLC and subscriptions, even though most gamers would probably say this had made games worse overall.
This occurred to me as well. At a minimum it would seem like a good idea for a larger Ag business to work with a competitor to bring Deere back to that line of thinking.
The farmer in the article that hooked up their own Satellite steering has got the right idea. I don't rely on my Auto manufacturer's entertainment console - I use a software company's version because it's better, and gets regular updates.
Can you imagine your entire net worth that year being determined by a single badly timed software push from a tractor company? (Granted, they may have "pivoted" to be quite good at software, but it doesn't sound like that's the case here) That would be frightening to me.
