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Comment by stopads | Hacker News Reader

The libertarian tech monoculture is the problem, not the solution. If you knew the history of the industry or Kansas over the past 30 years you'd realize you're exactly backwards.

Deere and similar companies got the idea to create this "perfect walled garden monopoly tractor" from Steve Case. AOL was the first to really lay out the pattern so many other industries (and Google and Amazon and Apple and other monopolists) have now emulated.

This isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about consolidation, power and monopoly. There are lots of smart people trying to innovate in Kansas right now, for the most part they are getting absolutely crushed by massive corporate concentration.

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What exactly is stopping these farmers from just buying from another vendor like New Holland or Kubota? Every time I read this stuff, it's all about John Deere being the Apple of farm equipment, and there's almost nothing said about their competitors, almost as if they don't exist.

I feel like I see the same thing when people I know complain about Apple: if I try to suggest they switch to Android because it doesn't have those problems, they look at me like I have a 3rd arm. I really wonder how much of this problem with farmers being unable to repair their own equipment is self-inflicted, by absolutely refusing to buy from a different vendor.

To my knowledge, Kubota doesn't produce harvesting equipment. And their largest agricultural tractor does have a lot of software (I assume it's closed source, haven't found anything to indicate otherwise).

As for running RPi or some other open-source or replacement control software, that's not a trivial thing to implement. Even if an entrepreneur releases a replacement control system, it's risky to install it (down time is expensive). Will they support the farmer? Will they be around in a year or two? Etc.

Did you ever notice that as you drive through farm country, you will see long stretches where everyone is using one brand, and then a long stretch where everyone is using another? Dollars-to-donuts it is driven by proximity to a regional parts depot. If you are down during planting or harvesting, and the mechanic can get you running today if you send your kid to a town 20 minutes away to pick up a part, or wait for tomorrows parts delivery, versus parts are two days away, it is an easy choice.

Ok, that made sense decades ago, but today there's two problems with that:

1) Overnight delivery

2) From everything I've read, you cannot go send your kid to town 20 minutes away to pick up a part for a John Deere machine. You have to call and set up an appointment for a service technician to come to your farm to repair the equipment on-site. After all, that's what all this right-to-repair stuff is complaining about: they aren't allowed to repair things themselves any more. And then the big problem here is: what if it's Saturday, and the service technician is off for the weekend, or is booked up all week long? How do you afford to have your operation down all that time because of a failed tractor?

So I don't see how having regional parts depots is useful any more.

There's probably some level of acknowledgement that there will always be a subset of repairs requiring the dealer's expertise and tooling. Especially as the machines keep getting more complex.

So you will still buy the locally supported brand.

It's only because Deere is the biggest most well known face of the problem, and because they've been most aggressive baout locking things down.

It's not just their tactic, but stopping them sets the precedent.

Also most news outlets don't have bandwidth for multiple articles about all the other companies doing the same thing, so they are the placeholder for the topic.

Even if one of the other manufacturers in the space doesn't permit an easy self-repair path at the moment, it would seem to be a golden opportunity to expand their market by doing so.

Given the way capitalism works in the US now, though, if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.

IMO, the government should be putting a stop to this sort of thing. If you're on this site, then you've seen this happen scores of times in the tech space. But, again, a lot of people on this site are specifically hoping for a buyout like this to make their first couple hundred million, so this is a weird place to complain about a tech monopoly in tractors.

>if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.

Kubota is a Japanese company; Deere can't just buy them out on a whim. The Japanese government would most likely block it.

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