Hacker News Reader

Deere has a massive service network that makes it extremely rare for a farmer to get stranded during planting or harvesting. To keep this network around year after year, they lock people into using it and charge a lot of money.

The Navy should probably contract with Deere, as they’d probably think they’re getting a good deal.

View on HN

And Caterpillar relies on customer loyalty, based on best-in-class service. Caterpillar has been known to rent equipment from their competitor and fly it by helicopter into remote mining locations while their equipment is inoperable. (Admittedly, mining is not a John Deere market, but this is about Caterpillar's service attitude.)

John Deere's model is successful, but ultimately monopolistic.

The Caterpillar model might work better for the Navy. Not a huge number of ships, used year-round.

I’m not condoning Deere, BTW. Just pointing out that there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?) of farms that get very busy twice a year and much less busy the rest of the time. Having the capacity to make sure a farmer gets service quickly during those busy times is really hard. And expensive. If anyone had a better idea on how to do it they’d be a billionaire. I mean, there probably aren’t enough helicopters available for Deere to do what Caterpillar does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com