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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.

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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.

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