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For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

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Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#51

Post by lostgame »

sneak wrote: post #20
brenden2 wrote: post #16

The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…

If customers don’t want this stuff, why isn’t there a competing company offering non-DRM tractors?

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.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#52

Post by darksaints »

brenden2 wrote: post #16

The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…

> Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency.

That is unless you are a government contractor...

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#53

Post by ng7j5d9 »

brenden2 wrote: post #16

The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…

> Milking your customers is not good for business

Maybe that's true in high-choice, low-stakes consumer situations, like "where should I eat dinner tonight?", but is it true in industries with high barriers of entry?

If I decide I'm flying across the country to visit family, I'm going to buy a ticket from some airline that is in fact trying to extract as much revenue as possible from customers. And the airline business seems to be healthy.

If I need to buy a new car, I'm going to be presented with models and trim packages designed specifically to extract the most money from the customer. Honda doesn't offer DX, LX and EX trim packages to save you money - they bundle things together so that even if all you care about is a sunroof, you're also paying for alloy wheels, fog lights, etc.

I've never shopped for tractors, but I'd suspect that maybe the tractor companies that stay in business are in fact the ones which extract as much revenue as possible from customers.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#54

Post by CharlesColeman »

sneak wrote: post #20
brenden2 wrote: post #16

The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…

If customers don’t want this stuff, why isn’t there a competing company offering non-DRM tractors?

> 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.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#57

Post by skywhopper »

sneak wrote: post #20
brenden2 wrote: post #16

The technology itself is not the issue, the problem is that companies are at war with their customers. These companies will go to any length to extract as much revenue as possible. Milking your customers is not good for business, especially if you drive them into insolvency. I hope in the future there are more companies that try to align incentives with their customers, such that their business practices help custome…

If customers don’t want this stuff, why isn’t there a competing company offering non-DRM tractors?

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?

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#58

Post by dsalzman »

Opportunity for a company like $TESLA or other startup to provide additional competition in the farm equipment space. It's a duopoly between John Deere (Green) and Case IH (Red). A modular electric system would work well since the required speeds are low and torque is important. Extra points for a small wind turbine based charging station that can mount to a barn.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#59

Post by asdff »

svachalek wrote: post #45
vearwhershuh wrote: post #30

"These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.” Amen. It is true that there is always someone saying "Things were better back then." But that doesn't always mean that they are wrong.

Yup. I also put large household appliances in this category. They've been getting more expensive and more fragile for decades, without much real progress other than energy efficiency which is unrelated to the fragility afaik.

Pretty much all audio equipment falls into this as well. A vintage marantz stereo is going to sound better than nearly anything on the floor at best buy today, and if something goes wrong you either pop in a new part and take the thing to someone who can solder a wire and read a schematic. Unlike a modern stereo that's a hunk of junk if a piece of critical plastic snaps in half or a cheap quality solder on the silicon board cracks out of warranty, not to mention the sound quality.

Re: For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity

#60

Post by amluto »

svachalek wrote: post #45
vearwhershuh wrote: post #30

"These things, they’re basically bulletproof. You can put 15,000 hours on it and if something breaks you can just replace it.” Amen. It is true that there is always someone saying "Things were better back then." But that doesn't always mean that they are wrong.

Yup. I also put large household appliances in this category. They've been getting more expensive and more fragile for decades, without much real progress other than energy efficiency which is unrelated to the fragility afaik.

It is related to some extent. Things like brushed DC motors can be very reliable if you’re willing to replace brushes on occasion, but they’re wildly inefficient. Better motors need more complicated circuitry, and it’s easy to cheap out and make that circuitry unreliable. It’s certainly harder to repair.
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