This keeps coming up and makes me wonder: this sounds exactly like a golden opportunity for another manufacturer to offer a different business model. What prevents a new company from selling combine harvesters at a premium price that use widely available parts and sensors? Or what prevents a cottage industry of replacement motors, ECUs, etc. from taking over where John Deere et al are acting in this way? It seems to me that the only reason I would want to buy one of the big name machines is so that if it breaks down I can quickly get it repaired and not lose much due to the stoppage but that’s clearly not the case here so why bother with them and why don’t better options exist?
Barriers to entry are pretty high. Developing, manufacturing and selling complex machinery is a very capital intensive high-risk business.
You can't simply copy the existing stuff, because patents. (And software copyright, yeey!)
Even if such a new company enters the market there's no guarantee that parts will be available later. So those new premium priced combines will have their own added risk premium.
And. There's again no guarantee that this new company won't ever "turn to the dark side". So probably farmers' resources are better spent on directly lobbying for "right to repair" policy.
Honda and Kawasaki both have plenty of capital and experience building new machinery. A new startup focusing on one specific type of machinery built as much as possible out of commonly available parts from e.g. Honda could also do quite well, I think. Longevity is of course a problem but you can solve that with serious funding and strategic partnerships.
I only have a similar observation that generalizes this. How come these old established giga corporations don't diversify/branch into these seemingly profitable niches?
Counterfactually we can say that those who did overextend too much died out. Those who are not focused can rarely do well enough to truly cash in on a market. (Is Samsung a good example of this or a good counter-example? Or simply a strange outlier?)
Are more laws better than free market?
How did one company get so big and change all the rules in farming?
It’s hard to believe John Deere is the only company to buy from, so that leads me to lean towards maybe it’s the best company to buy from? If that’s the case shouldn’t they accept the product as it instead of trying to get legislators to change the rules?
What do you mean by free? Completely free as in Mad Max? Because unless you mean that free, then obviously there are some rules.
Now, I don't think measuring the effectiveness of those rules, to maintain the efficiency of the market, should have much to do with cardinality, but you're right that just adding more rules to handle edge cases simply leads to a more complex and likely more fragile ecosystem.
> How did one company get so big and change all the rules in farming?
How did all the usual automakers got away with the same copyright/DMCA hard-to-repair shit? Market forces. Race to the bottom.
> It’s hard to believe John Deere is the only company to buy from
Likely there are others, who likely pull the same shit.
> If that’s the case shouldn’t they accept the product as it instead of trying to get legislators to change the rules?
Of course this is a possibility. Or they can start their own company. Or they can ask other established machine manufacturers to venture into farming machinery hoping that that will help. And so on.
But basically what's happening is this group of farmers discovered politics, and they are now trying to persuade society/legislators/regulators/power-brokers to fine tune that "freedom" to include repairability.
Basically it's an economic argument against rent (in the economic sense). Because these buyers argue that they are basically in a quasi-monopolistic market, and thus the profits extracted from them (via these stunts) are a lot higher than they should be.
Of course we can say that who cares, just raise the price of produce, grains, etc... raise the already enormous amount of agriculture subsidies, let John Deere pocket this extra. After all, it's on the stock market, apparently there's no big private stockholders, majority ownership is by a bunch of funds. (There's a ~10% private equity too, it seems.)
Deere makes a ton of money selling parts like those sensors, so that won't work. ECUs need a dealer mostly because they are machines are easy to part out, so by coding the ECU to the tractor it insures there is no black market for used parts and thus no tractor theft to get those parts. (The other reason is some ECUs are reused by many different things so you need the correct code loaded onto it)
Near as I can figure out, right to repair is really code for I want to bypass the emissions controls on my equipment.
Deere employee, but not speaking for my employer. My opinions are my own.
But capitalism. If Deere makes more money selling parts that means parts wear out too quick or are overpriced. As Bezos said, your margin is my opportunity.
What exactly do I get, as a consumer, from not being able to swap an ECU for a different one myself? What is the benefit for which I would be paying the premium?
I have never seen right to repair be framed as trying to bypass emissions. Especially considering the content of TFA and the fact that it also applies to consumer electronics and such. What makes you say that it is?
