19 ms·

New emails released in the McDonald’s ice cream machine lawsuit

250 points by notacoward 5y ago

black_13 5y ago
God if you only cared as much for the ppl that worked at McDonalds
djyaz1200 5y ago
In my naivety I build a startup that fixed a problem for a fortune 500 company thinking they would be delighted. They weren't. These big companies are staffed by individuals who are focused on their career and will do absolutely anything to extinguish your company/idea and pretend it was their idea and champion the company's initiative. It's disgusting but it's reality and if you are a founder be ready for it.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  That's the majority of the people in the world. Not just Fortune 500 execs.
  - derekjdanserl 5y ago
    Of course, we are subservient to and dependent on an economic system which both incentivizes and enforces this type of behavior.
    - hereforphone 5y ago
      Reddit is that way --->
      - xmonkee 5y ago
        <---- 4chan is that
    - fastball 5y ago
      Seems like you're making a swipe at capitalism, but this behavior is also rampant in socialist economies (e.g. was very widespread in the USSR), so I don't think the economic system is to blame.
      - EMIRELADERO 5y ago
        Those two facts aren't mutually exclusive
        fastball 5y ago
        Which two facts?
      - leemailll 5y ago
        It's a problem of bureaucracy
        tehjoker 5y ago
        Particularly career ladders. Without career ladders, people wouldn't feel like they're losing something if they didn't come up with the idea. My personal feeling is they are overused, but I'm not entirely ready to say they shouldn't exist entirely. The one thing socialism gives you that capitalism doesn't in this case is that you're guaranteed a job if you are made redundant whereas in a capitalist system, you're out of a job unless you made your own arrangements.
    - TeeMassive 5y ago
      In state bureaucracies and very unionized workplaces people will be afraid to fix something, even if they can and they should to avoid extreme waste, because they are afraid that it would take the credit away from someone else.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    Firefly: “Half the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.”
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    The difference is that a VP at an F500 has significantly more resources at their command.
  - pomian 5y ago
    In spite of every thing, I do not believe its a majority. As with many things, it is the loud minority. We would not have progress, if your statement were true.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      Progress happens when the incumbent interest is disrupted by something they couldn't see coming, or couldn't stop because of their own inertia.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        When I think about this, I think about how Apple stole the music industry for awhile. The RIAA was tossing lawsuits left and right to try to stem the tide of piracy. Companies tried to build up digital marketplaces, but the studios and labels owned the rights and didn't want to play ball. And most of the companies shot themselves in the foot by also not playing ball; after all, the RIAA was wrong, they were dinosaurs, they didn't understand tech and their demands were anachronistic nonsense. Along came Apple, and they basically sat down with the RIAA and did nothing but play ball. Exclusive deals? Got it. Our best cryptography folks working on a cipher algorithm to keep your music "secure" on a device someone else owns? Yes, we'll tell you we can do that and invest time and money into making it plausibly true. A revenue-sharing agreement so lopsided it would make a used car salesman blush? Here's our vein; open us up and leave us with as much as you think we need. And that lasted for a couple years. Then Apple unilaterally announced they were dropping the encryption. It was, after all, a pain in the ass for end-users. And the RIAA screamed. And Apple just stared them down and said "You killed all the alternatives. Where else but iTunes will you go? You can't even go back to CDs; customers liked digital so much they stopped buying them and the machines that play them." And for a brief period, Apple became de-facto owners of music distribution overnight by simply giving the previous owners everything they thought they wanted.
  - jcims 5y ago
    This is a pattern of behavior as old as time in politics and commerce and academics and relationships. This type of person isn’t the majority, at least in my experience, but their minority is large enough that you reliably encounter them when you start working with large organizations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Positive global gradient is insufficient; positive local gradient is necessary, at all links of the value chain.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Huh. That stuck around in my brain for a bit. Never really seen it put so succinctly before!
  - mclightning 5y ago
    As a non-native English speaker, I dont get this. Can someone explain it for me?
    - goohle 5y ago
      (Non-native English speaker). In an optimization problem, there can be global optimum and local optimums. He says that global optimum is not enough for supply chain, because lower layers money will be sucked by upper layers and chain will break, because owner of sucked business will park his money somewhere else, so each level must operate at a local optimum.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Even internally, if your big idea boils down to "I'm eliminating your job", people will be less than enthusiastic
- dehrmann 5y ago
  They went through the numbers as realized it would be cheaper to build an equivalent product than buy your startup. This is always a risk founders and investors are aware of. There's nothing disgusting about it. I wouldn't even go as far as saying it was people "focused on their career." They were really just doing their jobs.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > They went through the numbers as realized it would be cheaper to build an equivalent product than buy your startup. Except that they're always wrong about that ... The real problem is that the managerial authority to cut the check of the correct size is 4 political levels higher than the manager whose ass is getting kicked by your startup. Once your startup is kicking the CEO's ass, then you can expect a buyout.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Free market machine broke
14 5y ago
The wired article was extremely short not sure if I’m just not getting the full article? It seems from my perspective that Taylor and McDonald’s conspired to take money from the franchise owners. What a shame. Because all it does is incentives owners to cut corners like say serve cold fries so they don’t lose money. McDonald’s used to be great but somewhere lost the way. They used to be the affordable place anyone could afford a couple burgers and fries for their family and it used to be quite enjoyable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  What I'm enjoying is their randomly changing offers post-lockdowns in my country, and how they don't communicate them at all. Their "gourmet" burgers are now only available from 10:30am to 10:30pm, even in 24 hour joints. Their "all day breakfast" they spent a lot of money advertising now ends at midday. This was notably not advertised. When I rocked up at 12:15pm looking for my regular Sunday McMuffin, and was informed of the new policy, I kinda understood that famous scene in Falling Down[1]. They have vanilla shakes! Sometimes, maybe. Plenty of the other shakes, but vanilla is hit and miss. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlzm7-gvTRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlzm7-gvTRg
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That is an awesome movie, if a bit depressing. "I'm the bad guy?"
  - progre 5y ago
    Must have watched that move close to 30 times. I wish my kids will someday watch it, they will have a Keyser Soze moment when they realize how much of our daily coversation is made up of quotes from Falling Down.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      I suppose that's better than the Rocky Horror Picture Show quotes mine have been hearing... and I hope that they never find out. The Monty Python and Pulp Fiction quotes, though... Yes I hope that they figure those out some day!
abdel_nasser 5y ago
how disgusting. it makes me think that vertical integration is great for countries where the losing party of a lawsuit doesnt face any form of disincentive like paying the legal expenses of the winning party. if you are a company that tries to sell a product like this ice-cream mod then you will be sued but its better to have your own burger joint and fill it with your own inventions. they say that the company was brought to brink of insolvency so i think they probably would have been better being a vertically integrated burger joint. thats so cool to read about the innovations of their machine. text message alerts, ingredient monitoring in the hopper -- there is so much meat on the bone in so many markets. i sometimes think of what a better mcdonalds would look like. i imagine it would have equipment like this ice-cream machine that is highly automated and designed for very low maintenance. so one area of arbitrage is reducing staff count and burden with the machinery. then another aspect is getting rid of indoor seating. even before the pandemic i always noticed that the drive-through always seemed to get more traffic than the inside. i think you could just get rid of the inside and do a scaled-up version of the parking-lot delivery that mcdonalds has started doing recently. a medium sized parking lot with a large amount of numbered spaces, and some of the area could be used as a buffer for people to wait for open spaces. and a walk-up window for people who dont have a smart phone or are on foot. and this plays into the largest source of employee friction in my opinion. imagine you work at mcdonalds, you are face to face with random strangers all day. not only is it embarrassing to show your face and be recognized as a person who works at mcdonalds, its stressful dealing with people who are rude and sometimes crazy. i think if you could cut out this aspect of working at mcdonalds that it would be a much more attractive job and you would have much higher employee quality and retention which matter a lot. and one way you might do this is to have a very simple robot deliver the food. the active parking spots could all be on the outer edge of the parking lot and wrapping around the edge could be a track with protrusions between each parking space. it would be covered for rain and snow and surrounded by standard railings so that nobody would wander into the track, no cars could intrude into the track and nobody could interfere with the robot easily since it would be quite heavy. the robot would be a large box about the height of a car door window with a large battery and four large wheels and a camera and a radio. the robot would travel between the building and cars, having multiple food orders put on top of its head and then positioned directly in front of the driver window. it would be simple to drive, impossible to drive into a place it wasnt supposed to be, and driven on shifts, perhaps as a break from the more laborious jobs or by other people remotely. and the nice thing is that if the backup robots all failed or there is some problem, the workers could just use the track to deliver orders by hand like dairy queen. a high tech fast food company with delicious food, an app that works, fast and efficient user experience and a massive improvement in employee satisfaction.
pigbearpig 5y ago
First off, Taylor probably is happy with having machines that need service and who knows why McDonald's wants broken machines. I see nothing wrong with Taylor wanting to improve their own remote monitoring UX. That's just how competition works. Kytch make a good app, and what is Taylor supposed to do, not improve theirs? That part of Kytch's argument is bull. Kytch can MITM and reverse engineer Taylor's machines, but then they don't like it when Taylor does it back to them? Seems like a pretty weak argument. Both companies just need to focus on engineering a better product.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  The evidence up to this point strongly suggests Taylor and McDonald’s are interested in milking franchisees (who must source equipment from Taylor per their agreement with McDonald’s corporate), while Kytch actively demonstrated attempting to deliver a better engineered product to franchisees. This is important, as it demonstrates racketeering and anti competitive behavior on the part of Taylor and McDonald’s, and it’s possible the FTC gets involved further besides making an inquiry. One might expect franchisees have the right to repair their purchased equipment, even if forced to purchase specific food sevice equipment as part of their franchise agreement. One would not expect their equipment provider and franchisor to collude against them.
  - srj 5y ago
    One part of this I don't understand is why would McDonald's benefit from their franchises constantly needing their ice cream machines serviced.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      “Kytch points to documents from the time of Taylor's acquisition by Middleby in 2018 that show the company receives close to 25 of its revenue—from all its customers, not just McDonald's—via repair contracts with Taylor distributors, which Kytch argues provides an incentive to maintain the machines' fragility.“ The missing piece is the kickback to McDonald’s, or a similar financial incentive from Taylor to maintain the status quo. I imagine that’d be a component of discovery or information requested by a federal regulator.
PeterisP 5y ago
I don't see any basis why the complaint is interesting - there's assertion that the ice cream machine manufacturer is copying features of the competitor's device, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and, in the absence of patent protection (the word "patent" is not mentioned in the article) absolutely permissible; and there's some assertion of "stealing trade secrets" without asserting any actual compromise of a secret by someone entrusted to keep it, but rather an act which looks like reverse engineering a product (which, again, does not require a permission for physical devices not covered by patents or copyright; trade secret law explicitly states that reverse engineering is a lawful way of acquiring trade secrets) and its documentation, which should be considered a very reasonable thing to do for anyone with a hacker mentality. Trade secret applies only to things that you actually keep secret, all the things you sell or give to your customers aren't trade secrets any more. "There was a concerted effort to not only obtain and copy our device and follow everything we were doing, but then also, when it hit a critical mass, to actually put us out of business," - that's pretty much textbook definition of market competition, not an indication of anything shady. "Kytch argued in its initial legal complaint that the company didn't truly copy Kytch's device to try to fix McDonald's ice cream machines, but simply to have a competing product it could tout to McDonald's—and McDonald's franchisees—in order to prevent Kytch from fixing those machines." - again, it's perfectly legitimate to try and make a competing product to tout to McDonalds; unless they're violating a specific patent, it's their right to do so; more competition is a good thing to have.
- kjaftaedi 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it competition since McDonald's specifically forbade franchisees from using Kytch's device.
  - raverbashing 5y ago
    Yeah, and for some reason McD thinks you need a technician to fix something hard like "container overfilled" or something. And apparently even Taylor thinks this is stupid. Sounds like an "ok boomer" moment. (or maybe something involving financial incentives, can't exclude that) "Who mitms their own machine?!" Well, did Taylor fire the engineers that built this? Or they just want to keep the same limited hw and work the diagnostics part around it?
SLWW 5y ago
https://archive.md/D1rvC https://archive.md/D1rvC
shum1 5y ago
Relevant link for those who want more context on the constantly broken McDonald icecream machine situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 I don't think the WIRED article isn't really doing justice to what Kytch is trying to show. The important argument is whether or not McDonald and Taylor conspired to prevent Kytch from selling / franchisees from purchasing this equipment, essentially a 'right to repair' argument. If Kytch wins, there could be ramifications for the tractor debate in the agricultural world as well.
DonHopkins 5y ago
McDonalds should have Apple design uncrackable DRM that locks franchise owners into their walled garden, and call them iScream machines.
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
  I have no mouth and I must have iScream?
rbrbr 5y ago
The blank shallow face of corporate corruption.
siva7 5y ago
The reason why McD tastes the same everywhere in the world is because of strict protocols like this. Ever wondered why Domino’s tastes very different depending on the country? I prefer predictability in quality and that is one thing that McD gets right
- dblooman 5y ago
  Does that mean dominos tastes good somewhere?
  - marktucker 5y ago
    I've heard people say good things about dominos in Switzerland in France but I have zero interest in trying it to compare with my experience in the USA.
  - vadfa 5y ago
    Some of the premium pizzas are pretty good in Spain. I like the one with goat cheese and caramelised onions and the one with bourbon sauce.
  - rand49an 5y ago
    UK Dominos is damn good and very consistent between stores too.
- motoboi 5y ago
  McD tastes the same because all ingredients come from the same place. Ever wondered why McDonald’s tastes like cardboard everywhere in the world? That’s why.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > McD tastes the same because all ingredients come from the same place. Do you know how expensive McDonald's would be if this were true?
    - 5y ago
darepublic 5y ago
Go plaintiffs, go plaintiffs
blinding-streak 5y ago
Loose analogy that came to mind here as I read this article: McDonald's + Taylor: 1990s Wintel alliance Kytch: 1990s AMD (plucky underdog)
donenas 5y ago
The issue is that Mcdonald's is forcing owners to use this broken machine.
shadowgovt 5y ago
The meta-lesson here is that if you plan to go into the business of providing service for an existing tech ecosystem, be prepared in your future for a fight like this. Companies with small, insular lock-in arrangements don't cede territory willingly. Be it squeezing in on the dominant grocery in a small town, the used car dealers in a county, or the inkjet printer ink cartridge supply chain, find a damn good lawyer who's excited for a fight early in your company's life.

250 points by notacoward 5y ago

God if you only cared as much for the ppl that worked at McDonalds

In my naivety I build a startup that fixed a problem for a fortune 500 company thinking they would be delighted. They weren't. These big companies are staffed by individuals who are focused on their career and will do absolutely anything to extinguish your company/idea and pretend it was their idea and champion the company's initiative. It's disgusting but it's reality and if you are a founder be ready for it.

hereforphone 5y ago
That's the majority of the people in the world. Not just Fortune 500 execs.
- derekjdanserl 5y ago
  Of course, we are subservient to and dependent on an economic system which both incentivizes and enforces this type of behavior.
  - hereforphone 5y ago
    Reddit is that way --->
    - xmonkee 5y ago
      <---- 4chan is that
  - fastball 5y ago
    Seems like you're making a swipe at capitalism, but this behavior is also rampant in socialist economies (e.g. was very widespread in the USSR), so I don't think the economic system is to blame.
    - EMIRELADERO 5y ago
      Those two facts aren't mutually exclusive
      - fastball 5y ago
        Which two facts?
    - leemailll 5y ago
      It's a problem of bureaucracy
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        Particularly career ladders. Without career ladders, people wouldn't feel like they're losing something if they didn't come up with the idea. My personal feeling is they are overused, but I'm not entirely ready to say they shouldn't exist entirely. The one thing socialism gives you that capitalism doesn't in this case is that you're guaranteed a job if you are made redundant whereas in a capitalist system, you're out of a job unless you made your own arrangements.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    In state bureaucracies and very unionized workplaces people will be afraid to fix something, even if they can and they should to avoid extreme waste, because they are afraid that it would take the credit away from someone else.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Firefly: “Half the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated.”
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The difference is that a VP at an F500 has significantly more resources at their command.
- pomian 5y ago
  In spite of every thing, I do not believe its a majority. As with many things, it is the loud minority. We would not have progress, if your statement were true.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Progress happens when the incumbent interest is disrupted by something they couldn't see coming, or couldn't stop because of their own inertia.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      When I think about this, I think about how Apple stole the music industry for awhile. The RIAA was tossing lawsuits left and right to try to stem the tide of piracy. Companies tried to build up digital marketplaces, but the studios and labels owned the rights and didn't want to play ball. And most of the companies shot themselves in the foot by also not playing ball; after all, the RIAA was wrong, they were dinosaurs, they didn't understand tech and their demands were anachronistic nonsense. Along came Apple, and they basically sat down with the RIAA and did nothing but play ball. Exclusive deals? Got it. Our best cryptography folks working on a cipher algorithm to keep your music "secure" on a device someone else owns? Yes, we'll tell you we can do that and invest time and money into making it plausibly true. A revenue-sharing agreement so lopsided it would make a used car salesman blush? Here's our vein; open us up and leave us with as much as you think we need. And that lasted for a couple years. Then Apple unilaterally announced they were dropping the encryption. It was, after all, a pain in the ass for end-users. And the RIAA screamed. And Apple just stared them down and said "You killed all the alternatives. Where else but iTunes will you go? You can't even go back to CDs; customers liked digital so much they stopped buying them and the machines that play them." And for a brief period, Apple became de-facto owners of music distribution overnight by simply giving the previous owners everything they thought they wanted.
- jcims 5y ago
  This is a pattern of behavior as old as time in politics and commerce and academics and relationships. This type of person isn’t the majority, at least in my experience, but their minority is large enough that you reliably encounter them when you start working with large organizations.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Positive global gradient is insufficient; positive local gradient is necessary, at all links of the value chain.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Huh. That stuck around in my brain for a bit. Never really seen it put so succinctly before!
- mclightning 5y ago
  As a non-native English speaker, I dont get this. Can someone explain it for me?
  - goohle 5y ago
    (Non-native English speaker). In an optimization problem, there can be global optimum and local optimums. He says that global optimum is not enough for supply chain, because lower layers money will be sucked by upper layers and chain will break, because owner of sucked business will park his money somewhere else, so each level must operate at a local optimum.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kevingadd 5y ago
Even internally, if your big idea boils down to "I'm eliminating your job", people will be less than enthusiastic
dehrmann 5y ago
They went through the numbers as realized it would be cheaper to build an equivalent product than buy your startup. This is always a risk founders and investors are aware of. There's nothing disgusting about it. I wouldn't even go as far as saying it was people "focused on their career." They were really just doing their jobs.
- bsder 5y ago
  > They went through the numbers as realized it would be cheaper to build an equivalent product than buy your startup. Except that they're always wrong about that ... The real problem is that the managerial authority to cut the check of the correct size is 4 political levels higher than the manager whose ass is getting kicked by your startup. Once your startup is kicking the CEO's ass, then you can expect a buyout.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Free market machine broke

14 5y ago

The wired article was extremely short not sure if I’m just not getting the full article? It seems from my perspective that Taylor and McDonald’s conspired to take money from the franchise owners. What a shame. Because all it does is incentives owners to cut corners like say serve cold fries so they don’t lose money. McDonald’s used to be great but somewhere lost the way. They used to be the affordable place anyone could afford a couple burgers and fries for their family and it used to be quite enjoyable.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
EdwardDiego 5y ago
What I'm enjoying is their randomly changing offers post-lockdowns in my country, and how they don't communicate them at all. Their "gourmet" burgers are now only available from 10:30am to 10:30pm, even in 24 hour joints. Their "all day breakfast" they spent a lot of money advertising now ends at midday. This was notably not advertised. When I rocked up at 12:15pm looking for my regular Sunday McMuffin, and was informed of the new policy, I kinda understood that famous scene in Falling Down[1]. They have vanilla shakes! Sometimes, maybe. Plenty of the other shakes, but vanilla is hit and miss. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlzm7-gvTRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlzm7-gvTRg
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That is an awesome movie, if a bit depressing. "I'm the bad guy?"
- progre 5y ago
  Must have watched that move close to 30 times. I wish my kids will someday watch it, they will have a Keyser Soze moment when they realize how much of our daily coversation is made up of quotes from Falling Down.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    I suppose that's better than the Rocky Horror Picture Show quotes mine have been hearing... and I hope that they never find out. The Monty Python and Pulp Fiction quotes, though... Yes I hope that they figure those out some day!

abdel_nasser 5y ago

how disgusting. it makes me think that vertical integration is great for countries where the losing party of a lawsuit doesnt face any form of disincentive like paying the legal expenses of the winning party. if you are a company that tries to sell a product like this ice-cream mod then you will be sued but its better to have your own burger joint and fill it with your own inventions. they say that the company was brought to brink of insolvency so i think they probably would have been better being a vertically integrated burger joint. thats so cool to read about the innovations of their machine. text message alerts, ingredient monitoring in the hopper -- there is so much meat on the bone in so many markets. i sometimes think of what a better mcdonalds would look like. i imagine it would have equipment like this ice-cream machine that is highly automated and designed for very low maintenance. so one area of arbitrage is reducing staff count and burden with the machinery. then another aspect is getting rid of indoor seating. even before the pandemic i always noticed that the drive-through always seemed to get more traffic than the inside. i think you could just get rid of the inside and do a scaled-up version of the parking-lot delivery that mcdonalds has started doing recently. a medium sized parking lot with a large amount of numbered spaces, and some of the area could be used as a buffer for people to wait for open spaces. and a walk-up window for people who dont have a smart phone or are on foot. and this plays into the largest source of employee friction in my opinion. imagine you work at mcdonalds, you are face to face with random strangers all day. not only is it embarrassing to show your face and be recognized as a person who works at mcdonalds, its stressful dealing with people who are rude and sometimes crazy. i think if you could cut out this aspect of working at mcdonalds that it would be a much more attractive job and you would have much higher employee quality and retention which matter a lot. and one way you might do this is to have a very simple robot deliver the food. the active parking spots could all be on the outer edge of the parking lot and wrapping around the edge could be a track with protrusions between each parking space. it would be covered for rain and snow and surrounded by standard railings so that nobody would wander into the track, no cars could intrude into the track and nobody could interfere with the robot easily since it would be quite heavy. the robot would be a large box about the height of a car door window with a large battery and four large wheels and a camera and a radio. the robot would travel between the building and cars, having multiple food orders put on top of its head and then positioned directly in front of the driver window. it would be simple to drive, impossible to drive into a place it wasnt supposed to be, and driven on shifts, perhaps as a break from the more laborious jobs or by other people remotely. and the nice thing is that if the backup robots all failed or there is some problem, the workers could just use the track to deliver orders by hand like dairy queen. a high tech fast food company with delicious food, an app that works, fast and efficient user experience and a massive improvement in employee satisfaction.

pigbearpig 5y ago

First off, Taylor probably is happy with having machines that need service and who knows why McDonald's wants broken machines. I see nothing wrong with Taylor wanting to improve their own remote monitoring UX. That's just how competition works. Kytch make a good app, and what is Taylor supposed to do, not improve theirs? That part of Kytch's argument is bull. Kytch can MITM and reverse engineer Taylor's machines, but then they don't like it when Taylor does it back to them? Seems like a pretty weak argument. Both companies just need to focus on engineering a better product.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
The evidence up to this point strongly suggests Taylor and McDonald’s are interested in milking franchisees (who must source equipment from Taylor per their agreement with McDonald’s corporate), while Kytch actively demonstrated attempting to deliver a better engineered product to franchisees. This is important, as it demonstrates racketeering and anti competitive behavior on the part of Taylor and McDonald’s, and it’s possible the FTC gets involved further besides making an inquiry. One might expect franchisees have the right to repair their purchased equipment, even if forced to purchase specific food sevice equipment as part of their franchise agreement. One would not expect their equipment provider and franchisor to collude against them.
- srj 5y ago
  One part of this I don't understand is why would McDonald's benefit from their franchises constantly needing their ice cream machines serviced.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    “Kytch points to documents from the time of Taylor's acquisition by Middleby in 2018 that show the company receives close to 25 of its revenue—from all its customers, not just McDonald's—via repair contracts with Taylor distributors, which Kytch argues provides an incentive to maintain the machines' fragility.“ The missing piece is the kickback to McDonald’s, or a similar financial incentive from Taylor to maintain the status quo. I imagine that’d be a component of discovery or information requested by a federal regulator.

PeterisP 5y ago

I don't see any basis why the complaint is interesting - there's assertion that the ice cream machine manufacturer is copying features of the competitor's device, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and, in the absence of patent protection (the word "patent" is not mentioned in the article) absolutely permissible; and there's some assertion of "stealing trade secrets" without asserting any actual compromise of a secret by someone entrusted to keep it, but rather an act which looks like reverse engineering a product (which, again, does not require a permission for physical devices not covered by patents or copyright; trade secret law explicitly states that reverse engineering is a lawful way of acquiring trade secrets) and its documentation, which should be considered a very reasonable thing to do for anyone with a hacker mentality. Trade secret applies only to things that you actually keep secret, all the things you sell or give to your customers aren't trade secrets any more. "There was a concerted effort to not only obtain and copy our device and follow everything we were doing, but then also, when it hit a critical mass, to actually put us out of business," - that's pretty much textbook definition of market competition, not an indication of anything shady. "Kytch argued in its initial legal complaint that the company didn't truly copy Kytch's device to try to fix McDonald's ice cream machines, but simply to have a competing product it could tout to McDonald's—and McDonald's franchisees—in order to prevent Kytch from fixing those machines." - again, it's perfectly legitimate to try and make a competing product to tout to McDonalds; unless they're violating a specific patent, it's their right to do so; more competition is a good thing to have.

kjaftaedi 5y ago
I wouldn't call it competition since McDonald's specifically forbade franchisees from using Kytch's device.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  Yeah, and for some reason McD thinks you need a technician to fix something hard like "container overfilled" or something. And apparently even Taylor thinks this is stupid. Sounds like an "ok boomer" moment. (or maybe something involving financial incentives, can't exclude that) "Who mitms their own machine?!" Well, did Taylor fire the engineers that built this? Or they just want to keep the same limited hw and work the diagnostics part around it?

SLWW 5y ago

https://archive.md/D1rvC https://archive.md/D1rvC

shum1 5y ago

Relevant link for those who want more context on the constantly broken McDonald icecream machine situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 I don't think the WIRED article isn't really doing justice to what Kytch is trying to show. The important argument is whether or not McDonald and Taylor conspired to prevent Kytch from selling / franchisees from purchasing this equipment, essentially a 'right to repair' argument. If Kytch wins, there could be ramifications for the tractor debate in the agricultural world as well.

DonHopkins 5y ago

McDonalds should have Apple design uncrackable DRM that locks franchise owners into their walled garden, and call them iScream machines.

BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
I have no mouth and I must have iScream?

rbrbr 5y ago

The blank shallow face of corporate corruption.

siva7 5y ago

The reason why McD tastes the same everywhere in the world is because of strict protocols like this. Ever wondered why Domino’s tastes very different depending on the country? I prefer predictability in quality and that is one thing that McD gets right

dblooman 5y ago
Does that mean dominos tastes good somewhere?
- marktucker 5y ago
  I've heard people say good things about dominos in Switzerland in France but I have zero interest in trying it to compare with my experience in the USA.
- vadfa 5y ago
  Some of the premium pizzas are pretty good in Spain. I like the one with goat cheese and caramelised onions and the one with bourbon sauce.
- rand49an 5y ago
  UK Dominos is damn good and very consistent between stores too.
motoboi 5y ago
McD tastes the same because all ingredients come from the same place. Ever wondered why McDonald’s tastes like cardboard everywhere in the world? That’s why.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > McD tastes the same because all ingredients come from the same place. Do you know how expensive McDonald's would be if this were true?
  - 5y ago

darepublic 5y ago

Go plaintiffs, go plaintiffs

blinding-streak 5y ago

Loose analogy that came to mind here as I read this article: McDonald's + Taylor: 1990s Wintel alliance Kytch: 1990s AMD (plucky underdog)

donenas 5y ago

The issue is that Mcdonald's is forcing owners to use this broken machine.

shadowgovt 5y ago

The meta-lesson here is that if you plan to go into the business of providing service for an existing tech ecosystem, be prepared in your future for a fight like this. Companies with small, insular lock-in arrangements don't cede territory willingly. Be it squeezing in on the dominant grocery in a small town, the used car dealers in a county, or the inkjet printer ink cartridge supply chain, find a damn good lawyer who's excited for a fight early in your company's life.