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Considering the notoriety of John Deere fighting the right to repair and right to own movement, I have a hunch that their adoption of any new technology could b

Considering the notoriety of John Deere fighting the right to repair and right to own movement, I have a hunch that their adoption of any new technology could be largely motivated by curbing ownership. I would say many software services moving to cloud and to a subscription has largely prevented those products from being pirated or even necessarily owned. Inspired by that, for JD the most convenient path to create an "anti-piratable" product is by slapping a label of "autonomous and AI" and have them being directly controlled from a central location.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> I have a hunch that their adoption of any new technology could be largely motivated by curbing ownership. I’m plenty critical of John Deere (having worked there for a decade), but I think you have it backwards. Technology drives profit for John Deere, and John Deere’s right to repair is a defensive play to keep third parties from eating into those profits. Parenthetically, I also strongly suspect that the tech media are overly-cynical about its portrait of Deere’s anti-right-to-repair stance. Practically speaking, it becomes a lot more expensive to ship software updates when you can’t guarantee anything about the state of the system you’re shipping to because the customer has modified various things. Moreover, the more people tamper with these complex, dynamic systems, the more likely there are to be issues, which Deere probably fears will erode its “quality” reputation (Deere’s management can’t maintain Deere’s reputation; it certainly doesn’t want other parties accelerating the erosion). Furthermore, triaging issues and litigating responsibility becomes dramatically more expensive (note that unlike other parts of the software industry, “issues” here are tens of thousands of dollars per incident in the best case and “loss of life lawsuits” in the worst case). So yeah, all of these things are about “profit” from Deere’s perspective, but it seems to me to be less about avoiding competition per se and more about the substantial cost burden on Deere to support a third party ecosystem. As another parenthetical, I also think people attribute more competence to Deere’s software business than I’ve personally observed. I would honestly love to work on Deere’s technical problems, but Deere has so many political, cultural, and managerial problems that impede technical progress.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> I have a hunch that their adoption of any new technology could be largely motivated by curbing ownership. I’m plenty critical of John Deere (having worked there for a decade), but I think you have it backwards. Technology drives profit for John Deere, and John Deere’s right to repair is a defensive play to keep third parties from eating into those profits. Parenthetically, I also strongly suspect that the tech media are overly-cynical about its portrait of Deere’s anti-right-to-repair stance. Practically speaking, it becomes a lot more expensive to ship software updates when you can’t guarantee anything about the state of the system you’re shipping to because the customer has modified various things. Moreover, the more people tamper with these complex, dynamic systems, the more likely there are to be issues, which Deere probably fears will erode its “quality” reputation (Deere’s management can’t maintain Deere’s reputation; it certainly doesn’t want other parties accelerating the erosion). Furthermore, triaging issues and litigating responsibility becomes dramatically more expensive (note that unlike other parts of the software industry, “issues” here are tens of thousands of dollars per incident in the best case and “loss of life lawsuits” in the worst case). So yeah, all of these things are about “profit” from Deere’s perspective, but it seems to me to be less about avoiding competition per se and more about the substantial cost burden on Deere to support a third party ecosystem. As another parenthetical, I also think people attribute more competence to Deere’s software business than I’ve personally observed. I would honestly love to work on Deere’s technical problems, but Deere has so many political, cultural, and managerial problems that impede technical progress.