Judge allows major 'right to repair' lawsuit against John Deere to move forward

JD does the hard stuff that others aren't as willing to invest in: a large service network with spare parts and spare machines.

Harvest time can be make-or-break for farmers. Stuff you don't expect like a large storm at the end of summer can blow over corn stalks. That makes it a lot slower to run the combine at harvest time. If early fall storms are forecast you might literally need to get everyone available out in the field to harvest the corn in the next 3-4 days or you can expect the value of your crop to drop dramatically - everything will be wet and it's no longer warm or sunny enough for it to dry out. The field turns to mud and the grain elevator ain't gonna pay full price for water-soaked corn.

Everyone else is in the same boat so every available truck+driver is booked. Every mechanic is already 5 tractors backlogged from all the other farmers with emergencies.

Then your harvester/combine dies.

If you're with JD... they have a crews of engineers/mechanics and semi trailers loaded with parts driving around the country following the harvest. They will get you going again in a day or two, not 1-4 weeks later when some other dealer can fit you in or when the spare part you need arrives.

From JD's perspective that service network and parts stock costs a lot of money to maintain so it is available during harvest. They don't want customers going the cheap aftermarket route 11 months of the year because one month of sales can't sustain harvest support teams long-term. It's similar to peak electric generation capacity. Generator plants aren't economic if they only run 5% of the year at regular prices. In this analogy peak pricing has a limit: it would very quickly make harvesting the crop unprofitable.

FWIW I do think it's mostly a money grab by JD. Same reason Chamberlain closed their garage door opener API and has locked down myIQ: they want to force platforms, automakers, etc to pay for access to "their" customers and turn garage door openers into MRR. It's basically free money that you couldn't even imagine prior to the internet.

Maybe it just takes longer for the market to react. Selling farming equipment has a local component to it: you need local dealers and a robust service network. Countries also tend have protectionist policies about the market, since farming is of strategic importance. All of this slows down the expansion of competitors. Add to that that the average lifetime of farming equipment is very high.

The ~10 years that John Deere has shown this behavior might just be too little for the market to adjust.

Pretty much nobody at Deere thinks they're screwing anyone over.

Farmers are still buying Deere equipment for a lot of reasons, including the fact that Deere has by far the best service network during planting and harvest seasons. You will have the least likelihood of disastrous downtime with Deere equipment. Forcing you to get service from the service network makes sure that the service network continues to exist.

It's a complicated situation. (I support right to repair, btw)

You're trying to exacerbate an existing problem with the tax code.

If you invest in a company that goes on to become a conglomerate, nearly all of the value is now a capital gain. You can't invest it in something else without inducing a taxable event. Which means that investors prefer to keep their money in existing conglomerates than move it into prospective competitors. It's a huge tax preference to keep money invested in megacorps rather than new challengers.

It may even be the cause rather than the solution here. Because selling shares of a company that had previously been growing has a major tax disadvantage, investors then want those companies to keep growing even though they've saturated their market, so they demand abusive practices which are long-term detrimental to the company in order to keep the short-term growth rate competitive. Meanwhile this deprives potential challengers of capital which makes abusive practices more effective by making markets less competitive.

It could even make it worse. If you've invested in a company 5 years ago, you're stuck holding it for another two years and now you want to goose the stock price so it peaks when you hit the lower tax rate.

We may be better off with the opposite -- allow basis transfers without a taxable event when you're only changing what you're investing in rather than divesting in order to spend the money. Remove the tax preference for abusive conglomerates.

Interesting idea. I have recently been reading John C. Bogle's work (of Vanguard fame) and he seems to be of the opinion, from my interpretation, that short term speculation will have disasterious consequences for the Stock Market and that we need a sort of Sin Tax to discourage such behavior. Your idea would track with that.

I think you can get around this by just keeping ownership for 7 years, but promising any profit/loss from 6 of those 7 years to someone else via a private contract-for-differnce.

Or just make it a function of time, e.g. varying proportional to 1/(time in years).

Part of their reasoning why the software needs to be locked down is that tractors are priced based on horsepower and they use software to limit the horsepower of different tractors (which use the same actual engine). Otherwise, one could pay for (numbers made up) a 100 horsepower tractor and then unlock it so that they now have 150 hp.

Unfortunately for farmers, everything is controlled by software, so every repair now needs a service call and JD has been cutting back on service techs so that during peak activity times (planting/harvest - where working 24 hrs isn't uncommon) it can be either (a) put your tractor on a flat bed and have it trucked hundreds of miles, or (b) wait a couple weeks.

It comes across as evil to me.

Is JD being evil or are they just bowing to competitive pressure?

That's not an either-or kind of thing.

Because the vast majority of customers are fickle and estimating true long term cost is very difficult so many make purchasing decisions based on sticker price. Also most farms are corporate farms where I suspect they just deal with JD support contracts as the price of doing business based into their financial models vs having their own.

"They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it.

If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air – or of the money to buy it – even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless the had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think and say so. Even as you think at present that it’s right for so few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: “It’s Their Land,” “It’s Their Water,” “It’s Their Coal,” “It’s Their Iron,” so you would say “It’s Their Air,” “These are their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?”

And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on “Christian Duty” in the Sunday magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some of the air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers.

And when you are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggests smashing a hole in the side of one of the gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you’ll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to “justice” in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.’

    Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philathropists (1914) | Ch 15

This. And software developers are helping to make the dystopia real.

Things like 401ks are the biggest trick wall street pulled on the public at large. Now they don't need to defend their actions because many in the public are financially incentivized to defend them. It's not a sin if its done in the name of making my stock go up.

It would be interesting if “pays” was proportional to a party’s assets to ensure equal (yet not ruinous) pain.

As opposed to the current system, where people without much money can't risk suing a company with deep pockets because they don't have the money for a lawyer.

You don't prove it, the other party proves it to the judge by their inept case.

I think limits should be placed even on this, as poorer people are more likely to have a bad case as a plaintiff as they can only afford to personally represent themselves.

For those representing themselves it should start coming up a bit before they'd be declared a vexatious litigant. For those represented by an attorney, it should probably be the attorney paying the fee for wasting the other party's time and money.

If the lawsuit gets dismissed on summary judgment, that's one sign...