Caveat: this is totally pub talk level speculation, read at your own risk.
There's a bunch of stories about how pissed the users of farm equipment are with everything being controlled by computers that are totally locked down to the manufacturer. They're the kind of "easy agreement" story that flourishes. I don't doubt that they're true.
What I suspect is that this segment of the market is too small and too conservative to support a new manufacturer. The end result being not enough sales.
If you're buying a product that lasts 30+ years, and there's relatively little follow-on revenue after the initial purchase, then the market needs to be pretty big to support a manufacturer. And if you're new to the game, who's going to trust you for a 30+ year product life, when you've got no track record?
I'd love to see someone try though: you could try to promote the openness of the system as a counter to the "untrusted manufacturer", I suppose.
Meanwhile, "big Ag" is perfectly fine with an equipment-as-a-service model, since it gets capital costs off their balance sheets, and manufacturers are happy to play along, because they can get a much simpler and more consistent revenue model?
There's a bunch of stories about how pissed the users of farm equipment are with everything being controlled by computers that are totally locked down to the manufacturer. They're the kind of "easy agreement" story that flourishes. I don't doubt that they're true.
What I suspect is that this segment of the market is too small and too conservative to support a new manufacturer. The end result being not enough sales.
If you're buying a product that lasts 30+ years, and there's relatively little follow-on revenue after the initial purchase, then the market needs to be pretty big to support a manufacturer. And if you're new to the game, who's going to trust you for a 30+ year product life, when you've got no track record?
I'd love to see someone try though: you could try to promote the openness of the system as a counter to the "untrusted manufacturer", I suppose.
Meanwhile, "big Ag" is perfectly fine with an equipment-as-a-service model, since it gets capital costs off their balance sheets, and manufacturers are happy to play along, because they can get a much simpler and more consistent revenue model?