[Will_Parker]

> The immediate retort is that John Deere's approach is maximally profitable-- but is it?

If your profit has to come from sales, but a lot of theirs comes from locking you into a maintenance profit, isn't this a big problem, when they can lower their sale prices much lower than yours?

See what happened when printer manufacturers figured out it was more profitable to sell you ink than printers, even taking a loss on the first sale. They all had to do it once one did. Everyone knew the printers were getting cheap and terrible, but still very few wanted to pay 2x as much on the initial purchase.

With games and other software as well, we see more and more monetizing with ads, DLC and subscriptions, even though most gamers would probably say this had made games worse overall.