[resoluteteeth]

It's interesting to note that this exactly what John Deere has been claiming about repair software for their tractors: they're just really busy working on making it available ASAP.

John Deere has actually been saying this (that they're working on it as fast as they can and it will be ready any day now) as they stall for years and refuse to actually make their software available to purchasers, even though the software itself actually already exists, since dealers have it, and they could literally just hand people copies with zero additional work.

[csours]

What if John Deere viewed user serviceability as a competitive advantage? Why don't they now? If they changed their view today (or 5 years ago, etc), what challenges would they face? How much technical investment would each of those challenged take?

I've been thinking about assumptions so deep you don't even realize they are assumptions. If an organization assumes a dealership model, and works that way for 50 years, all sorts of decisions are made that make it hard to go direct. People joining the org naturally go along, after a while they just don't think about alternatives.

It's REALLY hard to hold ideas that don't make sense in your head; you ask your leadership "Why do we do this" and you come to some conclusion based on what they say, but it's resolved. Like untying a knot, you have to leave a lot of loose ends unresolved if you want to change deep assumptions, and that is not mentally rewarding for most people.

[duped]

That assumes they have the rights to distribute the software to their customers, it's not always so cut and dry when you have vendor libraries to deal with.

[LordDragonfang]

John Deere had a net income of 5 billion in 2021. If it genuinely takes them five years to figure out how to license software with that kind of cash flow, they need to fire their CTO.