The shareholders don't care about any of that if they think the board did a decent job of propping up the stock price.
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
The myth that shareholders largely care about short-term returns has been disproved empirically over the last 30 years. Every mammoth stock exploded due to assumptions about revenues far, far into the future (dotcom stocks, FATMANG stocks, crypto.) And this should come as no surprise: company valuations are the discounted value of future returns after all.
More often, companies shill bullshit, inestimable long-term growth (AI-bullshit for example) to pump price. Tesla is the poster-child of this strategy.
In contrast, short-term thinking/marketing is a sure fire way to annihilate a stock. Why would the next buyer pay a premium for a squeezed orange?
The dark reality is that most things we customers and employees complain about as “short-term thinking” are tremendously profitable over the long run.
Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
The board's goal was to lock-in maintenance with computer security, which failed catastrophically. All previous generations of Deere tractors have on-board electronics that can be jailbroken.
Well, yeah, putting thousands of pedestrians in a spot that was designed for, essentially, zero pedestrians is a good way to get them killed. The fatality was a dude was hit by a motorist(who was found not at fault) as he walked in the darkness across a street. It's not like John Deere called the Pinkertons in to bust heads and the fatality happened that way.
Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).
Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
>Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
Even low-tech anti-features are insidious. They make the windows in a 3D "bubble" type shape so when you break one, they can charge you more, or use it as leverage to scare you into paying for a support plan that "covers" broken windows. If they were made out of flat panels, 3rd parties could make them, farmers could make their own, and they would be cheaper.
I don't think it's going to happen. Too many shares of automotive companies locked up in influential institutions. The same reason Microsoft is untouchable.
How would you implement that though? As soon as you push a law in a single state, the company will move states, over a single country and the company will move countries, and you’re not gonna get this law passed somewhere like China
If you buy a device, the manufacturer should retain no control over it whatsoever. There should not be technical provisions to make such control possible. Otherwise, it should be considered a rental and made very clear to you before you commit to it.
Hahaha I hadn’t seen that they’re discontinuing that already. It seemed like such an obvious dud when I saw them announcing it. What a waste of resources.
I'm not and do not know American farmer so I'm asking a genuine question, why did they keep buying Deere tractors ?
I know for a fact that there are competitors, in Europe we have many other brand of tractors. It would make no sense to buy something that you know you can't repair.
JD has a good reputation for reliability, and at least in the area where my family farms, green tractors retain their resale value better than most. Also a well built-out dealer network for support. A key factor for my brother's operation is that a large regional JD parts depot is a 20 minute drive away. With any other brand, the mechanic might tell you: "Well, we can have the part here in two days." versus "If you drive to the depot now and pick up the part, I can have you running by the end of this afternoon." During spring planting and fall harvest, that is a big deal.
So despite their big flaws (repairability), they still are better than their competitor ?
I know a few farmer in Europe, despite being better if you tell them they can't repair their engine, they would get very angry and never buy this brand again.
When things break its faster to repair themselves because they already repaired it many times.
But here farms are much smaller than in the us, so it might be a matter of priority. If you have so much land than loosing a day on repairing something makes you lose more money, it makes sense to go with John Deere.
On the other hand, these farmers all have several tractors and old equipment like 40 years old so that when a thing break they can still use another even if less efficient to do the job.
I am a farmer, although one that isn't big enough to buy new equipment. Essentially, what happens is that only the big operators buy new – or more likely lease new – where they only keep it for a season or two. They aren't apt to be too worried about right to repair as the machine will be under warranty the entire time they keep it. Once it goes onto the used market, well... You're at the mercy of what is on the used market.
As sibling comments have said, wide availability of parts and specialists is a big part of it. Big time ops can have people on staff, but most mom and pops will lean on the service shops. Either way though, you need to have parts physically nearby so you can be back up and running in hours rather than days. When your hay is down and rain is in the forecast, waiting days instead of hours can be the difference between a great harvest and a field full of ass grass. In the north american west, when your irrigation is broken and it's July/August, you may only have a day or two before crops start drying and wilting. If you're lucky, you'll get it back up before permanent damage starts.
In many rural areas, John Deere is the closest and/or only option, so you have to choose between freedom and inconvenience, or technological slavery and safety. As we've seen with the general public, most people will go with the latter. Your insurance premiums are certainly cheaper that way.
I guess I don't really understand this argument in an age of near-overnight shipping. I am not a farmer, but I have maintained EOL equipment like refrigerators, fancy stoves, a MB 240D, chainsaws in a small mountain town (ie, far from parts sources). I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already. So for instance I have brake pads for a 2001 Toyota Tundra on the shelf.
Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.
An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.
I'm not a farmer, just friends with some. Driving through tiny towns in rural America you often see small-time John Deere dealerships and repair shops. They are very very well established. I've heard that they have trade-in and financing programs that are very attractive; for many farmers their only option is to go with what is local and has the minimum down up front.
Ahh, IBM - another great example of a company that attained a near universal adoption by setting the standards of quality - literally established what we thought a computer was and then just went to shit.
IBM couldn't get their supercomputer/AI that McDonalds funded to correctly run a drive thru - the project was literally shelved. It can play chess tho ;)
The specialist machinery that Deere makes is really well refined and good at what it does and the fact that farming in the US has consolidated a lot over the decades so the median tractor is bought by some "large enough that they don't really care" business of a farm who doesn't really care because they'll be buying aa maintenance contract and getting rid of the thing in X years anyway.
I just left the industrials space. All the other manufacturers are racing to implement AI and the John Deere model. Of course, most of them don't command the control over their customers like JD but they are definitely planning to lock things down. A major concern is the capabilities and availabilities of technicians. The techs as a whole do not have a good reputation for being competent so they are looking to provide remote diagnostic services with the help of AI...again, looking at JD as the exemplar.
Ya, I got the same ad. I wonder if (1) they believe that the ad will reduce the bad-pr generated by the article, or if (2) it’s just triggering because it matches some keywords (e.g. “John Deere”). The linked page looks like it’s intended to generate good will, so I think it’s case 1. But it really comes off as tone deaf to me
I think all those targeted ad algorithms are effectively just really dumb. Whenever you look through the comments of a YT video criticizing a product/company you are almost guaranteed to find a dozen comments saying they got an ad from that company when the video started.
But then again, what are they supposed to do when practically every corner on the internet only mentions John Deere in a negative context.
The Feds are coming, and I hope they keep going and going until there isn't a single product or service left that dares dictate what you can do after the transaction is complete.
I've been rolling the idea around that perhaps if a product is encumbered by a subscription then it's not a first sale and the product counts as inventory. And gets taxed as such.
I don’t know where a “bright line” needs to be drawn here wrt jurisprudence, but akin to Monsanto, I have _zero_ doubt that Deere has been crossing it for decades.
Readit News
Deere seems to have bad relations with their employees, customers, and regulatory bodies.
The shareholders should remove the board of directors.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/...
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
More often, companies shill bullshit, inestimable long-term growth (AI-bullshit for example) to pump price. Tesla is the poster-child of this strategy.
In contrast, short-term thinking/marketing is a sure fire way to annihilate a stock. Why would the next buyer pay a premium for a squeezed orange?
The dark reality is that most things we customers and employees complain about as “short-term thinking” are tremendously profitable over the long run.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/john_deere_doom/
Just for that failure, they should all likely be gone.
Ludlow Massacre, 1914 - 21 people - men including their wives and children were killed
there are more
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Dead Comment
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
You think that's bad? I bought a "RAM upgrade" over the phone from HAAS for a CNC machine back in 2016ish. The upgrade was from 1mb to 16mb of RAM.
The technician on the phone told me to go to the machine and punch in a series of keys followed by a 21 digit code. That was my ~$2,000 RAM upgrade.
The RAM was always there. It was just locked away as "reserve value" for the manufacturer.
Tesla won't let you buy parts unless you enter the vehicle vin. I believe some other things you have to order through the tesla app.
I think those kinds of requirements should be disallowed too.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
I know for a fact that there are competitors, in Europe we have many other brand of tractors. It would make no sense to buy something that you know you can't repair.
I know a few farmer in Europe, despite being better if you tell them they can't repair their engine, they would get very angry and never buy this brand again. When things break its faster to repair themselves because they already repaired it many times.
But here farms are much smaller than in the us, so it might be a matter of priority. If you have so much land than loosing a day on repairing something makes you lose more money, it makes sense to go with John Deere.
On the other hand, these farmers all have several tractors and old equipment like 40 years old so that when a thing break they can still use another even if less efficient to do the job.
In many rural areas, John Deere is the closest and/or only option, so you have to choose between freedom and inconvenience, or technological slavery and safety. As we've seen with the general public, most people will go with the latter. Your insurance premiums are certainly cheaper that way.
Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.
An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.
IBM couldn't get their supercomputer/AI that McDonalds funded to correctly run a drive thru - the project was literally shelved. It can play chess tho ;)
Deleted Comment
I’d be surprised if their contributions to American manufacturing was much more than assembly to avoid import taxes.
But then again, what are they supposed to do when practically every corner on the internet only mentions John Deere in a negative context.