Farming is not a high margin activity, and often depends on subsidies to operate. That's why farmers have always done their own mainteinance whenever possible.
Deere is moving towards a different model -> all data under your seat getting uploaded to the cloud, equip that is much more hands off (autodrive and steer, very high accuracy track following). Their machines can run $800,000. They seem to be targeting larger farms / ag engineering models -> driving very large scale efficiencies.
They see more margin in this cloud based revenue, the same way Microsoft does with its push into the cloud. Eventually it's probably going to migrate to essentially power by the hour type models that are already out in other higher end equipment. Their powerguard stuff is trending that way (all costs included for $100 deductible).
It's going to be some other company (Kubota?) that could do the open firmware / open source version. There should be some market for this, not sure how commercial it will be.
