Re: The Problem
That worked for Adobe - but only because Adobe have a de-facto stranglehold on the creative industry (effectively, if you are in the design/print business then your clients will expect you to be able to handle Adobe documents).
But contrary to what others have said, Deere don't have that degree of stranglehold. A tractor is basically a commodity item with stable and well defined interfaces. If you drag something, then there are industry standards about how you couple it; if you attach an implement, again there are industry standards for the 3 point linkage; ditto for the power take off; ditto (more or less) for hydraulics. Basically, for any specific weight/size/power of tractor, you can largely swap that tractor out for any other make of a suitable weight/size/power.
And there are plenty of manufacturers around. Ford, Case, Massey Ferguson come immediately to mind. But there's also Lamborghini (made tractors before they made cars) and a host of other little known makes. And that's before you get to the Russian and Chinese models - a lot of which appear to be either copies of, or perhaps they bought the tooling from, well known makes like MF.
So Deere can take the decisions to stop selling outright, but their sales teams will very quickly be feeding back to management that they might as well scale back manufacturing capacity a lot. They'll get some lease deals - big operators do tend to lease more of their kit - but they'll lose pretty well all of their sales to small and mid size customers.
One thing that does tend to get attention is when [big vendor's sale person] comes calling to collect his next sale - he sees that amongst your current [big vendor] kit parked in the yard, there is now a competitor's product. The sales person knows very well that once you've bought one of something else, unless it turns out to be a lemon, then it's unlikely to be the last.