John Deere now considers VMs to be legacy tech, Ethernet and Wi-Fi on the brink Agricultural equipment maker John Deere has decided virtual machines are legacy tech. Principal architect Jason Wallin today told Nutanix’s Next conference that a four-year digital transformation project has seen it replace its previous infrastructure in order to take advantage of cloud-native technologies. Wallin didn’t …
Sometime in the far future, the human stellar empire will have entire specially-formatted agricultural planets run on JohnDeer automated machines, providing pesticide-free crops to all of Humanity.
But that ain't today. Today, we only have Earth, and it has not yet been terraformed for John Deer.
I'm not sure this is the future we're looking for.
> Nothing pulls like a Deere...
Nothing RUNS like a Deere.
> ...a company high on their own supply of bullshine.
Like my neighbor's Deere lawn tractor. Two rotating blades. Cogged together so the cut overlaps between the blades. About every 3rd mowing the cogs strip, the blades clash, VIOLENTLY. If it were honest cogs, or even motorcycle chain, it might work (loudly). But no, rubber cogbelt. They make such belts for motorcycles and they last; dunno how JD screwed this plan. (Maybe cuz cellfone is weak here?)
> switching from wifi to cellular?
Range and stability? Have you seen some of Deere's factories?? They go on and on. Yes WiFi can be networked (not so very different from Cells) to cover arbitrary acreage, but cell has done this a decade longer (more corner-bugs squashed).
... that they'll grad every opportunity to hinder you running anything locally, because that means freedoms for end users and accountability for them. Instead they want to make everything online, so, they will have total control over everything 24/7, and will also not be subject - or just in a limited fashion - to privacy, right to repair and warranty laws, because they'll be able to pull the strings behind the curtain as they wish.
Very true. Have a pint with a farmer and ask them about their tractor. Big chance you will get a story that, yes, it is all digital and no, we can't do anything ourselves any more. If John Deere talks about the production of food, they will probably omit that they plan to introduce a subscription model for that too. Read the stories here of cars not activating certain functions if you don't pay per month? Horrified by it? Well, again, buy a farmer a pint, and see what the world looks like for them for a long time already. Don't pay? Oh dear, tractor won't start...
Have a pint with a farmer and they'll have you on.
Real Time Kinematic guidance is subscription but tractors starting up and moving about about are not.
And the car subscription functions never did horrify me because I read the details about them, not just the headline or the what some drunk bore down the pub said that his brother's mate read on facebook.
So you're happy to pay a monthly fee for heated seats? Ones that are already fitted as standard so to the manufacturer there is zero additional cost?
No, the manufacturers in question - for example BMW - offered a price for permanent enabling of the feature alongside the subscription option, for a price inline with what they normally sell the option for. It was a choice, that suited some people. I read the details.
If I had not chosen the option, then it being there anyway is zero difference to me. Same if I did choose it.
It’s just negative people, so desperate to find something to whinge about - will ignore the rest of the information.
I think I'll just buy a (probably Chinese) vehicle that is "buy once and you're done". I don't need a drip priced "ultimate driving machine", thank you very much.
I'd guess that since the majority of new cars are leased rater than purchased it all gets lumped into some $700+ a month "car payment". I prefer to pay cash for "slightly used" and then run it until it eventually falls apart (we don't have rust here so that can be literally decades). Its cheaper.
The problem with subscriptions is literally everyone's selling them these days and they really mount up. Most people don't realize just how bad things have got until the get laid off (or retire). and find out the truth of Micawber -- "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." Most people don't leave any financial slack in their lives -- many just can't -- so that when "something always turns up" eventually fails they do aw well.
The difference is I have to carry round the hardware even if I don't buy it. It has weight, costs fuel to move and costs money to make (which ultimately I will be paying for). I'd like to charge them for displaying their logo honestly, if that's their attitude.
And BMW earn special ire for charging £300 to "activate" CarPlay (or equivalent) as though their standard dashboard is good enough. Does anyone else charge to activate CarPlay?
“costs money to make (which ultimately I will be paying for).”
As above, no it doesn’t. It costs more to have fit-or-no-fit process and million-variant logistics, than fitting consistently to all vehicles. But it still overall has to be paid for. In other contexts, you know this very well. If you buy off-the-shelf curtains, standard length 2 meters, does this cost more or less than if you order the same curtains in 1.87m length? It isn’t “cheaper to have less material”.
“Ones that are already fitted as standard so to the manufacturer there is zero additional cost?”
I understand that this is the underlying complaint - you feel you are being ripped off. But it fails to understand the underlying economics - there *is* underlying additional cost, which is invisible to you. You are assuming that the cost driver is “making and fitting the seat heater”, the way manufacturing was twenty years ago, but that’s not correct. The choice the manufacturer actually has is: a) Make one car, including self-contained seat heater, and gate it off in software b) Make potentially two cars; depending on customer order, jitter the entire production line, fit-or-no-fit a bunch of cabling, stall up a whole bunch of logistics to keep separate holding areas at every point in the finished shipping chain for each different option, because now the 4000 cars are not identical, and all need to be tracked and routed correctly.
Option b) Seems like a ridiculous strawman, until you realise that it’s not just one build option. A modern car has maybe 20 options….and therefore 2^20 variants. A million variants. Almost every car built is unique, and much of Henry Ford’s production line efficiencies have been lost. It’s costing literally $5k+ *per car* now on the build-variant logistics. *That’s* what they are saving, and *That’s* what you are paying for. And Tesla are saving that $5k+ per car, by producing precisely one variant per model, all build options in software. BMW are just following, as usual.
There is an obvious third option for them here. Make one variant per model. All "options" are no longer optional. Everyone gets them, everyone pays for them. This would eliminate the need to track in software which options should be activated in each car, simplifying things even further. Some customers would love it, and some would be angry at paying for things they will never use. Is it better than what they are doing now? I don't know, but this is definitely a route they could go.
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Do they know the attitude of some of their core customers towards that tech? Billie-Joe-Bubba gonna sit on this here tractor with ma tinfoil hat!
(*cough* yes, I own a JD tractor myself for the hobby farm *cough* No, my hat when using it does not have a metal lining. I swear!)
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