s219
Super Member
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2011
- Messages
- 8,548
- Location
- Virginia USA
- Tractor
- Kubota L3200, Deere X380, Kubota RTV-X
Well, I can only look at the rear remote kit for my Kubota as but one example. It clearly took someone a chunk of time to work out the details and components, size the hoses, select all the fittings, and then make up instructions that covered cases with/without front loader, with/without backhoe, and so on (the instructions were complex and had several errors, which tells me they should have spent more time and considered other variations of the existing hydraulics setups). That all takes time and isn't free. They would have to know ahead of time that they could sell enough of those kits to cover the development/engineering/legal cost and then turn a profit. Part of that involves pricing the kits to make the math work but still be a compelling value to a customer.
Some of the mods people do here on TBN are probably too marginal to justify, though a third-party might have a better business model to pull it off (especially a lot of the small homegrown outfits who don't yet have a care/appreciation for overhead/development/engineering/legal costs).
The only experience I can relate directly is from my software business developing surveying/navigation apps for iPhone and iPad. I get a ton of customer feedback and feature requests. About 80% of them are good reasonable requests with broad appeal, and make it into the software. The other 20% are oddball requests that might be super important to that one person, but have very limited appeal (and may actually detract from or run counter to the intended use of the app). In most of those cases, I can tell with certainty that the feature only matters to that one person out of several hundred thousand customers.
It costs me anywhere from $500-$10,000 in developer time to implement new features, so I have to be sure that my time/budget is spent wisely, on stuff that will increase sales or bring in upgrade revenue. The oddball requests don't come anywhere close to making the cut. The kicker is that the people that request this stuff are almost eccentric in nature, with no understanding of that balance. They are universally unwilling to pay for the feature if I offer to do it as a custom app project for them (I don't even bother to offer anymore, since my time is too scarce now). So generally these are people looking for $10K of coding to make a $4 app meet their very specific needs. It just doesn't wash from my side of the fence.
I'll go back to your idea of a chainsaw holder -- I see a lot of those posted here on TBN, but not a single one of them would work for me. First, I usually need 2-3 saws with me for cutting projects, and second I haven't seen a chainsaw holder yet that would accommodate my big 77cc Stihl and 28" bar. I am sure each of the custom holders works great for the individual people who did their own mods, but as a manufacturer, I wouldn't see a universal solution with broad appeal that could likely sell in numbers to cover costs. I think many tractor mods fall into this category, and are better left as homegrown mods or small-business products.
