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> If it were a high margin business, perhaps things would be different. It's not. Most of the loss here is not from lost bookings; a lot of people who prefer B
by jacques_chester 9y ago
> If it were a high margin business, perhaps things would be different. It's not.
Most of the loss here is not from lost bookings; a lot of people who prefer BA will probably just wait and book once the systems are restored.
It's going to be from secondary losses -- lawsuits, ding to the reputation and so on.
These numbers are estimatable, even for low-margin businesses.
- tyingq 9y agoI agree, but I've been around this sort of thing and seen the post incident analysis, been in the discussions, etc. Despite the huge costs of these outages, they pale in comparison to the costs of a real HA solution for all "needed to fly" applications. To give you some idea, ITA Software was bought by Google for $700 million. They were some of the best and brightest minds in this space, on par with any Silicon Valley darling. They successfully wrote a modern replacement for one popular airline function...shopping. They failed, however, at delivering a modern reservation system, despite tons of money and talent invested.
- jacques_chester 9y ago> Despite the huge costs of these outages, they pale in comparison to the costs of a real HA solution for all "needed to fly" applications. Then, quite honestly, it's the rational decision for airlines to take. Even Google accepts that perfect reliability is impossible, and they're sailing in a pillow-strewn gold-plated yacht down a Mississippi of money.
- mnutt 9y agoI thought that they successfully delivered a passenger scheduling system, but it failed to gain market traction. I don't know the details, but I'd imagine it would be a huge migration cost even if the new system was much better.