5 ms·

Complacency - particularly a sense of you being on top in the natural order of things - will kill you, one way or another. No empire has ever survived it from t

Complacency - particularly a sense of you being on top in the natural order of things - will kill you, one way or another. No empire has ever survived it from the Romans to, the British empire to, well, I guess Boeing. Business textbooks are rammed with stories of complacency gutting market-dominating corporates (IBM, Kodak, Xerox), and the big reckoning seems to be coming for the likes of Boeing, GM, Ford, and many more. In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. When you're not totally absorbed by the share price, and instead you're trying to build a sustainable long-term business that can pay off decades (or generations), later, you get to make decisions that lead to a more sustainable and trusted business.

Pavilion2095 1y ago
> The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.
- Gravityloss 1y ago
  I guess that's also a natural evolution of many industries and societies, which has happened many times. First you have rapid iteration and lots of innovation. Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. Then it gets so bad you won't have anyone working anymore who has finished any new projects during their career, everybody's been working on the same decades long projects since time immemorial. Some new ones are started, some are cancelled every now and then but none are finished. Then the organization will not even try anymore and accept to live in the ruins created by past generations. Then it could happen that all artifacts crumble, all documentation disappears and even the people propagating the intergenerational verbal history forget or die and nobody will even know that anything existed.
  - Frieren 1y ago
    > Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. The problem with Boeing is mostly a business side one, not an engineering problem. Boeing invested in buy backs instead of creating good products, and that has been its philosophy for a while. Interesting read: https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... "Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” "Everything seemed to be changing—the leadership, the culture, even the headquarters, with a move from Seattle to Chicago in 2001." "Many employees struggled to adjust, or resented what they saw as a changing of the guard, where investors took priority over passengers."
    - Gravityloss 1y ago
      Yes, I agree. But the whole business area has also changed and matured. B737 is 56 years old, but A320 is 38 years so not very new anymore. Certification takes very long nowadays, for any company. So the financialization might not have happened in a vacuum or because of some villain, but motivated by the situation that there was less money to be made with engineering anymore.
- kamaal 1y ago
  >>But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. Most of Boeing's Ls seem to have come from quality issues, and that seems to come downstream to cutting spending on engineering, testing and in general overall technical ecosystem. There is no point in making 20 or even 200 new planes, if you don't make them well. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs
themafia 1y ago
Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
- pjjpo 1y ago
  Looking at their general stock performance, I'd say it's actually only the customers being killed. Agree with the sentiments of the sibling posts that monopolies seem as great for business as ever.
- PedroBatista 1y ago
  Boeing is going nowhere. One of the reasons Boeing’s bad behavior in last couple decades is also the reason they won’t die: The US Government
  - themafia 1y ago
    Yea. That's the other new phenomenon this new century has brought us, zombie corporations kept alive by feeding them good tax dollars after bad investments. We have to learn to bury our dead properly.
- tempodox 1y ago
  > Monopolies will kill you. But sadly not fast enough. The monopolies get to make everyone else miserable for far too long.
- g9yuayon 1y ago
  And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?
MaKey 1y ago
Another recent example is Intel.
- scrlk 1y ago
  Ironic, given that Andy Grove's motto was "Only the paranoid survive". There's a Chinese saying: "Wealth does not pass three generations". Three generations of Intel CEOs after Grove: Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini and Brian Krzanich (the progenitor of much of the mess that Intel is in today).
  - targadany 1y ago
    That's why I invested in Rapidus instead of Intel (nVidia has already peaked) it's making Japanese 1nm chips by end of decade, backed by Sony, Toyota, NEC and government. Unfortunately Intel is slow, and US government is unreliable now.
dude250711 1y ago
> In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. Surely, Google here is the cautionary tale? Though I guess it started with the cloud for them.

Pavilion2095 1y ago

> The interesting thing for me about this particular tale is the commercial genesis of Airbus and the incentives of the management team have led it to catch up despite Boeing have a 20-year head start. But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. If anything, they abandoned the idea of a new design and introduced 737 MAX as a response to the competition - A320neo.

Gravityloss 1y ago
I guess that's also a natural evolution of many industries and societies, which has happened many times. First you have rapid iteration and lots of innovation. Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. Then it gets so bad you won't have anyone working anymore who has finished any new projects during their career, everybody's been working on the same decades long projects since time immemorial. Some new ones are started, some are cancelled every now and then but none are finished. Then the organization will not even try anymore and accept to live in the ruins created by past generations. Then it could happen that all artifacts crumble, all documentation disappears and even the people propagating the intergenerational verbal history forget or die and nobody will even know that anything existed.
- Frieren 1y ago
  > Then the projects become more complex, there's less quick wins, and cycles get longer. The problem with Boeing is mostly a business side one, not an engineering problem. Boeing invested in buy backs instead of creating good products, and that has been its philosophy for a while. Interesting read: https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg... "Since the start of the jet age, Boeing had been less a business and more, as writer Jerry Useem put it in Fortune in 2000, “an association of engineers devoted to building amazing flying machines.” "Everything seemed to be changing—the leadership, the culture, even the headquarters, with a move from Seattle to Chicago in 2001." "Many employees struggled to adjust, or resented what they saw as a changing of the guard, where investors took priority over passengers."
  - Gravityloss 1y ago
    Yes, I agree. But the whole business area has also changed and matured. B737 is 56 years old, but A320 is 38 years so not very new anymore. Certification takes very long nowadays, for any company. So the financialization might not have happened in a vacuum or because of some villain, but motivated by the situation that there was less money to be made with engineering anymore.
kamaal 1y ago
>>But Boeing introduced several new planes during these 20 years. Most of Boeing's Ls seem to have come from quality issues, and that seems to come downstream to cutting spending on engineering, testing and in general overall technical ecosystem. There is no point in making 20 or even 200 new planes, if you don't make them well. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

themafia 1y ago

Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.

pjjpo 1y ago
Looking at their general stock performance, I'd say it's actually only the customers being killed. Agree with the sentiments of the sibling posts that monopolies seem as great for business as ever.
PedroBatista 1y ago
Boeing is going nowhere. One of the reasons Boeing’s bad behavior in last couple decades is also the reason they won’t die: The US Government
- themafia 1y ago
  Yea. That's the other new phenomenon this new century has brought us, zombie corporations kept alive by feeding them good tax dollars after bad investments. We have to learn to bury our dead properly.
tempodox 1y ago
> Monopolies will kill you. But sadly not fast enough. The monopolies get to make everyone else miserable for far too long.
g9yuayon 1y ago
And the competition from Airbus may not make Boeing better either. On the contrary, Boeing may well get into a death spiral and a slow but painful death. What competition really means is that incumbents can die without impacting customers as other more competent alternatives will fill the void.
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>Monopolies will kill you. So when is it gonna kill Google?

MaKey 1y ago

Another recent example is Intel.

scrlk 1y ago
Ironic, given that Andy Grove's motto was "Only the paranoid survive". There's a Chinese saying: "Wealth does not pass three generations". Three generations of Intel CEOs after Grove: Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini and Brian Krzanich (the progenitor of much of the mess that Intel is in today).
- targadany 1y ago
  That's why I invested in Rapidus instead of Intel (nVidia has already peaked) it's making Japanese 1nm chips by end of decade, backed by Sony, Toyota, NEC and government. Unfortunately Intel is slow, and US government is unreliable now.

dude250711 1y ago

> In tech, the assumption that the new hot like OpenAI is going to win all seems far-fetched as the complacency is already there. Surely, Google here is the cautionary tale? Though I guess it started with the cloud for them.