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.
themafia · 19m ago
Competition keeps entities honest. Monopolies will kill you. In Boeing's case both figuratively for the business and literally for it's customers.
MaKey · 8m ago
Another recent example is Intel.
jaggs · 1m ago
In my country we have a saying - "Every dog has its day".
mojuba · 17m ago
Makes it even more impressive considering that the A320 is slightly more expensive.
duke_sam · 30m ago
It’s impressive that Airbus caught up with Boeing after a 20 year head start. It sounds like Airbus’s bet on the future paid off but the article reads more like a PR piece than a case for why the A320 out competed the 737.
Tuna-Fish · 15m ago
A320 and the 737 were designed in entirely different worlds.
The 737 was designed using light tables and slide rules, to use low-bypass turbofans and direct controls with avionics only on board to optionally aid the pilots.
The A320 was designed in CAD and using CFD, with full digital fly-by-wire, and designed from the start for high-bypass turbofans.
Both designs have been updated plenty since, but because the basic design is much more modern, the A320 is much more amenable to being updated. There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737.
The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.
kortilla · 5m ago
> The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.
What’s wrong with the 737 design that it wouldn’t pass today as a new aircraft? (Ignoring the disaster that was the MAX.)
speedgoose · 41s ago
From my understanding, mostly based on Kerbal Space Program, the aircraft isn’t well balanced when equiped with modern engines.
So you have to constantly apply some controls to fly, done by software.
I love stupid car comparisons so imagine a car with a new engine that is more economical to run, but very heavy on the left so the car constantly want to turn left. But if you apply force to the steering wheel manually or the car does it for you with software, all good. Still a shit car though.
rob74 · 8m ago
Yeah, that was exactly my feeling too when I read that Airbus has "finally" caught up to Boeing. With that head start, catching up was not something that could have been expected (unless Boeing would have replaced the 737, which they arguably should have done years ago already, but that's a different story). Of course, if you look into the details, things get more complicated, since the 737 had an in-house narrowbody competitor with the 757 for some time - but Airbus now has the same, with the A220 competing with the smaller A320 family models (A318 and A319).
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.
The 737 was designed using light tables and slide rules, to use low-bypass turbofans and direct controls with avionics only on board to optionally aid the pilots.
The A320 was designed in CAD and using CFD, with full digital fly-by-wire, and designed from the start for high-bypass turbofans.
Both designs have been updated plenty since, but because the basic design is much more modern, the A320 is much more amenable to being updated. There are elements of the 737 design that still exist on every new MAX coming off the line that would completely doom the certification chances of any new design, but are still there because they got grandfathered in for 737.
The wonder is not that the A320 finally caught up in sales, it's that the 737 can still be legally sold.
What’s wrong with the 737 design that it wouldn’t pass today as a new aircraft? (Ignoring the disaster that was the MAX.)
So you have to constantly apply some controls to fly, done by software.
I love stupid car comparisons so imagine a car with a new engine that is more economical to run, but very heavy on the left so the car constantly want to turn left. But if you apply force to the steering wheel manually or the car does it for you with software, all good. Still a shit car though.