Will Boeing Become the Next McDonnell Douglas? (aviationweek.com) 132
schwit1 shared a thought-provoking analysis from
Aviation Week:
Douglas Aircraft started down a 30-year path toward extinction when it merged with McDonnell in 1967. McDonnell management prioritized military programs and was not willing to make the investment necessary to maintain its commercial jetliner market position. By the time it merged with Boeing, Douglas' jetliner products were on their last legs.
It has been nearly 25 years since Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged. Given Boeing's significant engineering cuts, program execution problems, clear prioritization of shareholder returns, extremely uncertain product development road map and deteriorating market share outlook, it is time to consider whether Boeing Commercial Aircraft is destined to share Douglas' fate.
It has been nearly 25 years since Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged. Given Boeing's significant engineering cuts, program execution problems, clear prioritization of shareholder returns, extremely uncertain product development road map and deteriorating market share outlook, it is time to consider whether Boeing Commercial Aircraft is destined to share Douglas' fate.
Merger in name only (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, when they were failing, McD bought Boeing, using Boeing's own money. The McD execs pushed out the Boeing engineers that had risen through the ranks to executive level, disdaining anything as mundane as engineering. The moved the HQ as far as they could get from where actual plane and space work was being done.
Boeing is already dead. All that really remains to be seen is how the company fails - do they try to "spin off" a stripped-down plane company, sell the space company (to anybody who'll take it, Lockheed I guess?), or just ride it all into the ground?
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Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Insightful)
The way Boeing handled the Max fiasco tells me that re-invention is unlikely to be in the cards. My 100 year-old grandfather could have managed that crisis better than they did. That shitshow made NASA look agile.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Insightful)
"Companies have a limited lifespan" is a totally meaningless statement. When the Sun goes Supernova in about 5 billion years, no company on Earth will survive. The upper limit for terrestrial companies is thus 5 billion years.
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As biological organisms get older, they are more likely to die.
As companies get older, they are less likely to die.
Plenty of 50-year-old companies last another 50 years. Many 100-year-old companies last another 100 years.
Comparing companies to living organisms is a weak analogy.
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If you're looking at all of biology that's not really true. The longest living organisms don't really get more likely to die as they age. Apparently humans also do this. Your hazard of death increases as you age until you're around 90, at which point it stops increasing.
The analogy isn't perfect, but companies do demonstrate some of the characteristics of biological lifespan, including high infant mortality and a small number of really old ones that just keep trucking.
You chose extreme outliers (Score:2)
all of which are trivally simple operations compared to Boeing.
IRL corporate life is far shorter for the vast, vast majority of companies (and nations).
Nova (Score:3)
When the Sun goes Supernova in about 5 billion years....
At the risk of being pedantic, the sun is too small to go supernova. The best it can do is go nova, iirc.
--
.nosig
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because sometimes a company re-invents itself
I'm watching their exit from the Puget Sound region with great interest. They have an opportunity to leave the dead wood behind and start anew in places like South Carolina and elsewhere.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:4, Informative)
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every time boeing has tried to move technology out of the general seattle area they've failed. they seem to ignore the fact that institutional memory is a thing, and "starting anew" is a sure-fire way to get rid of that costly and hard won knowledge.
You don't have to start anew. You can offer relocation to those you wish to keep. Offer unheard of things like sunshine. :-)
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they seem to ignore the fact that institutional memory is a thing
Not so much. SpaceX being an excellent example of starting with a clean sheet of paper.
You can offer relocation to those you wish to keep.
Unions. You must offer relocation to those with the highest seniority. Regardless of whether these are the people you wish to keep.
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There's another company in Heidelberg that has some questionable strategies as well. HR department gets a bonus every time they can downsize the workforce.
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"Starting anew" is what led to the 737 MAX fiasco, all the old-time programmers with in-depth knowledge of real-time never-fail systems handling multiple inputs were given early retirement bonuses and less expensive newbies brought in. Non-critical systems like the entertainment package were even farmed out to low-bid contractors in India. They ended up with an aircraft whose critical control systems were programmed by people whose experience was writing software for banks an cruise liners, two planeloads
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The dead wood is people, not places. Without cutting out the rot at the source (management), they will bring it with them to whatever building they set up shop in. Although the S.C. facility seemed to be worse off quality-wise ca. 2015 when customers were specifying they'd only take planes from the WA plant. I assume some of the so-called "dead wood" there were actually engineering-focused holdovers from Boeing's glory days, whereas Johnny-Come-Lately got put in charge when they established the newer locati
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That is not really true. What is really happening is a probability outcome over time. Psychopaths are approximately 1% of the population, some countries higher (USA, Arab Countries) some less. What happens is a psychopath through corporate politics eventually gains control and basically it all becomes about enriching the psychopath at the expense of the corporations, it's staff and it's customers and it's investors. Everything, absolutely everything takes a back seat to enriching the psychopath.
Almost a co
Testing for Replicants (Score:2)
Is this test something like what the Harrison Ford character conducted with the Sean Young character in Blade Runner -- asking seemingly off-the-wall questions and looking for pupil reaction indicating empathy or disgust?
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Simple EEG can show it. There are some jobs that lack of empathy is an advantage.
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Is this test something like what the Harrison Ford character conducted with the Sean Young character in Blade Runner -- asking seemingly off-the-wall questions and looking for pupil reaction indicating empathy or disgust?
Boing: "Are you asking me if I'm a civilian aircraft manufacturer or a Lockheed?"
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While you have a good point, there are times a lack of empathy is an advantage and possibly the reason that psychopathy has been conserved in the human race.
One example I remember hearing was a brain surgeon who was studying psychopathy, namely how to spot it in an EEG. Somehow his EEG got mixed into the pile he was studying, and sure enough, this EEG showed high psychopathy. Then he found out that it was his. Looking at his life, yes he was a psychopath, didn't treat his family very good, but not bad, jus
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America is based on worshipping psychopaths. Watch any movie, or tv
So, just to be clear, your understanding of a nation of 300 million people comes entirely from a selective sampling of fictional entertainment put out by a handful of media companies and advertising firms. Never mind that you're overwhelmingly wrong even about that: Corporate CEOs are regularly depicted as being every bit as crazy as they actually are. It seems you're overgeneralizing the part of the media support by ad revenue, which is self-aggrandizing and propagandistic because funnily enough, busin
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The real killer is the short term profit economists instead of those that look at the long run profit and 20 to 30 year return on investment.
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Most of those with long-term outlooks were forcibly retired in the 1980s when executive pay became linked to stock price.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Funny)
or just ride it all into the ground?
A fitting metaphor.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up, please, very insightful. This matches my observation working on a major project with Boeing from 2002 - 2009. The closer the project management got to St Louis, the more people from that part that were brought in, the more fucked up the program got.
Oh, and Dennis Muilenberg was the Boeing PM. From what I saw, he took the bad behaviors from our project and instituted them first in Commercial Aircraft (see the problems with 787, both assembly and supplier management/bad batteries) and then across the entire company. I wasn't surprised by 737 MAX (and that Boeing compromised the safety and system engineering practices) but I sure was disappointed.
But in general, observing mergers in Mil/Aero: The intent is to get the best from both companies. What happens is the merger gets the worst of both predecessors.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Merger in name only (Score:2)
When two companies merge all the old mangers and executives need to go. Stick around for transition but just about all of them have to go. Once that is done the new company will be good.
Of it isn't done then you end up with a bad merger.
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As the billionnaire building electric trucks would say "MBAs are the bane of company management"
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Even that is a generalization. The engineer who gets a MBA is going to be different from the person who got a MBA because it looked easy.
Re: Merger in name only (Score:2)
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Interesting)
Success of SpaceX (Score:2)
is that Elon Musk doesn't run it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Success of SpaceX (Score:4, Informative)
is that Elon Musk doesn't run it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Of course Shotwell is an engineer herself. Obviously quite competent, unlike the Boeing MBAs.
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Re: Success of SpaceX (Score:2)
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No other industry gets billions for research and then once successful gets to sell the product the tax payer paid for back to the tax payer.
Not true. In fact there's an entire government program for this: The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. It funds all sorts of research with the aim of commercialization. The goal is for the government to eventually have a source to buy from. It's how the government gets private industry to develop products that the government needs, but are not feasible for companies to develop on their own.
For example: need vitamins for the dolphins you use to find underwater mines? No company would ever de
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Theres a big difference between that and SpaceX. Theres a difference between a one time research grant and a company that gains "grants" for years on end.
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Apparently you're not aware of the existence of the pharmaceutical industry. Government pays for all the research and development of a drug, the company patents it, and then pays an inflated price higher than any other country or the insurance industry.
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I am aware, but this is not an encyclopedia, im not going to write a 1000 page essay.
In the end two wrongs dont make a right, i mean because a catholic preist raped a kid that doesnt excuse another person from doing the same does it ?
Elon is an engineer? (Score:2)
Is he even a physicist?
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> As long as the two air frame manufacturers in the world are Boeing and Airbus
There's still Bombardier, Comac, UAC, and Embraer, the only reason they're not larger than they are is largely due to US protectionism with Boeing; see for example what happened when Bombardier got a massive order from Delta - Boeing claimed dumping even though Boeing had no competing aircraft. Why? Because allowing Bombardier breathing space to grow it's business means there's a risk Boeing could eventually face another compe
Re:Merger in name only (Score:4, Interesting)
The McDonnell maneuver was done by a subset of Jack Welch's gang at GE -- they destroyed major companies including McDonnell and Boeing as they worked their way through the Fortune 500. The rank and file engineers at 3M, McDonnell, and Boeing were nearly wiped out as the financiers used cost-cutting-based-inflated-stock-prices to pump up their bonuses. Technically competent Boeing managers who survived did so by drinking the downsizing kool-aid.
Is Boeing dead? Despite the financiers best efforts there are still competent people (systems engr, design engr, mfg, testing, customer service, et al). Given enlightened mgmt they could pull the company out of a nose dive:
a) Wars (thus weapon systems) aren't going away soon.
b) If "Buy American" includes commercial aircraft then Boeing is the main player
c) Boeing's disastrous flirtation with "offloading/outsourcing" shows need to rebuild vertical integration.
Re: Merger in name only (Score:2)
You are being ironic? (Score:3)
The DC-10 and the Tristar were two very different airplanes, technologically speaking, that had a general resemblance?
"Boeing to buy McDonnell Douglas" (Score:2)
This contemporary article explains the transaction and what lead to it fairly well. Note the headline is "Boeing to buy McDonnell Douglas", not vice-versa.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/1... [nytimes.com]
Boeing bought MD, including the MD name.
This was shortly after Boeing had bought Rockwell.
This was because Boeing's emphasis on engineering without much in the way of business strategy or controlling costs vs revenues was starting to not work so well. They needed the government contracts and all that from Rockwell and Bo
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Re:Merger in name only (Score:4, Interesting)
Could a better management have done a better job? Probably. But aircraft development is a very complicated process. Combine this with the last 20 years of almost unprecedented uncertainty, and it's easy to see why Boeing has become a very risk-adverse company. Had there been no merger, I could see McDonnell Douglas existing as a military-only business. Considering Boeing's pre-merger reliance on civilian aviation, I think it's possible Boeing would have actually fared worse had they not merged with McDonnell Douglas. A lot of "Boeing shoulda done this..." thinking is premised on the assumption that Boeing never experiences a recession or the airline industry never experiences a downturn, and development money is unlimited. I'm sure if 911, the Great Recession, and COVID never happened, Boeing by now would be putting the finishing touches on a shiny, new, modern integrated product family of wide-body down to single-isle 120 passenger aircraft. But the market over the last 20 years never gave Boeing the stability to undertake such an end-to-end product refresh. That's my opinion, and I did work for McDonnell Douglas at the time in the merger, and I do currently work in the airline industry, so have some personal experience here. I just hope things will work better going forward, but from experience I wouldn't be surprised if the next cycle lasts less than 10 years.
Mod this up. (Score:2)
Great insight. Thanks!
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Could management be better?
The real question is if they could have been worse.
By all measures the 777 program was a great success.
However, with the 787 they decided the outsourcing fad was the way to go. So they outsourced to companies all over the world, and when these couldn't get the job done they had to buy many of those failing small companies to be able to finish the job.
The 787 fiasco was an utter disaster driven by bean counters that like to play "company" in some conference room.
Large companies oft
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The 787 fiasco wasn't just outsourcing. Boeing has tried to copy the Airbus model of distributed manufacturing, badly. Also, unlike Airbus, Boeing decided to put in a shitload of new and unproven technologies at the same time instead of introducing them in a staggered manner during the production run. And last but not least the new non-union factory in South Carolina produced broken aircraft.
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They already spun space off (Score:2)
They've already pretty much spun the space company off -- it's called ULA now. ULA was formed as a joint, 50-50 venture, between Boeing and Lockheed. Boeing still operates somewhat within the space sector (ex: SLS), but the majority of government contracts are handled by ULA these days.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:4, Interesting)
All that really remains to be seen is how the company fails
In a word: Comac.
The minute the Chinese come up with a airliner than can be plausibly coaxed through FAA certification Boeing is done.
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Indeed. I expect they will ride it into the ground. Their planes are already doing it. And they cannot build engineering back up in time, that would take a decade or longer and they would have to change company culture before (another decade).
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Insightful)
Even dead cats bounce.
Re:Merger in name only (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you talking about Bob? I guess he's slack enough to go to space.
It's possible (Score:3)
With the fiasco over the 737 Max and now engines losing parts over residential areas [cnn.com], it's not looking good [9cache.com].
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Boeing doesn't make the engines, nor do they maintain them.
While true, it doesn't matter at all in the court of public opinion. This is all that is seen.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed in a statement that a Boeing 777-200 safely returned to the Denver International Airport after "experiencing a right-engine failure shortly after takeoff."
No mention of Pratt & Whitney -- not that it would matter. Boeing takes the bad press on this one all the way.
Re:It's possible (Score:5, Funny)
After seeing the footage of that huge engine cowl planted in somebody's front yard, I think that Boeing could put a positive spin on this with a press release:
"To help promote the arts in these trying times, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney team up to help deliver avant-garde sculptures to ordinary citizens via air, free of charge."
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The real question is (Score:2)
Is it safe to short their stock, or are irrational GameStop investors going to drive up the price to the moon? Investing has gotten so bizarre ever since people who learned everything they know about stocks from crypto coins and Animal Crossing, jumped on board.
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Just avoid shorting more shares than actually exist.
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Is it safe to short their stock
If you know what you are doing and have information that is not available to the general public, it is safe to short.
But if that were true, you wouldn't be asking us. So, no, it is not safe.
Too big to fail? (Score:3, Insightful)
The USA is going to want to maintain it's domestic position for commercial airliners as well as the array of military products Boeing currently supplies. I suppose the question is if there is a domestic company that could absorb Boeing. I personally don't see it so I can see Boeing receiving bailout money from the feds to keep itself operational or in a more reasonable approach the company is split between civilian, military and/or aerospace divisions.
ULA seems to be much more reliably operated in the rocket market than either of it's parent companies. Leadership makes a difference and Boeing, if it were to receive government assistance (more than it currently does in subsidies) should have it's leadership expunged and replaced. Overall the company is large and important enough to have some degree of charter that places it's public utility over it's profit lines.
In any case it's obvious that it's legacy is likely forever tarnished and chances are it will always be second fiddle to Airbus in the civilian market and in another decade I wouldn't be surprised if Comac is nipping on it heels.
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I suppose the question is if there is a domestic company that could absorb Boeing.
Amazon and Microsoft jump to mind. Both have been involved in defense contracts and they are large enough that I don't see them having ideological issues with becoming involved in actual war-related business in the same way that I could see Apple or Google's employees having a shit fit. There isn't anyone within industry though that could probably take over unless they look abroad (which is possible but I don't know if it would happen) -- ex: Mitsubishi or Samsung both have defense sectors.
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Amazon or Microsoft? No way. The first company that comes to mind for me is GE, since they already manufacture the engines they might as well make the airframes too. It's much less of a leap, and it's already a conglomerate so bringing in the airframe business seems reasonable.
I checked the market caps, and BA is currently worth a bit more than GE; but if BA starts sinking and looks like it's about to go Chapter 11, then GE could take it in cheaply and the government might help facilitate such a deal due
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I work at Amazon, while we do host data storage for the military we're not involved in making weapons. Amazonians would throw a truly epic shit fit if the company were to acquire a weapons maker. There wouldn't be any complaint if the military portion were spun off first.
Still, Amazon management isn't stupid enough to acquire a company in an industry about which they know almost nothing and which isn't even peripherally related to anything else they do.
Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Might makes right (Score:2)
Re:Might makes right (Score:5, Informative)
Male Lions hunt less but get first dibs. Lions also scavengers stealing downed prey from others. Business have similar dynamics, well funded barbarians acquire positions to insert their directors and they hire management they like, trust to carry out their visions. While Boeing struggles , look at their competition, anyone poised to overcome? More likely an opportunistic investment group will stir up the pot when if time is right. Planes demand for cargo will continue but passengers will be lower as pandemic lingers. Even when vaccines widespread affordability will be tough until employment gets back to full. Business travelers volumes will return sooner.
I didn't get the feeling that this Boeing guy thought of McDonnell Douglas managers like Lions. The way he described them they are more like those creepy parasitic wasp larvae that eat a caterpillar up from the inside leaving the vital organs until last to prolong the agony.
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those creepy parasitic wasp larvae that eat a caterpillar up from the inside leaving the vital organs until last to prolong the agony.
The wasp larvae are not sadists.
Yes, but as this Boeing guy was implying, in that critical point, these larvae are the polar opposite of McDonnell Douglas executives who thoroughly enjoy every second this process.
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Many of the cargo aircraft in service today started as passenger planes. Boeing itself does some of the conversions in Renton, WA.
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Not really. The merger has happened over 20 years ago, everyone responsible has been long gone by the time the 737 MAX program was started.
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Not really. The merger has happened over 20 years ago, everyone responsible has been long gone by the time the 737 MAX program was started.
...and yet the McDonnell Douglas corporate culture lingers.
It is obvious (Score:3)
The 737 Max is textbook accountant led destruction. Everything on the plane has the fingerprints of accounting uber alles. From the destabilized airframe via cranking up the engine size and moving the wings, to the shitty software, some terrible instrumentation issues, to decisions not to require flight simulator time in an airplane that badly needed it, to agitation to self certify - this was a plane that was designed for immediate and maximum profit. Shortcuts wherever they could happen,
My guess is they'll fire more engineers, hire some more 6 figure accountants to keep track of 10 thousand dollars worth of pencils and go into a nice spiral down.
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More precisely - they fell behind Airbus in a market segment (not keeping their eyes on the ball) then tried to plug the gap fast by taking an old model and claim that they were just making modifications to avoid having to fully certify a new design, and then pushed that old airframe beyond reasonable limits, and then needed a stack of waviers, and electronic bubble gum to patch it up get the thing to pass even a very business-friendly licensing process, pretending it was still just the same old airplane. S
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More precisely - they fell behind Airbus in a market segment (not keeping their eyes on the ball) then tried to plug the gap fast by taking an old model and claim that they were just making modifications to avoid having to fully certify a new design, and then pushed that old airframe beyond reasonable limits, and then needed a stack of waviers, and electronic bubble gum to patch it up get the thing to pass even a very business-friendly licensing process, pretending it was still just the same old airplane. So no new training needed!
Oh, and also make redundant safety an extra-cost option. Shows right were their priorities were.
A key part the problem is that due to the need to keep everything else the same while they performing major airframe surgery was they were stuck with the original 1980s lfight control processor, so they had limited computing resources to deal with much more complex control issues.
All a perfect demonstration of what happens when the final decisions are made by accountants who hold engineers in contempt.
This is not to hold the honorable accounting profession in contempt. It is simply a fact that people do not deal in the laws of physics and life critical programming to rule over devices that require proper application of physical laws and programs. People's evidence number one - the 737 Max, a plane I'll not fly in, because as an accountant designed and built plane, I'll never tru
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This is a really good review of what went wrong and why, which pretty much confirms your suspicion. There's pretty much no one left at the company with experience programming real-time systems or adding redundancy. The MCAS, the poorly written program at the heart of the issue, has a "redundant" backup system, to engage it the plane needs to land, turn one off, and turn the other on. Decisions like that ran throughout the 737MAX program.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aero... [ieee.org]
It spawned the longest discussion t
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This is a really good review of what went wrong and why, which pretty much confirms your suspicion. There's pretty much no one left at the company with experience programming real-time systems or adding redundancy. The MCAS, the poorly written program at the heart of the issue, has a "redundant" backup system, to engage it the plane needs to land, turn one off, and turn the other on. Decisions like that ran throughout the 737MAX program.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/aero... [ieee.org]
It spawned the longest discussion thread that I've ever seen on Specturm.
Damn- that is one of the best articles I've ever read on just about anything. Greg Travis turned out a masterpiece there, and sums the issues pretty perfectly.
And the ending paragraph:
"It is likely that MCAS, originally added in the spirit of increasing safety, has now killed more people than it could have ever saved. It doesn’t need to be “fixed” with more complexity, more software. It needs to be removed altogether."
is s sledgehammer of truth.
No. (Score:2)
And by that you mean... (Score:2)
Some people at Boeing were proud of their work (Score:2)
in destroying a once proud name in aviation.
They won't lose their jobs.
No one will be punished.
Nothing will change.
Boeing deserves to be cut up into nationally necessary military projects and far less necessary (everyone not the US or France or Russia pretty much outsources civilian airliners) civilian aircraft divisions.
If the civil half fails Boeing and America deserve it. If aviationists are not going to run aircraft companies those companies are degenerate and should shut down for the global good,
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Yes, the military and space business needs to be split off, and quickly. As a key part of national defense the necessary will and legal means should be readily available for this. Once split, the military/space part cna be bailed out its share of the corporate debt (the debt is entirely due to the civilian side though, so it may be that it can be kept on that side of the split).
Rescue of the civilian side needs to have tough terms. A near clean sweep sacking current upper management (I am assuming some comp
Re:Some people at Boeing were proud of their work (Score:5, Insightful)
just get rid of anyone with an MBA...
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Fire up the popcorn [hint: regulatory capture] (Score:5, Interesting)
One huge and not-oft examined aspect of big government and big corporation collusion that most people never hear of is "regulatory capture" - and even those of us aware of it have never before seen a scenario that will play out if Boeing collapses.
When a new product or service arises, its creators have maximum flexibilty and freedom to innovate - because there generally is NO government regulation in that area. Once the new thing catches on and gets government attention, politicians and bureaucrats realize there's something new to tax and regulate (power, prestige, more employees, more rule writing and enforcing, what's not to like?). The first wave of government intervention is almost always cautious as the government people do not know much about the thing and killing it off accidentally does them no good, so they tend to invite the early market entrants to tell them what regulations are needed. Those early market entrants, being human, always offer self-centered ideas for rules and they and their businesses become "the standard" which all later entrants into the market must meet or exceed while the early entrants are generally grandfathered in and considered pre-approved. Thereafter, as years pass and more rules and regulations (and taxes and fees) are added, the big original market participants are big and wealthy and able to comply and often find it a good market rigging scheme to actually encourage government to increase regulations and fees (which THEY will be able to afford, but no new young upstart company will not). This is "regulatory capture" (the early market participants capture the market with a big assist of government regulation) and would seem to be ripe for government attack as an anti-competitive monopoly practice, but government is a partner in the mischief.
Incidentally, the presence of regulatory capture is the best evidence that a marketplace has matured - and stagnation and no real innovation will exist in that field again. The effects of capture prevent new innovative entrants to the market, and encourage existing participants to become lazy ,risk averse, repetetive hacks who have no worries about innovating competition.
Here's the thing we've never seen before and for which there may be no easy fix:
What happens when government builds all the mountains of regulations that enable regulatory capture (making it impossible for new market entrants) and then allows merger after merger in the market so that there's only one player left (as happened with Boeing in the domestic airliner biz) and then that market entrant collapses? Does government wise-up and get rid of the obstructions to new market entrants? Does government go all-in on the socialist mindset and form a government airline builder? (these have long bad track records). We simply have no model in the USA that I am aware of for what happens when a vital industry is fully-captured by regulations and then all the vendors collapse.
As I said, fire up the popcorn - if Boeing fails, things will get real interesting no matter where you sit on political matters. There will almost certainly be huge levels of dishonesty, corruption, etc and the politicians may well decide to bail Boeing out, or even subsidize its failure, just to avoid facing the scenario which would gore the oxes of many people in DC. Remember: there will be national prestige and many billions of dollars on the line and imperfect human beings involved, so whatever happens there will likely be eventual government panels and hearings and then prosecutions...
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I'm not buying that Boeing being the sole US builder of airliners is due just to regulatory capture.
Building airplanes is an expensive business. Developing a new aircraft takes ~10 years and tens of billions of dollars. Then you have to build the aircraft (requiring the largest factories in the world, also expensive to build) and sell several hundred (at $300 million each) to recoup your costs. That alone puts a very high lower bound on the size of company that can operate in this business, and an ever high
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For example, rail deregulation changed the dynamics of the marketplace in the US over 40 years ago. (See https://fee.org/articles/railr... [fee.org] and https://thehill.com/blogs/cong... [thehill.com])
Deregulation doesn't happen every day, and there's a lot of stakeholders who like/hate the idea. But, it's the natural wave of government regulations... lest the US picks up Boeing's ashes and turns it into a government entity or partial program (USPS or Amtrak or Freddie Mac/Mae).
TItle is pointless (Score:2)
Nope (Score:2)
There's no US producer of civilian aircraft for them to merge with. The US government won't let them go bankrupt.
"clear prioritization of shareholder returns" (Score:2)
Ah, pursuit of the dollar fucks everything up again. I work in sales. My best advice to people is don't go chasing the dollars. Find what your customers need and serve them. If you are a slut to the dollar at the cost of service to your customers, you're going to get a stench that is VERY HARD to wash off. That's what Boeing is doing and now they rank of it. They're serving their stockholders at the expense of their customers... their customers safety and lives on some levels! Their stockholders need
Boeing already is MD. (Score:2)
Internal Military Takeover at Boeing (Score:2)
There was an amazing article about the growth of the military-industrial complex in Harper's last year, by Andrew Cockburn (journalist probably now more famous for being the dad of Olivia Wilde), about the military-industrial mentality. Neither safety nor money matter as much in military aviation. When McD took over, the civilian side of Boeing was also merged with the military, and it wasn't a good fit. The result, ultimately, was the 737MAX debacle.
https://harpers.org/archive/20... [harpers.org]