> 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.
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.
> 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.
"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."
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.
>>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
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.