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Comment by mindfulplay | Hacker News Reader

This is really fascinating. Continuing along the comparison with airplane stocks:

On one hand you have companies that keep flying chairs in the sky filled with people, feeding them every few hours migrating them across continents.

On the other hand, I have a company that can replace my crappy apt bedroom with a fake office background.

Fascinating that VC funded madness has gotten to this point - prioritizing CTRs, engagement, growth rates and so on.

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Business travel is a large part of airline profits. If people believe many of those business trips will be replaced with Zoom video conferences on a permanent basis, then you would expect Zoom to see increasing revenues and airlines to see permanently impaired revenue.

This is pretty much caveman/child logic though. You can make anything sound anything speaking like that ignoring all the complexities involved and actual value provided.

As an IT professional, I can know that operating Zoom (out any other similar service) is orders of magnitudes easier than an airline.

For one, having catastrophic bugs means to send a "sorry" mail to your users. And maybe fix them.

Such bugs on a plane mean death of people. It is similar to suddenly not having wings. And they are back, but half of the cabine is gone. And suddenly no more plane, you are kindly asked to flap your arms.

And less riskier too. 1 day downtime for Zoom will be a blow in their business but will be backup the next, a few flights crashing in day and the rest grounded will put an airline out of business.

But all these difficulties means airlines truly deserve to be mistrusted as an investment vehicle, and to this direction Warren Buffet recently pulled out all investments from the airline industry. So it's really not that comical that airlines are where they are, especially during COVID.

Plus it seems like part of the business model of airlines is lobbying for government bailouts.

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