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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

Yes, large companies take a lot longer to fail than I ever imagined. A lot of time can pass riding on past excellence before the cracks start showing.

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It's not about the size of the company, it's about the barrier to entry of the market they're in, how much competition they have and the amount of vendor lock-in.

And civil aviation in general scores top marks in all those fields. It's a duopoly with an insane barrier to entry both technical, legal and financial with very long and complex vendor lock-in.

I wonder if this opens up an opportunity for Bombardier and Embraer to move up market into the 737s space.

Isn't Bombardier now owned by Airbus? But you make a good point: why hasn't Embraer moved into this space?

They didn't sell the business jet division, only the regional jet division.

>why hasn't Embraer moved into this space?

Money?

Exactly: look how fast the values of companies like MySpace and Yahoo tanked when they became irrelevant. They were highly valuable at some point, but they had serious competition and not much keeping their users locked-in.

Yep… I wish it were possible to easily invest in the downfall of obviously poorly run companies coughSirius XMcough, but things like puts and shorts really only work if you know when it will fail, and that it will be very soon.

Imagine how that scales and then how that might scale to nation states.

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