The pivotal point to me was, when Airbus launched the A380, Boeing thought they would have an easy home run with the Dreamliner, Airbus would be doomed as competition as no one wants the A380, Boeing slacked off, and then Airbus came back, listened to the customers, changed the A350 to a new plane and had a runaway success (on top of the bread and butter neos).
If it doesn't add up, maybe it's the other side of the equation that's the problem: Maybe the flaw or surprise in the equation is not Airbus but the other side - the beliefs about "EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles" - maybe those aren't what you thought and don't have the impact you thought.
If the evidence doesn't match the theory, it's time to re-examine the theory.
I say that because those beliefs about the EU are a dogma of American big business and its fellow travelers, which prefers the US where they have so much power (and so little regulation or tax) rather than the more democratic power in EU.
That is because one of those things is not true. It's not very cross-border. The vast majority of Airbus R&D and manufacturing happens in Toulouse and Hamburg with each city focusing on specific plane models.
Airbus is incredibly centralized and has been able to take advantage of that to deeply integrate R&D and manufacturing.
A pretty significant part of R&D happens in Filton and Getafe too. And manufacturing is even more distributed.
Also, plants do not focus on specific models at all, but more on specific parts and systems, across all models.
My guess is this could only work in the airline industry where an efficient bureaucracy would be a competitive advantage.
I will keep that in mind when seeing an Airbus Beluga again when in Hamburg.
btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Dreamlifter [ed. wrong link]
At least that's what I understand from a very layman view of their processes, would love to be corrected if I'm wrong.
First off, one of the things the UE does accomplish is reduce the obstacles that come with cross-border work, and European bureaucracy is massively overblown as a problem. Insofar as it is a problem, US-style lobbying amounts to as much of an obstacle. E.g. with no Intuit lobbying involved, I have literally not filed taxes once in the last ten years, it's just completely automated and a non-issue for me.
"Overregulation" is a sweeping generalisation, and pretty much irrelevant in this particular space: this is the aerospace industry we're talking about, it's one of the most tightly regulated industries worldwide. Airbus is not bogged down by any meaningful amount of red tape that Boeing is free from.
I see that they could do great good but instead work up very specific regulations that few companies fit. Those types of regulations instead of broad thinking about integration. They are narrowly focussed on implementation details. What I have seen in the past 2 years fits the exact fears my crazy uncle warns about.
This means sometimes the EU will pass regulations that are difficult or abstract to implement. And this means the US will miss obvious regulations because they can't gauge the business impact.
The current FTC is attempting to actually enforce some of these more obvious regulations now, and they're facing a lot of push back from the American private sector. Blocking huge mergers that monopolize the free market, disallowing one-sided contract clauses, banning outright lying to consumers... these are obvious, to me. It's been shocking just how much resistance they face.
I do think the EU has a common vision. I'm sure if a common vision drives the USA. I think it's more chaotic until an incumbent establishes a critical mass. I believe the influence only lasts as long as the mass holds.
I think using competition regulation to create equity is misguided. I believe incumbents become dominant and focused on narrower goals. This narrowing of thinking is more likely in my eyes to cause a USA company to fall from dominance.
Microsoft and ATT the monopolists I was raised on were definitely dominant. I having being using computers since the 1970s and the only Microsoft OS based computer I have ever owned wasn an OrangePC 486DX2 card that lived inside a PowerMac G3. I used for probably close to a decade to compile software for windows distribution of Mac developed software. I of course stayed as far away from corporate America which was Windows crazy.
My point is that any creator that feels they are being held back by a platform vendor just needs to re-arrange their thinking until they are free of that thought. There are plenty of opportunities in the USA to do whatever you want market share be damned.
This means you can provide cheaper services by, say, stealing data. And you can protect yourself from lawsuits by making someone "sign" something. And, worse comes to worse and you're down on your luck, you can always aggregate the data and sell it to law enforcement for a pretty penny. While we're here, go ahead and implement the addictive tactics casino's use into your app.
> There are plenty of opportunities in the USA to do whatever you want market share be damned
Yeah, to a scary degree. I mean you can just make a company to collude on prices. That's what RealPage does, and they're getting away with it. Not just them though - every industry has one of those. Or you can just decide to give people music without a license. That's what Spotify did. Or maybe you can just sell ad space for political campaigns. Wait, aren't there laws on that? Apparently not - if you're a tech company, you can do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want!
We haven't really decided if this is a good thing. The EU pre-emptively is saying "yeah not good". We're still mulling it over. So we're ahead now, but who knows if it will stay this way.
What most people do not understand, most of the regulation in the EU is to make trade easier. That is the main focus of the EU commission (not the parliament though, which brings in pro-people regulation like food regulations or GDPR).
There is often the joke about the EU regulating bananas. People don't ask why this is regulated, they think it's "the idiots in the EU". The reason is easier trade. Because this way some dealer in Poland can buy a quality level of banana from someone in Spain and knows what they can expect to get. It's for easier trade.
It's like having a standard API and language (e.g. SQL) instead of everyone doing their own. It's like lanugages generating LLVM IR (the IR is "regulated") so they don't have to write their own backend. Think of EU regulation more like OAuth.
His podcast role is Chief Cynic but man I love listening to Ed Zitron's Better Offline. What I'm about to link is an extremely hard & direct a polemic, especially the second about the specific people at the largest companies, but damn. It was so enervating to hear.
The Shareholder Supremacy episode ties it all to Jack Welsh making everything awful forever everywhere, managing by number-goes-up. And then How Shareholders Are Destroying the Tech Industry is such a real shared anger against specific leaders, that undercuts how bad & ineffective & midling this age is, being lead by people with so little inspiration & touch with their products.
https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-shareholder-suprema... https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/how-shareholders-are-de...
This podcast series is definitely on my world treasures list, as a how-it-really-is "histories of today" account. Also, the Daily Show keeps having some real bangers... (Covering the media coverage of McDonalds vs Enemy Within was a deep cut.) It's cathartic as hell and often remarkably informative (but also sometimes less so too).
2001: Seattle to Chicago: https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/on-this-day-boeing-moves-co...
2022: Chicago to Washington, DC area: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...
2024: Back to Seattle (maybe just the CEO and not the whole office): https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/new-boein...
This is ahistorical.
When Airbus announced the A380, Boeing tried to respond with their own version, the 747X [1]. The 747 is arguably the most successful aviation platform in history and was hugely profitable for Boeing for 40+ years. But the industry changed to wide-body 2 engine planes (eg 777, 787, A350) because they're more economical to run and engines have become so reliable that they'll generally last the entire service life of the plane.
The A380 needs 4 engines. The 747X would've too. Even with higher passenger count, running 4 engines instead of 2 is a huge economy issue. Basically you needed to fill ~550 seats to make a profit and not many routes could support that. It works great for the ME3 airlines and arguably a couple of Asian carriers (eg Sinapore Airlines) but not really anybody else and certainly not US airlines.
A way more pivotal moment was the A319neo. This was a complete surprise to Boeing and represented an existential threat to Boeing.
As you may already know, commercial pilots are generally certified for a single type rating at a time. They can train and certify for another type rating but generally speaking commercial pilots won't switch all the time between, say, a 787 and an A350 or even a 787 and a 737.
So airlines like Southwest keep costs low by maintaining a single type rating fleet, being the 737, an airline originally designed 50+ years. So that's both a blessing and a curse for Boeing. The curse being they lose that lock-in if they design a new cockpit. Airbus didn't have that problem.
But the A319neo was so efficient and coule potentially suit US airlines that Boeing ahd to respond and make the 737 more efficient, which of course led to the whole MCAS debacle.
That wasn't the first time Boeing had issues either. Back in the 90s the 737NG had an issue (that caused crashes) with the 737 rudder getting stuck in flight. That took years to resolve.
There were issues for Boeing as a company with the 787. That's when Boeing tried to savagely cut costs with layers of subcontractors and it was a disaster that delayed delivery by years. That's continued with the 737MAX issues like the door panels not being bolted in.
The A380 is from 2007, the A319neo is from 2016.
So not the turning point. 2007 is the point in time when Boeing thought they had won, not 2016. From that point on it went down, with Boeing hybris.
If you look at the sentiment from the times,
"Battle for the future of the skies: Boeing 787 Dreamliner v Airbus A380", Guardian 2013
or
" The market for big planes has fragmented and there is simply not enough demand for jets the size of the 747 or bigger to justify the huge development costs of an all-new jet such as the A380, according to the Boeing view. So it has bet its future on a midsize jet, the 787 Dreamliner. [...] Now, critics say Airbus made the wrong bet on the A380." [0]
[0]: https://www.aviationpros.com/home/news/10384535/huge-mistake...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing#Merger_with_McDonnell_D...