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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

Boeing is what happens when an engineering focused company gets taken over by MBAs. When it happens to a webtech company we call it enshitification. When it happens to a transportation company lives are actually at risk. Sadly Boeing is important enough to DC that they seem to be allowed to casually risk American lives.

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Boeing is late stage MBA.

Intel is mid-stage MBA.

Google/Alphabet is early stage MBA.

This seems basically right and there is no known cure save bringing back a founder (Jobs & Apple).

Microsoft seems to be "coming back" by essentially becoming an umbrella company, much like how all food manufacturers consolidated and are basically a couple of mega umbrella companies

They need it since Apple is right there with Intel.

Oh I like this framing.

MBAs can only pull this off when there is no competition and they are in bed with the regulators. You can very easily get Boeing back on track by splitting them into multiple competing businesses, but we all know this won't happen.

They’re already broken up. They consider themselves to be a system integrator. They design the planes, hire contractors to build most of the parts, and then assemble the parts. The fact that this gives Boeing most of the risk and the contractors most of the profit doesn’t seem to bother them.

Vertical integration is not competition. A decision maker at any level within the vertical of power is facing internal competition from political rivals, but no results-based competition from his peers in other companies. So this promotes political shenanigans, and applies negative selection pressure on the actual product quality.

This is some kind of vertical dis–integration. They literally sold their factories and tools to their contractors because owning land and buildings and machinery was dragging down their metrics! (Specifically assets to earnings or something along those lines.)

But regardless of that, breaking up a large company because it has some problem doesn’t fix the problem. It just makes all the smaller companies you created easier to purchase. Just look at AT&T. NorTel bought every single one of the baby bells within a decade of their creation, resulting in just as much of a monopoly except now in a foreign corporation.

Interested in the Nortel acquisitions, do you have a reference? I don’t see that in the Wikipedia narrative, but maybe I’m misunderstanding.

And risk a multiple of those lives as long as they are foreign, remember the MAX failed several times around the world before getting grounded.

There really needs to be a federally protected “no” from engineering to keep the MBAs from “optimizing” away things they don’t understand.

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