Seems like Boeing made the right call when they canceled their own plan for a new superjumbo back in the 90s. The A380 is cool, but not economical to fly. The future is more planes like the 777X.
Airbus will adjust far better than Boeing could have, had they been wrong.
With newer engines and a slightly redesigned wing (if I recall correctly it was designed a bit oversized than what was needed for the -800, to be able to accommodate a stretch variant which was never introduced) it could probably be made to have 15% lower fuel burn per passenger which would make it work even better for those specific kind of routes, but it's not economical for Airbus to do that when only Emirates and a very small handful of other customers would buy it...
I know they purchased many, but how did it work out for their bottom lines? Also, are these carriers concerned with bottom lines as much as national prestige?
"Emirates reports new record profit of AED 17.2 billion (US$ 4.7 billion), up 63% from AED 10.6 billion (US$ 2.9 billion) last year."
...of course it helps to have direct access to cheap fuel. Also, if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world#..., you'll see that Emirates is the fourth largest individual airline in the world by passenger-kilometers, and the first three are US-based airlines with more complicated networks, while Emirates only has one major hub in Dubai and isn't really that into direct A-to-B flights (unless B is Dubai of course) - so if it makes sense for any airline to operate the A380, then that airline is Emirates.
Waiting for your bags on the other hand...
It was 100% the airlines that killed Boeing's attempt to pitch them on a clean-sheet airliner. I still believe that if Boeing had a CEO who was an engineer (and not a Harvard MBA who spent two decades at GE under Jack "Company Killer" Welch) at the time they would have not made that promise, because it was impossible to get the larger, more fuel efficient engines under a 737 wing without changing the flight characteristics too much to keep the type certificate.
But... the Sonic Cruiser is a minor footnote compared to the A380. That was an enormous business disaster (if any A380 ever turned a profit on fly-away costs alone, ignoring the initial up front costs, it was only just barely). The thing about building a new clean-sheet jetliner like this is that you are betting the company's financial performance for the next 10 years on this working out. Because Boeing was actively killing people and there are only the two companies (C919 notwithstanding) Airbus came out of the era looking great, but the A380 was orders of magnitude bigger corporate problem than the Sonic Cruiser.
Muilenberg was the one who got fired- and he definitely deserves the blame for the Ethiopian Airlines flight, they should definitely have investigate Lion Air faster and better- but it was McNerney who was responsible for most of the 737 Max program. The engines and wings issues were basically set in stone by the time that Muilenberg first became responsible for the program.