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Comment by 51Cards | Hacker News Reader

Boeing saw this coming years ago. When the A380 was in progress they announced the 787 Dreamliner design saying they felt the industry was moving towards smaller more efficient planes on more personalized routes. The fact that orders for the jumbos have dropped to zero might be proving them correct. I believe Airbus scrambled the design of the A350 XWB once they saw Dreamliner sales taking off.

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I've heard similar, that Airbus went all in on the A380 while Boeing gambled on the smaller 787. Most of the industry seems to think that Boeing got it right and it's put Airbus in a tough situation.

Airbus has been in the 2nd mover position before, however. Boeing learned some hard and expensive lessons having to do with the complications around contracting out parts of a plane made from a much less ductile material. (Carbon fiber.) Airbus could still do a leapfrog on Boeing, imitating the economics of the 787, but managing to do it incrementally better.

Making decisions like that having major implications seems daunting. I wonder what strategies they use to dampen or hedge big decisions like that. Think of all the things that play out overtime that there is no way to predict. Such as the drop in jet fuel prices which we don't even know now if it is long term or just short term. And that's only 1 of probably hundreds of interacting factors that can make or break a strategy. One of the things that got me to stop reading business magazine years ago - all they did was appear to put laurels and awards on business people that happen to somehow bet on the ride side of history (as well as companies). An example of this might be Jack Welsh who was given credit for GE Capital and now years later they want to get rid of that part of the company and return to their roots.

Jack Welch "CEO of the decade" for, amongst other things, being the pioneer of "maximising shareholder value" later described it as "the dumbest idea in the world." [1]

Jack did a lot of things right, but at scale bad ideas can get hidden in successes which take years to unwind.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/02/05/salesfor...

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