I wonder if there are books or articles that analyze how and why Boeing declined so fast and so spectacularly. Boeing used to be able to build 747 under budget and ahead of schedule, just like Lockheed could dazzle the world by creating U2 ahead of schedule and under budget with fewer than 200 people (or < 100?) in 15 months with the cost of a few millions. It can't be just the change of geopolitics post Cold War, right? It can't be just that the fixed-margin structure imposed by the government, right? It can't be just the mismanagement or the greed of the leadership, right? It can't just be that Boeing is in the phase of accelerated decline as any old-enough company, right?
I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:
"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."
The trouble is that government contracts always strongly incentivize ‘excessive outsourcing’, and Boeing’s absorption of MD increased the dependence on government contracts, though Boeing was already on that road (especially after taking on Rockwell). Government oversight (almost) always discourages large profit margins, which makes increasing low-risk costs very appealing. In addition to that, there are strong political incentives for ‘distributing’ contracts widely, with the Space Shuttle being a famous example of this, having parts made or assembled in 48 different states.
Yes making the actual product is very very secondary to successfully appeasing Congress, produce 'jobs', and follow the litany of rules in place about now the money is used and paperwork after to check boxes.
These aren't businesses operating in a competitive market with pressure to produce the best things quickly. Their goal is simply to be the best gov lapdog vs the only 1 or 2 other gov lapdogs.
Being extremely late and extremely over budget is standard practice in that world and worst case is usually the project gets cancelled for budget reasons then restarted 5yrs later doing the same thing.
This is the environment the gov fostered, they made Boeing etc critical to national security and industry while having a total aversion to risk, and zero forethought into long term investment in legitimate competition. All we get is the same growing monster that becomes the living embodiment of The Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Sure the government can create some inefficiencies but trying to blame them removes culpability off Boeing. If it was truly our government then many more government contractors would be delivering broken crap and that doesn’t seem to be the case. Example NOC stock seems to be doing just fine over past 5 years while Boeing..,has not.
Those government inefficiencies are a great source of profit. Cut the FTEs today because the contractor's unrealistic low bid looks better on the budget. Make sure to hire a woman or minority owned for-profit road construction company, or hell just let the roads get so bad a pizza company can make it into a very effective ad campaign. I think we are a country hobbled by capitalism, afraid to do anything because it might hurt profits, even if it will hurt people.
Early NASA was the sum of the private companies and the smartest nerds pulled from academia that they absorbed and turned into an organization. These people brought their culture of production and research from where they came from and built something great. Now NASA is merely a legacy gov agency whose culture is that of every old gov agency. Risk adverse, checkbox focused, political pawns, professional budget wranglers, etc.
Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
Public-private partners is a good idea because public orgs that need to produce IRL things are very flawed, but you still need national interests beyond market interests so this is the compromise that has worked many times.
But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Boeing has no risk and neither does NASA because they can just keep choosing the safe choice, Boeing. What a lovely market.
We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old. And we need to force any public-private arrangements to legitimately foster competition, which means lots of compromise beyond a VC type situation, like reducing the litany of special interest checkboxes (jobs, geography, diversity, etc) and paperwork for small companies.
>Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
I'm blaming capitalism 100% for the hollowing out of NASA. I never said early NASA was perfect.
>But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm blaming capitalism of doing.
>We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old.
I really think if we just didn't let this happen constantly we'd have a better system. It's going to shift the litany of special interest because the goal is profits, but barely, existing contractors will just open up a bunch of subsidiary companies.
Last paragraph is a bit melodramatic. Here's what's publicly known:
- Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
- They're the 4th biggest American defense contractor, so they're likely seen as vital for securing state power by many in the government.
- The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Using Ockham's razor, here's my guess what happened: To get in this position in the first place, there will have been a fair bit of lobbying and "greasing the wheels" involved. Boeing eventually found themselves in a position where they got government contracts, no matter what. Leadership got complacent, they didn't really compete anymore because they didn't have to. This was when Musk came in and disrupted the space industry. But at that point, company culture was likely already too far down the drain for quick fixes. The situation would already be much worse for their space division, if not for the fact that they have such good relations with NASA and the government. NASA basically covered for them and played down the seriousness of the issues for weeks. And even now, they're not having SpaceX rescue the astronauts immediately, which would be even more embarrassing for Boeing. Instead they're bringing them back together with the already planned SpaceX Crew-9 flight next year. Boeing keeps getting away with black eyes, there aren't enough consequences despite all the serious issues.
> - The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
This is irrelevant here; the only people buying most of the products that Boeing makes are governments or airlines (many of which have government backing, because countries find it advantageous to have an airline). Without government, there's just no Boeing, or SpaceX, or Lockheed Martin, or Airbus, or...
The problem ultimately goes back to 1996 when Boeing was more-or-less taken over by McDonnell-Douglas management, and quality engineering took a back seat to quarterly results. Everything, from bad QA to "greasing the wheels" with lobbyists, ultimately goes back to someone with an MBA deciding that those behaviors were worth it for the stock price increase.
And to be fair, they were... until they weren't. But by then, the guy with the MBA has either left or divested, and it becomes someone else's problem.
SpaceX's success can be in a large part contributed to the fact that they don't have a bunch of retirement and pension funds demanding a chunk of the profits every quarter regardless of actual market space performance.
Blackberry's revenue peaked in 2011, and things didn't really appear to be hopeless in 2014, with the iPhone 6. Apple had gone through roughly 3 major hardware revisions (3G, 4, 6) before RIM's hopelessness was reflected in their yearly revenues.
I'm not unconvinced that organizational rot in a slower moving company like Boeing took 3 decades to fully spoil the org.
Blackberry failed because they didn't spend 5+ years building a complete mobile OS that carried all the amazing stuff that desktop OS had at the time (top tier, networking, graphics multi tasking etc.). By the time the iPhone launched, all the competitors were already screwed.
I think the point is that "Internet experts" (derogatory) believe they are being knowledgeable and clever when they ascribe any and everything that goes wrong with a Boeing product to McDonnell Douglas.
I believe there's also an element of "MBA bad, engineer good" resentment of management at play.
But the real truth is much more nuanced, no matter how satisfying it is to drop pithy one-liners about the MD merger.
I worked at Boeing. The reason people attribute McDonnell Douglas is because it caused a fundamental shift in leadership expectations.
It was clear as day on the ground that something had switched, suddenly every conversation was about minimizing cost. Every meeting was about maximizing value. Efficiency above safety.
I cannot overemphasize that it really did fundamentally shift the language, the incentives, etc. I started having to prove I needed vms to two different business panels.
Sometimes you are right, the root cause is too simple, but I was there for this one. It really was that simple this time.
I like this: "MBA bad, engineer good". As a joke: If you ask an LLM trained on HN discussions to describe, in its best "cave man speak" how to HN views MBA vs engineer, you will get exactly this phrase.
It is also crazy to me that people speak as if Boeing is "falling apart", but managed to produce many successful models since the MD merger, including the amazing 787.
This is Hacker News; I assume we're here to have thoughtful, curious discussions concerning topics of business (YCombinator, after all) and most things computers ("Hacker" News).
Dropping the McD one liner meme is neither thoughtful nor curious and it certainly doesn't explain anything.
It's like saying a McDonald's Big Mac is made of bread, beef, lettuce, and some mayonnaise like that's some conclusive end-all be-all. That's cool, but are we actually going to speak about something worth the time of day?
"It certainly doesn't explain anything" is some irrational hyperbolic bullshit. You're talking nonsense. Of course it explains something. Listen to people who actually worked at Boeing. One of the dudes who worked there just replied in this thread. This is not a stupid internet meme. This is reality. I recommend you watch the documentary: "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing".
The fact that SpaceX demonstrated, without a doubt, that reuse of a first stage was viable in December 2015, and that we still do not have any clearly reusable first stage from anyone else tells you the whole industry is complacent and juiced up on the fat margins of launching a first stage up, then chucking it in the ocean, and then asking for money for another first stage.
That's true but it also speaks to the fact that Space X is incredible. Not nearly as bureaucratic and innovating like crazy. The new Raptor engine alone is mind boggling in it's simplicity.
China has at least one Falcon 9 clone in testing stages (that one that accidentally launched during static fire a while ago) and many new-space rocket companies have reusable vehcles in pipeline (eq. Rocketlabs Neutron). Even Europe is going to do that - eventually. :P
That is exactly my point. It has been 10 years and aside from some small baby steps, no incumbent has declared clearly and vocally that reusability is the future. They're all in denial. The Russians, the Chinese, Europe.
Maybe at one point really early on the external tank was planned to be reused, but it was expended in every launch of the shuttle with no provisions for re-usability. They even stopped painting it within a few launches.
I'm sorry this was downvoted. It is probably a bit too pithy for HN.
I think you raise a good point even if there are some "technicalities" about it.
Real question: I'm not an aerospace geek. The term "first stage" has probably changed at lot in rocket science in the last 50 years. From the NASA Space Shuttle to SpaceX Falcon 9, has the definition changed? From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable, but you are definitely right that the Space Shuttle "thing" (no idea how to call it) was used over and over again, (somewhat) safely. Something that I don't know: Where Apollo programme capsules reusued? I assume no.
The space shuttle had three main components - the orbiter (white and black space plane with the crew and cargo), the external tank (rust brown on all but the first few flights), and a pair of solid rocket boosters. The orbiter had three engines and received its propellant (oxygen and hydrogen) from the external tank. At launch, the solid rocket boosters (SRB) and the main engines were all running so technically they can all be considered part of a “first stage”. The SRBs would expend their propellant in around two minutes and separate. They dropped into the ocean, slowed via parachute, and were recovered by boat and refurbished. The three space shuttle main engines would continue to burn for several more minutes until the external tank was depleted. The ET would be discarded and burn up on reentry. Then the orbiter would use two small rockets with internally stored hypergolic propellants to boost up to its intended orbit.
Apollo/Saturn had a much more traditional staging design where the first stage booster would run then drop off, then the second stage booster would run, then drop off, etc. There exist other rockets like the Atlas which had what they called a “stage and a half” design where the center stage burned for a long time and there was an outer “ring” stage that dropped off after a shorter time while the center stage kept going.
After going to the moon, the only part of the entire Apollo/Saturn rocket that came back was the command module capsule with the astronauts and moon rocks. These were completely torched and affected by salt water and were not designed to be reused. Reentry from the moon is significantly faster than reentry from low earth orbit.
The shuttle orbiters were refurbished and reused. It was a very difficult, expensive, and time consuming process to get an orbiter ready for another flight.
All of that is to say that the picture is blurry for the shuttle regarding first stage reusability. Yes the SRBs and orbiters were reused and were lit at launch. The ET was in use at launch but discarded. In my opinion it’s sort of not that interesting to argue what is and isn’t first stage on the shuttle because the elements just don’t map cleanly.
The design of the system with the SRBs, tank, and orbiters being adjacent to each other is considered by many to have been too dangerous in retrospect. This design was a factor in both shuttle disasters - the SRB shooting fire at the ET causing it to explode on Challenger and cracked foam falling away from the ET during launch and hitting the leading edge of the orbiter wing for Columbia. If they were stacked vertically rather than adjacent, those specific failure modes would not have been possible.
All this is irrelevant. The shuttle required so much inspection, refurbishment, and repair that it was little more than the world's largest and most expensive piece of political pork for a giant PR stunt. Contractors were selected so that every state had a contractor making shuttle parts in order to bribe congressional reps into supporting the massive boondoggle.
Each launch cost almost half a billion dollars in 2010 money. The Falcon 9 is reportedly $60-65M per launch.
SLS was just more of the same, welfare for all the states with contractors who grew fat and happy off the shuttle contracts. There was no technical argument whatsoever for reusing such ancient technologies.
Each RS25 engine cost $35M to refurbish for use in the SLS. For the cost of building TEN falcon 9 engines, NASA refurbished one RS25 engine.
And yes, of course it was absurdly dangerous to rely on not just one but two solid rocket motors of which there is no control whatsoever except for slight thrust vectoring...
I understand the costs were higher. Albeit, it could be called a political stunt, did it not provide a lot of employment? So, while inefficient was it not a good thing (in at least the short-term, the long-term could be debated).
My understanding of the federal government of the US is that it is mainly a subsidizer of their national military-industrial complex. Something I would call: military-industrial socialism.
With that said, it is just more of the same in a different era. 1930s and the Empire State Building: to re-invigorate the economy, Eisenhower and the interstate highway system: to provide a stronger national defense, etc
Even more stark, the raptor 3 supposedly costs <$500k to build, so you can get around 70 (almost two full starship stacks worth) for the price of refurbishing one of those engines.
> From my elementary school memories, the Space Shuttle used a giant center rocket and two booster rockets that we expendable
That's incorrect. The orange "giant center rocket" had no engines, it was an external tank which held the propellant burned by the orbiter's main engines. The SSMEs were on the "Shuttle thing" and were reused.
Let's be realistic though, it's nothing to do with the 'Silicon Valley mindset'. It's just the classical route to dethroning a poor-performing incumbant - hire good talent, throw lots of money at reasearch and stay focused on the smallest targets where you can demonstrate the biggest progress.
Despite his projected persona, Musk would love nothing more than to get to the position of being the bloated encumbant supplier with guaranteed government contracts regardless of results.
>Despite his projected persona, Musk would love nothing more than to get to the position of being the bloated encumbant supplier with guaranteed government contracts regardless of results.
I'm impressed you can keep saying this nonsense despite how SpaceX operates being pretty well documented.
We do have a large number of wealthy people who are all about that and I find it mind boggling. What kind of idiot decides that the most important thing to them after they already have over a billion dollars is to get more? Why not try to do new risky things that are unlocked by that money? How're they really just all about a "number go up" game?
Fortunately it seems that we also have quite a few wealthy people that actually want to use their money to fund and do new and innovative stuff.
Musk has done some impressive things for himself. Along the way he’s helped out society. Now it seems as though he’s done with that and cares more about changing it match his image.
Your say that believing the downfall of Boeing is reflective of the downfall of all of society is "melodramatic", and then spend the rest of your post explaining how Boeing's failures are exasperated by failures in government and other organizations. You defeat your own argument.
There US Army generally has one tourniquet that it’s deemed best. The CAT by North American rescue. Every Soldier is awash in these things. They hand them out like candy on Halloween. And rightly so.
But the Government has to buy them from businesses that meet certain characteristics. Woman owned, etc. That’s a great thing, right?
In this case however, that female owned business is the guy who invented the things wife. Who he sells them to at a mark-up. Who then sells them to the government.
Economy of scale? Ya! They are the number one buyer and pay the most. Honestly, who cares though, it’s only a couple million a year. Drop in the bucket.
How did Boeing fail? Death by a thousand cuts. That same story probably plays out across the entire supppy chain. Every part, every product, every supplier. Compounded over and over again.
That sounds like embezzlement in the USSR but painted with capitalism colors. Quid pro quo siphoning at every layer, undetectable as a whole, but a giant boulder of dead weight for the system.
> - The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
Government aquisition is a monopsony (market dynamic where there is one purchaser who wields all the power) which means "free market competition" doesn't exist. This causes lots of negative consequences. Here's a discussion of the topic in the context of defense but a lot of the same surely applies to space.
This idea of neverending public-private partnerships, where Congress dumps money into the same tiny group of companies for decades and gov agencies just sit around finding new things for these same companies to build (over budget and way too late), was always going to get to a breaking point of dysfunction. Whether it's military or infrastructure or whatever.
The gov created this environment and the private companies protect it because it's big money and grease it so it's the only option (like selling the bullshit idea "no one else can do what [Boeing] does cuz we huge staff counts and billions").
They both enable each other
And people are too scared to have a system that encourages new smaller companies take part because they don't have fancy sales pitches or fail early prototypes or take longer to get to Step A. And everyone criticizes them to death. So the only option is to get bought by Boeing or Lockheed, who then do really good at Step A just to fail a Step C and D and E.
I fully agree. There has to be some disruption to allow a healthy competition to exist. This will allow at least the possibility for better companies to thrive. At present the behemoth contractors are propped up by the fact that people will always say the small upstarts can't scale enough to meet the needs of the massive purchaser. Companies like SpaceX on the space side and Anduril on defence are showing that innovation is possible in these industries, and that small companies have something to offer. In both cases they probably got more of an audience in government than the average startup because of high-profile connections (Musk and Thiel respectively). It would be great if the playing field were set up such that others could also innovate and disrupt without having that leg up.
In the late 00's there were billions on the table of junk contracts for parts service training with crazy pricing to the USAF.
I would speculate that when those got shaken out, (and likely some space contracts sniped away by SpaceX) Boeing did not make any adjustments for the revenue loss and simply tried to continue on their original bloated trajectory but instead cutting every corner possible along the way.
> Boeing is a 'too big to fail' corporation with a significant source of revenue coming from the government. 40% in 2024¹, billions of dollars of public funds! Just a bit more and it would be mostly state-funded.
SpaceX (as of a year or two ago) was getting 45%+ of its funding from the US government.
And then there's the $900M in subsidies SpaceX asked for to provide rural internet access via starlink...
> The government is not a good allocator of funds, free market competition works a lot better for creating the best product.
That doesn't explain why their civilian aircraft aren't just not the best product, but have gone completely to shit over the last decade or two. The 737 max is the most notorious example here, as it's their most recent development and has never been good from the start - but reporting suggests that the engineering on their formerly-good lines has been going downhill also, and it's only the fact that they started out as good products which means they've taken longer to fall as low.
And there's very little government revenue for the civilian aircraft design and manufacturing side of the business. It's all free market competition.
> gone completely to shit over the last decade or two
Has the 777 and 787 done this? I don't think so. Yes, Airbus has many competitive aeroplanes in adjacent categories now, but that does mean the originals (and their many sub-models) from Boeing have "gone completely to shit".
My more thoughtful reply: I think "too big to fail" gets a bad rap on HN. In my view, for any sufficiently large country+economy, at some point, your top 3-5 defense contractors will be considered "too big to fail". No way around that. Depending upon the size of your country+economy, this is true for steel manuf also, but probably just the top 1-2.
Has anyone with great expertise in Boeing considered the effects of a break-up? I'm not sure why Boeing needs so many different industries under one roof -- space, civil, military, plus others.
I'm trying to find an article from circa 2007 on the changes at Boeing but I can't find it right now. Read those two and follow their various links and you'll get more information.
The long story short version is that post McDonnell Douglas merger, Boeing's management culture was replaced with MD's management culture and things have only declined since.
In almost all mergers the management of the worse comapny ends up winning, provided there was no loopsided difference in size. The thing is, since those executive were not good at creating product, they are more likely to be good at politics and hence they end up overtaking management of the new combined company, even if their company was the smaller one.
A good series of examples is in the book "Barbarians at the Gate", chronicling the career of F Ross Johnson. His company would get acquired and then he and his folks would outmanoeuvre the acquiring company management.
Boeing was known as a great engineering firm that was not that great at turning their engineering excellence into shareholder returns. The shareholders wanted executives more focused on said returns.
Sounds like the solution is to turn it into a privately owned company then. Of course, that's greatly simplifying things, but it would be a right step in the right direction.
Finance people prefer finance people. MD's bean counter management were seen as being more responsible and "hard nosed" than the Boeing management who were focused on things that "didn't drive the bottom line" like the product, culture, etc.
I recall that in a previous thread, someone had explained that the agreement between Boeing and MD was that MD's management would be retained at similar positions in Boeing, and that many of MD's management gamed this agreement by raising their position before the merger. Leading MD's management to end up higher in Boeing's management.
1. MD merging with Boeing and taking over management, basically. Management gurus hate this being pointed out
2. Moving headquarters to Chicago - part of the MBAs taking over
3. Losing the engineering first mindset - this is really the core of what happened there.
When the company kept focusing on stock returns and "financializing" the company, and did things like spinning off Spirt airplane assembly company, that was the real visible symbol of the problem. In the past few months they gave up and rebought them to join with Boeing.
The solution for being will be a multiple year transition of the company into being much more technology and engineering focused. They will have to eject the MBA type "reducing cost is the goal" type leaders. The problem is those are completely the leaders of the company today.
Absolutely MBAification. But also complexity crisis.
My two most major issues with the world today.
Boeing got some but worse, and also made their products so complex that humans can’t understand it as a whole let alone communicate it to others.
It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.
Compound that with MBAs that insist things “run lean” and “the core competency group you aren’t in found X, so meet your target of Y or find somewhere else to work” to “We need that BlackRock money, so do whatever the govs of NY, IL, and CA say to do because their trillion dollars speaks”.
Software is unfortunately a big part of the complexity crisis. What you are describing is an investible consequence of abstraction (not that abstraction cannot be handled sensibly at some level, but it at any point you reach a situation where nobody is capable of understanding the entire software stack, then we are in trouble. We are almost certainly at that point now in most industries).
There was an interesting lecture Jonathon Blow gave a while back that addressed this issue but it was predictably panned as the ramblings of an insane game developer, I think wrongly. A lot of the points made were true.
Most of the complexity in modern software is not inherent to the problem meant to be solved by that software, but instead emerges from both the organizational structures used to develop software, and from the modern engineering culture of software development.
For instance, Boeing famously bungled the 737 Max. But 737s were first created in the era of slide-rules, there is nothing about the plane which is too inherently complex to be done well. MCAS, the software portion of the debacle, was so simple in principle it could have been easily implemented by one competent engineer plus a few more to check his work. Complexity inherent to the problem space is NOT the problem here.
Go on then, explain why you believe something like MCAS is too complex to make properly. Mismanagement is the root of these problems, not the supposed complexity of the problems.
MCAS was one flight control law, a one that was poorly conceived in the first place and then botched in implemention, but still only a single flight control law. If you think that such a system is too complex to created properly, then please tell me how many thousands of engineers must have been on the team that created the first all-digital fly-by-wire system for an aircraft. That was a hell of a lot more complex than one flight control law on a 737, and they were actually doing something new back then. Thousands, why it must have taken tens of thousands of people amirite.
When did I talk about any specific system? You can’t make a toaster without at least five databases. You can’t change oil in a car without consulting the internet because there are 400 oils and special mfg requirements like a programmer to reset the counter or to run a replaced oil routine.
It’s not my fault you can’t think beyond Boeing.
It’s the whole world, and you are just one of the people that even if it is pointed out to them can not see it. Because like I said, you haven’t made anything to see the issue.
> Boeing got some but worse, and also made their products so complex that humans can’t understand it as a whole let alone communicate it to others.
> It’s not just Boeing. It’s everyone, everywhere. All systems in every market require so much extra “stuff” that we’re on a spiral.
Nah. That's just another facet of engineering incompetence.
Complexity doesn't just happen, it is allowed to happen.
We repeatedly went to the moon over 50 years ago, with complex systems that were well understood by the different teams that built them.
Now, 50 years later, if we are not capable of repeating the same feat, we are doing something wrong.
If we use software-controlled hardware and then throw are hands in the air screaming "it's too complex", we are doing something wrong. That stuff shouldn't have been used in the first place.
Wasn't the U2 a skunkworks project where they just did it vs opening it up for input from committee whether from corporate or bureaucratic? Starliner was far far from that. From day one, everyone's fingers were in the pie.
U2 was Skunkworks, they started with an existing airframe (F-104?) and worked from there. Significant compromises, for example the wings droop so much they skid on the ground on landing and it's use was limited by the improved anti-aircraft missiles that became available around the same time.
Companies serving the military and companies serving the population at large should generally be separated.
Boeing's fall (thanks to the reverse McDonell Douglas takeover) was mostly as their defense arm grew. Huge margins, a very different type of working. Boeing stopped giving a damn about it's civil aviation business, as is exemplified by moving their HQ from civil manufacturing hub Seattle first to Chicago and now to Arlington County, Virginia literally to suck up to Washington and lobby 24/7.
That's a very different type of business.
If Boeing was forced to make money with a successful civil aviation business alone it would be run very very differently.
There's a lot of theory about this. Look into strategy theory. A few well know concepts as entry points; Feedback loops, path dependency, disruptive innovation, group thinking. Other related concepts needed to analyze the Boeing story completely to understand their strategic position and defensibility could be; Core competence, Blue Ocean, Porter's Five Forces. More macro and fundamentally I'd look into Austrian school if thought and "destructive innovation", and core concepts such as division of labor.
Without knowing the details it makes a lot of sense that Boeing ended where they did (Boeing/SpaceX fits a lot of theories above). What may save the US is not the ability to save companies like Boeing - that would more likely hinder progress on a mid to long term scale - it's the ability to come up with new companies/innovators to overtake the incumbents.
In my interpretation. Fundamentally it goes all the way to the quality of institutions and culture. Time will tell, but I'm feeling more worried about those than the current ability to innovate.
Probably mostly of the "do the opposite of whatever this guy says" variety. ;)
The top review on this book says:
The author credits James McNerney for turning around Boeing. He
neglected to say which way they were turning. For example, he
credits JN for outsourcing so much of the 787 -- which included
the wings, perhaps the thing Boeing did best. The 787 ended up
way over budget and three years late. That's good management?
Any organization that seemingly operates poorly typically just has bad incentives. Congressional funding for space became a feedback loop of pork for states (jobs program) from Apollo, continuing to today with SLS. Commercial crew demonstrates how stunningly dystopian over-specific congressional funding is. The solution is simple: Congress should take a giant step back from NASA involvement so NASA can have more commercial programs like commercial crew.
Unfortunately, the way we structure, fund, and manage modern corporations creates tons of poor incentives all on its own, no legislative influence needed. (unless your goal is to maximize short term profit signals at all costs)
I think that they’re looking for intelligent, insightful analysis. As opposed to the myriad parroted HN comments on the subject, written by developers that pretend that their expertise is somehow transferable.
Except that in this case, the consensus HN view is also the wider consensus. Boeing engineers have been yelling about this as loudly as they can, for many years now, and the public is finally listening.
> I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
Markets cycle. Companies cycle. People cycle (actually just die unless you consider their offspring their continuation).
All systems do cycle; including the USA. It doesn't mean it's the end. If China doesn't rise and crashes it, there isn't really any other serious challenger and it will likely be the "rising" empire again.
Eh. Maybe. My money’s somewhere in between. The US is an empire in decline, but it isn’t clear that China is the replacement. If China can somehow survive demographic collapse, then I’d put my money on them, but that’s a big if.
SpaceX is a US company too. The government has to be comfortable letting the incumbents fail, so that companies like SpaceX and Anduril can take their place.
Stock buyback for investor gratification enabled the most optimal way for executives to keep meeting kpis in the short term rather than long term investments
> I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.
I’m tired of this hyperbolic, melodramatic angst about the general decline of the U.S. Did you not read the part about the crew being returned by SpaceX? A company that just made landing rockets a reality only 9 years ago, not even 10 years has passed and reusable rockets are as boring as smartphones. NASA identified an issue on the Boeing Starliner, and a cutting edge company (SpaceX) stepped up for a non-emergency rescue mission. There was no loss of life, or equipment, there’s been no injuries, just mild inconveniences. This isn’t a nation in decline, this is a nation that has even begun to peak yet.
I'd be extremely happy to be wrong, as I invest my life and my family's in the US. As for the concern, it's not about this one particular incident, but about the pattern that other countries have experienced: the government and the society has so many entangled interest that no one knows how to move things forward. As a result, the country perishes. I'm not saying that the US is in that trajectory, but I did see some aspects of institutional decay, like the cost of canon shells is 6X of Russian's, despite that Russia is a much more corrupt country, or like the country is so divided and many people simply accept that election is about telling stories and personal attacks instead of logical discussion of policies. Like it would take billions to build the next-gen battleships or planes, and we couldn't have good enough supply chain in the US. Like our medical system is so much more expensive than other developed countries, and the list can go on.
> I'd be extremely happy to be wrong, as I invest my life and my family's in the US.
Spend less time reading the news and more time enjoying your family. The world has been “ending” for decades now, the U.S. isn’t going anywhere and will continue to get some things right while getting other things wrong.
“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
> Was hilarious in one case to be called a racist by a white fella for pointing out how indians only hire indians, and then later seeing him get laid off by said indians.
Maybe I'm missing something but is this antidote to show you're not racist? What were the other cases this was hilarious?
My best friend, basically my brother of 15+ years is indian. I don't really care that you think I'm racist.
This case in particular was just great because it was some liberal white guy calling me (a minority) racist for pointing out something clear as day. And then he got his karma.
I never said that I think you're a racist. The fact that you think I did is telling.
Does your best friend of 15+ year also consider you a friend? Is he also able to capitalize proper nouns without trouble but can't seem to extend that same effort to americans?
I'm curious about such questions because on a larger scheme of the things, I really hope that Boeing is not a miniature reflection of the US - an empire in its twilight that got entangled in irreconcilable interests, doomed to watch its own inevitable decline.