I love a good business story and, among industries, I love stories about the airlines or about airplane manufacturing. I usually flip right to any airlne, Airbus or Boeing story in each issue of the Wall Street Journal or in BusinessWeek. So, when I saw a review of Boeing versus Airbus by John Newhouse in BusinessWeek […]
Written by randomfool on February 25th, 2007 with
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I love a good business story and, among industries, I love stories about the airlines or about airplane manufacturing. I usually flip right to any airlne, Airbus or Boeing story in each issue of the Wall Street Journal or in BusinessWeek. So, when I saw a review of Boeing versus Airbus by John Newhouse in BusinessWeek a few weeks ago, I didn’t even wait for Amazon to ship it…I drove right over to the bookstore and bought it. I just finished it and unfortunately I was disappointed.
The story, of course, is one of the epic industrial battle of the present time. Airbus, owned by a consortium of European Union countries with a wacky organizational structure designed to insure that no one country has too much control, has come somewhat out of nowhere over the last 20 years to challenge Boeing who has been the dominant player in the industry for a while now. Boeing has had its share of public problems lately with several management shake-ups and a merger with McDonnell Douglas. However, nothing appears to be a bigger mistake than Airbus’ decision to build the giant super jumbo A380 which has not sold well and is late being delivered due to all kinds of production problems. Meanwhile, after not building a new airplane in over a decade, Boeing is cleaning up with its new 787 Dreamliner. Basically Airbus made a bet that the world would need super jumbos that would fly large numer of passengers (in some cases over 800 at a time) and Boeing bet that there would be more of a need for point-to-point routes using smaller planes. They each placed their bets, in amounts in the tens of billions of dollars, that essentially locked in their strategies for decades to come. Right now, it looks like Boeing made the right bet (after making a series of bad bets) but that could all change. I was more interested in more of the inside story behind the decisions that led to the strategies the companies elected to employ.
Good examples of the sort of story I was expecting are Taken for a Ride, a book about the merger of Daimler Benz and Chrysler or Smartest Guys in the Room, the story of the Enron collapse. I had a hard time putting those books down. This book was more of a rambling collection of quotes from other people with a writing style that just never grabbed me. The author is a fairly accomplished guy apparently but, while I read the whole thing and came away with a few new bits of information, I found the book to be a pretty disappointing experience almost to the point where I want to go and buy one of the other books that tells the same story but with a more typical business story writing style.
Written by randomfool on February 25th, 2007 with
no comments.
Read more articles on General Folly and Books and Business.
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