Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.
And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…
I agree with your comment, even though I have no idea on the technical aspects. What I can weigh in on is crisis management, especially communication.
Boeing needs to take control of the situation and actively start communicating and showing that they are working on fixing this thing. In Situational Crisis Communication Theory you would call it a rebuild approach. They tried denial, they tried downplaying, it’s not working. A rebuild strategy is usually the last resort, as things like admitting your mistakes and fixing them are rarely appreciated by investors. Furthermore it’s usually a huuuuge cost to do a recall on that scale. But Boeing need to show the public that they are actively working on improving the situation, to earn back their trust. So at least a partial recall should be considered.
You’re exactly right in your first paragraph about the news. The media and the public are very sensitive to Boeing quality issues rn. These articles won’t stop unless one of three things happen. Either Boeing gets their shit together and gets some effective crisis management and communication done, the company goes bust, or something else turns up in the news that replaces this. The third option will be the most likely, but it will also haunt them forever. It’s like that exploding galaxy note 7 situation. There were articles about that for every new generation of Galaxy Note, despite Samsung doing pretty well in investigating the issues. And while the following Note phones sold alright, the whole thing was a significant loss of trust and money for Samsung and enabled competitors like Huawai to catch up.
What they do right is having a duopoly with Airbus, and great military contracts. So investors know that even if things are shit rn, they will probably get better again.
Furthermore, while I agree that Boeing probably will not go bankrupt over this, the valuation sometimes is not a great indicator of what’s going on internally. Enron was worth over 60 billion. Half a year later they were at zero. Now I’m not saying Boeing is nearly that bad, but they are in some trouble for sure.
Working for Boeings PR department must be absolute madness right now… imagine having to somehow excuse all those fuck ups and every week there is a new one
You misread. They got scammed into paying 10$ shipping for a supposedly free product that will never arrive.
This kinda makes it sound like Abercrombie and Fitch back in the days… guess they still miss the smell tho
Thanks for the answer, definitely is an interesting perspective! I’ll look more into the masks. And I wholeheartedly agree on the part about reactionaries using these kind of strategies. Something just throws me off about the weird folksy way we see a lot of these guys… be it Daddy Elon or Uncle Bill or Cowboy Jeff, framing them as quirky characters in the reality tv show that is our news media distracts from the real issues that each of those guys represent.
Can you give me a summary why character masks make this cutesy billionaire shit ok?
I’m not confident enough in my knowledge about Marx‘s ideas to be arguing about that.
I think I got a grasp on the basics, capitalism creates societal positions like owners and workers, and Bill slipped into the mask of an owner.
But to me that does not mean that humanizing the billionaire class is a good thing. I’d rather say it makes it a worse thing, as it takes away incentives for lower classes to change the system and get rid of the owner class. How do we get anywhere close to equality if people see good ole Bill and Daddy Elon, instead of the ruthless oligarchs that they are?
But like I said, I don’t have a good grasp on this theory so would be happy to be corrected/have it explained to me ;)
Such a nice little stoner billionaire /s.
Don’t humanize these assholes. It’s the reason why he says stuff like this. He’s a wealth hoarding bastard that fucked a lot of people over to get where he’s at. If he thought it was a good idea he could easily just start a big trial somewhere. But he doesn’t. Instead he sits on his mountain of money and says cute shit for idiots to drool over instead of taxing him.
A stakeholder is something different than a stockholder. A stakeholder could be an employee, investor, customer, someone selling equipment to them or even the community they work in.
Basically anyone who’s affected by their actions.
This is a frequently repeated quote attributed to the late philosopher Frederic Jameson. On its own it doesn’t make a statement about capitalism or what it is at all. (If you wanna know more about Jamesons theories on capitalism you can read about it in his books)
Jameson’s quote points out that people often find it easier to picture possible world ending doomsday scenarios, than it is for them to think about alternatives to living in a capitalist world to try to avoid these scenarios.
You can even test this yourself. Ask people around you about the end of the world and many will point out reasons like climate change, demographic changes, environmental destruction, pollution, world wars, nuclear holocaust, asteroid impacts (shoutout Roland Emmerich) and even biblical scenarios for an eventual end of the world as we know it.
But ask them if they think there are other ways to live, so that those things won’t happen and usually they will just give you a version of “this is just how things are, not much you can do about it” or “the world could be different, but there is no use in trying because this is just a utopia and I have no idea how to change stuff anyways”.
Regarding your last paragraph, imo this kinda misses the point. I agree, there are structures that exist parallel to what most people consider capitalism, but ask people in most self described capitalist societies and they will not really recognise the difference and will just see it as an anomaly at best.
Btw, this is all coming from a European perspective, albeit heavily informed by US media.