Boeing’s fall from grace is actually very sad. When I was a kid, Boeing was considered the pinnacle of quality and one of very few American companies that set the bar for their industry.
All of the great brands from when I was a kid that I can think of off the top of my head are trash now. They all switched from bragging about decades of quality propping up next quarter’s growth and getting bought out to be the latest style brand. Maybe there are a few left, but unless they are privately owned their days are numbered.
That’s kind of the enshittification of every sector as private industries have stopped caring about long term business models and only see as far as the next earnings report because private shareholders demand it under threat of legal action. A race to the bottom with no concern for any future, a fire sale.
Look at the airline industry at large. Flying, even for regular people, used to be seen as an event to look forward to. Now you get hit up for fees for literally everything that used to be part of the ticket as you’re crumpled on top of one another.
Boeing is a bad actor, because our modern “free market” rigged economy now incentivizes being a bad actor. Private shareholders don’t contribute to these companies, care about the quality of their products, or the satisfaction of customers, they just want moooaaaar right now. Always moaaaaar. If anyone tries to actually provide a better product/service, they may win by being bought out by the shitty industry they tried to improve, but they’re bought to either kill or enshittify that company to maintain their oligopoly that screws both customers and employees to maximize private shareholder profit at all other expense.
This is why the customers first, employees second, investors third model business tossed aside in the 70/80s was so vital. Nothing happens without customers and employees, no profit, no product. Shareholders are just needy baby leeches that contribute no labor and demand moar profit every feeding, and they have ALL the power.
Our economy should punish the private shareholder model and reward a cooperative model that rewards active and former labor contributors to a profiting business commensurate with the labor/expertise/duration of contribution they provide. Won’t happen, the owners will see to it we collapse before they let their captured government put them in check, but it needs to.
Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, and Unity. The term was used by writer Cory Doctorow in November 2022
No, it’s enshittification. The “en” prefix has nothing to do with electrics. Cory just spoke about tech platforms because that’s what he always talks about.
Agreed, where I was growing up in the U.S. we had a bunch of regional parts manufacturers and Boeing contracts were always prized My dad was a union guy working at one of those factories for a while before it got bought out by a larger multinational corp. AFAIK they ended up shifting a lot of that manufacturing out of the U.S. into Mexico while downsizing the U.S. operations. That’s kind of how it goes in that industry :/
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