Just to be clear, when you Khan "killed our remaining low cost airline carrier", are you referring to when the DOJ blocked the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger? Not arguing, I just want to understand.
> Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
I hope this is true. However, my sense is that the value chain is so elongated from aircraft designer/engineer/marketing/sales to the end customer (retail airline passengers) that those important signals are lost. Not to mention the financial incentives on the part of US domestic airlines to keep making the flight experience worse for end customers.
> With rare exception, people just buy the cheapest ticket
With rare exception people just buy what they can afford. If people had so much money that they could afford to fly first class and it wouldn't impact their budget very few would get the lowest price they can find knowing that their experience in the air will be miserable.
They need both. They want the high-margin business and first-class passengers, but with those alone the volume would be too low and overall prices too high to make operating feasible.
The high-volume low-margin economy customers keep seats filled to prevent wasted potential space. On most commercial planes, flight is only profitable if nearly every seat is filled.
No. If they could fill the entire plane with business/first class seats and sell out >70% (maybe even less) of it, you bet they would.
The only reason why economy class exists is because they can’t. But the demand for more premium travel is steadily increasing, which will lead to shrinking economy cabins.
So yes, they do need to fill the space. But I wouldn’t say that they need the economy passengers.
How would you explain discount airlines that don't have business class at all?
You also contradict yourself saying they only profit from business class but at the same time they can't profit from business class because there is no enough demand for it.
Your statement doesn't make sense and what the poster above you said is right - they need both and that's the reason there are both.
The thing is, a lot of questions user have aren’t unique, maybe just with a slightly different context and LLMs are good at adapting answers to other contexts.
But it only works for stuff that is already consolidated. For example, something like a new version of a language will certainly spark new questions that can only be discussed with other programmers.
> something like a new version of a language will certainly spark new questions that can only be discussed with other programmers.
I'm not sure this is true? Most languages have fairly open development processes, so discussions about the changes are likely indexed in the web search tools LLMs use, if not in the training data itself. And LLMs are very good at extrapolating.
Ballmer was hard-working, smart, and incredibly lucky in many ways. (Fairly or unfairly, I always have a soft spot for someone who survives Math 55 freshman year at Harvard—which Steve did!)
But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.
Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
I thought there was grumbling about Ballmer adopting GE’s stack ranking employee evaluation system where every team has to grade at least some people as below par. So that led to weird incentives like not collaborating across teams, sabotage, etc.
I don't know, anecdotally I never heard MSFT employees grumbling about stack ranking. The lack of internal collaboration seemed to be more top-down, stemming from powerful execs expanding and protecting their fiefdoms.
Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.
A little hyperbole, but as an American, the idea that the average person in my country would rather drive somewhere rather than feel inconvenienced by a short walk is very accurate.
I’ve had 5 personal Mac laptops over the last 25 years. And all of them overlapped their service lives bc I usually had 2 active laptops at a time. None were the Pro, just iBooks and MacBook Airs.
The one I just retired was my portable workhorse from 2014-2024. I got annoyed towards the end bc the latest OS wasn’t supported (but still got security updates for my old macOS version at least).
Overall, I never needed to replaced battery, hard drive, cpus, screens or really any of the hardware on any of them over 2 decades. And I got at least 6 yrs out of each one.
There's significant evidence contradicting this hypothesis. See industry analysts like Gartner, IDC, etc. who all ask tech firms to "pay to play" for better rankings in their reports. As well as the ratings agencies like Moody's, S&P's, and Fitch during the 2008 financial crisis. These ratings agencies were paid by the banks selling CDOs, MBS, and other debt derivatives that were especially tied to the US housing market. The agencies were incentivized to not downgrade those products.
> See industry analysts like Gartner, IDC, etc. who all ask tech firms to "pay to play" for better rankings in their reports.
Do you have any evidence of this happening? I've been involved on the side of the firm in many of these analyst reports, and I've never seen this happen. What /does/ happen is that to be listed at all, e.g. to have the analyst invest time/resources to review you, you have to pay. They don't exhaustively review every company in the segment or every product in the segment, regardless of size and market position. They only review those who pay to be reviewed or are large enough in market position that they are must-reviews (almost all of which also pay). But I've never seen the rankings/outcome dictated by pay at all. Much to my chagrin sometimes, the analyst will lower your ranking due to something I may have felt was a small issue, but they considered a large issue. Analyst Relations is a major investment area for large tech companies, and given my exposure over the last nearly decade, I've never seen any form of quid pro quo / money changing hands.
