> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.
The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.
It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
I.e. they've been reinventing the business. They were probably burned to the ground in WW2 and had to rebuild the business from scratch.
You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).
Some fight it off longer than others.
I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.
Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.
It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
That's what they say, but I don't think it's true (at the high end, at least). For instance: if Boeing dies, the market will not replace it. It'll be an Airbus monopoly for large jets, and maybe the the communists will eventually build a competitor (Comac). IIRC, it's too expesnive for Embraer to make the jump into that market.