Why do people keep repeating this garbage over and over and over? It just isn't true.
Amazon literally didn't make profits for 10 years. Many other tech companies haven't made a cent yet, but investors are looking 5-10 years into the future for those.
Some businesses just make bad decisions, others make good decisions. Overall the free market/public corporation system is a resounding success. Just because boeing messed up doesn't say anything about the rest of the system.
We don't have a free market. The market is not allowed to implode. Mega corporations and banks are not allowed to fail. Boeing is not allowed to fail, and that fact, more than anything else, explains why they are such a poorly run company. Where you see a "resounding success" I see an absolute failure that is closer to a scam or a ponzi scheme than a legitimate system.
Boeing didn't take the money anyways, so I don't know why people are so riled up about it.
The defense part of Boeing used to be a separate company (McD). DoD could easily let commercial fail and spin out McD again, or just shrink to defense only. For a long time, Airbus has claimed that the DoD spending subsidizes the commercial side. So TBH, letting commercial fail would result in more bang for the DoD buck.
Regarding military activities, I don't doubt that there are engineering synergies between commercial aviation and military aviation. However I've always heard that from a commercial perspective the two are at odds: for a defense organization you want to make sure to keep as little cash on hands, as it's fairly easy to ask for more. There are always scope changes, delays and shit happening. The last thing you want is to have a war chest that your customers will ask you to tap in to cover the costs of contradictory requirements, feature creep and original underbidding to win the contract. See the A400M as an example: the civil side of Airbus is coughing up quite a lot of cash for that clusterfuck.
On the other hand, developing civil airliners requires cash. A lot of cash. You can't ask American Airlines to cough up some extra cash because your 787 is delayed and is costing more to produce than anticipated. In fact the opposite is true: because your 787 is delayed, your customers will pay much less, and only when you can actually deliver the product (for the most part). Bombardier didn't have pockets deep enough to sustain the CSeries...
What a deal!
Yet for some reason, nobody's buying from the stores that are open.
So the mass layoffs are just a mirage, and not a failure at all, are they?
Yeah, and they caught never-ending flak for it until AWS starting turning a profit and eventually dragged Amazon into the black. Amazon was/is the exception, not the rule.
Amazon went public in 1997. Boeing went public in 1962.
You get leeway as a young-ish public company, which will expire once you are an established player. How do you think markets are going to react if the bottom falls out of Amazon's business in 2055?
Long range plans get re-evaluated periodically because things change, both technology and markets but I have never experienced them being either ignored or thrown out in pursuit of the quarterly 'numbers.'
That said, if your senior management doesn't understand all aspects of your product value, they will make poor choices both in the short term and for the long term.
I would imagine that it is easy to push a narrative that execs are greedy, short sighted and barely competent. I would imagine this can be true, but more than likely its a bunch of factors that aren't public that led to less than optimal decision making.
You can't even build a factory in a quarter.
In reality larger companies usually prosper for many decades, because they do plan long term.
Boeing's stock is up on the news. Lost jobs = lower payroll = improved cash flow. That's the bottom line. Shareholders couldn't care less how you arrive there, just that you do.
Clearly there are some downsides, but managing them via laws and regulations is possible.
Of course, those are both ridiculous extremes - the answer to what balance is healthiest for an economy I'm sure is immensely complicated. I'm just saying that efficiency doesn't come without costs, and we shouldn't design our entire economy completely around the interests of shareholders of major corporations.
That said, I have serious doubts that everything can be automated as that suggests all human labor would be providing zero value.
I am guessing aircraft manufacturing is going to severely depressed in the medium term. Customers are delaying deliveries, canceling orders etc. Demand will likely not return to pre covid levels in even one year. Even if it does, airlines are not in any financial position to make significant purchases for few years. On top of it 737-MAX issues and resulting hold in manufacturing of that line has not left Boeing in a great shape.
You're shooting the messenger when the core issue is that Boeing, like all publicly traded companies do not have medium to long-term views for their business. It is always quarter-to-quarter. That is what management is judged on, because their job and their compensation is tied to maximize shareholder returns.