If you search for them on LinkedIn, it's a small team of ~5 outside of Silicon Valley (Austin, Spain, Norway). I'm sure they're doing quite well but even if they were doing just ok it doesn't have to make billions for everyone to do ok.
This is the reason Delta and United and doing well right now and Southwest and the LCCs are struggling.
It wasn't true just a few years ago, but if this continues as a trend, I could see an airline sacrificing fuel efficiency for a dramatically improved onboard experience.
Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats and are about overcharging for a little extra legroom and service rather than trading off operational flexibility for unique luxury though. Big difference between charging 3x economy rates for 2x the space for a carefully estimated proportion of seats in a mixed configuration (no brainer) and hoping your layout is so good it justifies thirstier, less flexible aircraft to operators (tough sell)...
That said, Boom's customers - if they ever exist - will be a new business class pay extra for supersonic flights category anyway.
> Premium cabins tend to be a very small proportion of overall seats
Most of the profit on a plane is made in business class. If airlines could fly an all-business configuration, they would. The problem is the smallest planes that can do high-paying routes like LON-NYC are bigger than that customer set. So the airline throws in economy seats, often barely breaking even on those, to fill space.
In a world with small airliner planes that can make those transoceanic and transcontinental journeys, I suspect we’ll see more all-business class flights.
Smaller jet aircraft on the same route generally means relatively expensive operating costs: some costs like landing slots and pilots are essentially fixed, whilst others like maintenance, fuel and capital costs don't scale down linearly. The marginal profit on an individual economy class seat might be small, but 100+ of them cover a large portion of the fixed and semi-fixed costs of operating the aircraft, and are relatively easy to fill.
Long range business jets which can comfortably accommodate a typical narrowbody business class cabin exist: nobody is certifying them for all-business class scheduled flights because it wouldn't be profitable to do so; likewise the all-premium 32 seat A318 configuration hasn't been adopted anywhere except the NYC/LON route it didn't really have the range for because it wouldn't be profitable elsewhere. Boom's bet is that supersonic changes that.
Landing charges levied on each landing usually have a significant weight component (amongst other variable components like emissions, noise, handling and passenger charges) but the relationship usually isn't linear with passenger capacity. Landing slots required at busier airports to have the right to land at a certain time each week are generally traded between airlines with the slot coordinator's agreement with the value of the slot based mainly on the commercial attractiveness of the time slot.
There is one airline that flies all business class. An A321Neo with 76 lie-flat seats, NYC to Paris/Nice/Milan. Random date selection yields $2700 one-way New York to Paris.
But that's just it - the airlines have finally (lol) realized that a huge price "Delta" (lolx2) between normal cattle class and first class was a mistake.
People aren't usually paying 4x for first, but they will pay $10 more for Y, $30 for Z, etc.
The future of airlines is fully adjustable planes!
Huh. Where? I work for a company that's not a FAANG but $200B market cap, and what we get through Concur, Spotnana is at most, 5, occasionally 10% below what I see for the same fare class on Expedia. I have never seen anything approaching 20% cheaper, let alone 50%.
It isnt a trend. This is marketing. Thirty years ago, the a380 was pitched as having room for luxury too. The new plane is always going to have more legroom, wider aisles and better air conditioning than anything before. But it never happens. The pitch to actual operators is the square-feet of floorspace and how many seats can be crammed into that space at given price points. Just like concord, this thing only makes sense with quazi-economy seating. Do not expect to nap on a nice lie-flat seat.
I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.
Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.
While I don't disagree with that, in my experience all Windows instability on WinNT family (and I tightly worked with all end user versions of Win from 16 bit W3.11 to the recent Win11 with a very few exceptions) are caused by faulty hardware and/or bad drivers that can't handle it.
I don't think I could remember any issue that I can't attribute to bad HW/3rd party driver.
Wrt Win95 & it's kind - all processes in that family essentially run in a single address space, and data "isolation" were "achieved" only through obscurity. If you knew some magic constants that were easily obtainable from disassembly, you could do anything there. So no wonder it was as bad as the worst program you've installed..
Windows 2000 server was peak windows. All the subsequent versions just got harder to maintain as they gradually ruined the user interface. Nobody cares about the UI on consumer windows but if you’re spending a lot of time in RDP the vista based server products are terrible.
I don’t hate windows 2019 but Linux is better, easier, faster and a relief after any futile attempts to use IIS or sql server in 2025.
windows xp x64 edition was pretty slick; and so was NT4. I agree that 2000 was pretty cool, but perhaps a lot of that is design nostalgia. It was very "serious business OS" where XP and Me looked like jellybeans and cartoons. My favorite windows, though, is win 7 ultimate, Steve Ballmer Edition. i was sad when i had to upgrade to winten.
I get the nostalgia for XP, it was the first windows consumer edition that didn’t suck, but for a server OS 2000 was so lean and easy to manage it makes me wonder how MS lost to Linux. Back then, it was a genuine competition, now you’d have to be crazy to choose windows to deploy anything.
I wish MSFT could build Active Directory and the associated constellation of services on Linux. You can make a reasonable simulacrum with Samba but it isn't as well-integrated.
(My fever dream wish is for a "distribution" of NT that boots in text mode and has an updated Interix subsystem alongside Win32. Throw in ZFS and it would be awesome.)
I guess I misread you, then. I thought you were arguing that a text mode wouldn't be useful. That's why I suggested Server Core. It's CLI, but uselessly framed in a GUI framework.
Like I said in my earlier post, text mode NT is my fever dream fantasy. Maybe you were saying the same thing.
Yes, I was saying the same thing. There are very few applications we could run on a text-mode DOS/Linux-CLI type NT due to the upstream dependencies that require (or implement) a graphical interface.
Text-only mode would be wonderful even if all you could do is look at a blinking cursor.
Powershell was 2006, so I suppose the real "peak windows server UX" was 2016 when PS was relatively mature and came out-of-the-box with the latest version.
If MSFT had back ported servicing stack updates to 2016 it would still be usable. As it stands it bogs down unreasonably when applying updates and needs lengthy DISM /CleanupImage processes to be run periodically to reclaim disk space.
I went from 98 to 2000 (rather than ME) and it was an amazing experience. It showed me what an operating system could be like. Of course, what I really wanted was Linux, but I didn't know better at the time.
I dunno how to compare stable to stable but I ran Win2k for so long that I got bored with it (something like 5-7 years) and never experienced a single crash. This is coming from a Linux guy btw… so I’m no Microsoft fanboy, just saying, it was as stable as any other stable OS.
I saw years of uptime on those systems whereas Win2000 iirc needed a reboot for every single update of the OS, and even for applications like IIS or Exchange.
Compared to NT4 it was probably very stable, since I remember telling most clients to just shut it down Friday evening and boot it Monday morning cause the pre-SP4 NT4 could not stay up more than three weeks.
Compare that to AS/400, where we pushed updates all over the country, without warning clients, to system running in hospitals, and there never was even the slightest problem. It sounds irresponsible to do that today, but those updates just worked, all the time and all applications continued to work.
SQL Server is really Sybase tho, which was always capable of running on UNIX.
Can't say much more, but I worked on a huge (internal) Sybase ASE on Linux based app (you've _all_ bought products administered on this app ;) ) way back (yes, pre-SSD, multi path fiber I/O to get things fast, failover etc.) and T-SQL is really nice, as is/was ASE and the replication server. Been about 20 years tho, so who knows.
I worked with SQL Server a bit, writing a Rust client for it back in the days. The manual is really good, explaining the protocol clearly. That made it really easy to write a client for it.
SQL Server uses NT and Win32 APIs, so the SQL team built a platform independent layer. Meaning NT and Win32 is still used by SQL on Linux. It’s pretty cool tech.
I guess wording wise for my comment, the "Hah, they didn't actually write that themselves, they just bought the Sybase rights to everything license" got the better of me :)
To be fair again, from what I hear, SQL server at Microsoft did some nice things on top of Sybase but the base, T-SQL, is just nice overall and by itself. I really want to like Postgres (and I do) but some of the awesome things I had with actual Sybase ASE 20+ years ago, Postgres still does not have. And that was a piece of software that had those features I loved for 10+ years prior to when I started working with it. The app we're talking of here was 15 years old when I worked on it 20+ years ago and it's probably still around and very probably still uses Sybase ASE (tho the actual app was converted from Smalltalk to Java ;)
I also later on had to use Oracle and had the same "WTF? You can't do that?" experience :shrug:
The tone and content of this document is shockingly candid and frank. I think it did a ton to make Windows Server a better product. I have a lot of respect for the people at MSFT who reviewed the company's own product in such a critical light.
Of course. Why would you expect anything but? Pride is actually a very good driver of change if you ask me because people often do their best work when they are proud of what they are building.
The 90s were the dark ages of cloud computing. It was the age of system administrator, desktop apps, Usenet, and the start of the internet as a public service. At the time concepts such as infrastructure as code, cloud, and continuous deployment, were unheard of.
AWS, which today we take for granted, was launched on 2002, and back then it started as a way to monetize Amazon's existing shared IT platform.
Of course migrating anything back then was a world of pain, specially when it's servers running on different OSes. It's like the rewrite from hell, that can even cover the OS layer. Of course it takes years.
> At the time concepts such as infrastructure as code, cloud, and continuous deployment, were unheard of.
There existed different names and solutions for things like cloud. I worked with Grid Engine in 2000 after Sun acquired Gridware, but that project started in 1993. By 2000 we were experimenting with running Star Office on the grid and serving UI to thin clients (kind of what Google Docs or Office 365 do now, but on completely different stack).
We're well past 2016, but Stratechery had an opinion that Dropbox focused too much on infrastructure projects like this and would have had more success focused on improving product/market fit.
"That's why I actually find this announcement really disappointing. Apparently Dropbox has been devoting significant resources for at least two years to a project that will no doubt have a positive impact on the bottom line but a minimal impact on the top line. It's all well-and-good (and honestly impressive) to announce 500 million registered users, but the reluctance to disclose both active users and especially the number (and size) of its business customers speaks even more loudly. How might have the product and company evolved if the company had continued to rely on AWS and devoted its resources to fixing its product-market fit problem?"
Perhaps the answer to this lies in the incentives for VCs. The current dropbox strategy produces a sustainable, lifestyle business for its employees and customers. They are happy with a product that meets their needs. It's not what VCs want at all; they want either total domination or acquisition. The middle-ground is uninteresting to them. So, had they stayed with AWS, they may have bought a 10% chance at 10x more VC return, and a 90% chance that they are bought up and absorbed into OneDrive.
I prefer the current outcome to a swing for the fences.
I don't think it would be possible for them to stay with AWS considering their storage volume usage. As soon as the storage was out everything else has followed as well
Dropbox's business IS storage, which means running on top of storage is always going to be a threat and cut into their margins. What incentive does AWS have to give Dropbox a really sweet S3 deal? They know Dropbox needs the storage. It's like why it's better for a business to own the building its in, because if you become successful, your landlord has the incentive to increase your rent. This isn't about if AWS can provide a compelling bulk rate for S3, it's about if your business lives or dies based on the AWS deal renegotiation.
No, I don't think that Dropbox should manufacture its own hard drives. The main reason is that switching hard drive manufacturers can be done piecemeal as you need to buy them. Getting data out of S3 if the contract negotiations go bad can cost more than storing it. It's just very different economics and level of vulnerability given the two.
Sure, that was a great feature in 2007. (S3 existed when Dropbox was founded, FWIW.)
It eventually stopped being a differentiating source of value, and trying to out-commodity the CSP’s on storage cost at scale seems like a bad strategy to bring value back to the product. At tremendous effort you make it possible to lower prices by 20% or whatever, in order to keep the same profit on an undifferentiated product. Who cares?
Dropbox is a company with thousands of engineers. They should be able to focus on both aspects.
It seems Dropbox has an issue with execution. It already has a set of customers. They should be able upsell other things. They are trying with Dropbox Sign.
But other features like Paper and Photos don't seem to do well. Paper is deprecated, I think. Failing to expand to a doc-like saas is a very bad sign, when your customers use Dropbox to store documents.
> Dropbox is a company with thousands of engineers. They should be able to focus on both aspects.
This highlights a big issue in online discourse, the false dichotomy is everywhere. "why didn't they allocate resources in solving world hunger instead of uber for furbies" Because they chose not to, not because it was an either-or.
That’s not the story I’ve heard. What I’ve read are stories of airlines who regretted the deals and went after those who used them extensively, looking for excuses to revoke them:
Anyhow, the Mark Cuban article says almost nothing about how the airline treated him, it’s just a light human interest story about an unusual and quirky thing a famous person did.
The immediate catalyst was the EU, but this is likely what Apple wanted all along by launching ATT and running all its PR about privacy. Users pay instead of advertisers, and Apple gets its 30%.
I interned on Encarta one summer shortly before the fall, and 11 years ago I wrote a Quora answer about why I think it failed, which amusingly still gets upvotes: https://qr.ae/pK2pGA
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