Wednesday, February 02, 2005
I was just reading an interesting article, and listening to some good music, when I had an interesting idea. the article's point #9 made me think about how airlines have been really stupid the last few years.
Sales start going down. Why? Probably because people just plain old don't need to travel around as much anymore. People finally trust e-mail, and have even found ways to do it in a relatively secure way. People can chat instantly using common, free applications with a wide array of features such as file transfers and realtime AV feeds. These were pretty much all invented for people to use personally (mainly with college kids in mind I think - like Napster) but businesses are using these technologies like mad right now. Businesses don' t need to spend thousands of dollars a day to keep their people on the road because they can do more/most of their work sitting at home.
Wouldn't it have been great to see airline companies, who have been trying to convince us for the last 50 years that are not in fact "Air Transportation" companies but more like "People Connecting/Impact-Of-Geography Reducing" companies with a knack for making our business easier and more comfortable... wouldn't it have been amazing if they had seen that the rise of the internet basically would equal less air travel, and have all those airline companies start delivering on their promise of connecting people and geogrphies by building networked business applications, and providing video conferencing facilities (possibly at their gigantic airports to start), and maybe even becoming ISPs, in an effort to embrace a business problem they 'claimed' to already understand better than anyone else, rather than clinging to their old styles of operation and praying that the air-transport lasts forever.
By the way, I think this approach I'm talking about could have allowed a company like, say Air Canada to keep their traditional non-low-cost carrier model for the air business they still would have, and would have even left enough room for the low-cost carriers to grow-up in pretty much the same way they did over the past 5-10 years. (because companies like Air Canada don't really care about low-cost air travel)
I think the failure of Air Canada to even survive, and the struggling air transportation business all over the world points out the basic point that the strategy of "cling to the past and hope we're okay" is not going to cut it for airlines anymore.
The sad part is that with their gigantic businesses behind them, they could quickly and easily invent, build, and become the biggest player in this new "business liason" market. As it stands, I think for a long time this market will simply not exist, and then some tech companies will do it terribly, and then someone will do it properly. Finally. And most of the airlines will be out of business.
Sales start going down. Why? Probably because people just plain old don't need to travel around as much anymore. People finally trust e-mail, and have even found ways to do it in a relatively secure way. People can chat instantly using common, free applications with a wide array of features such as file transfers and realtime AV feeds. These were pretty much all invented for people to use personally (mainly with college kids in mind I think - like Napster) but businesses are using these technologies like mad right now. Businesses don' t need to spend thousands of dollars a day to keep their people on the road because they can do more/most of their work sitting at home.
Wouldn't it have been great to see airline companies, who have been trying to convince us for the last 50 years that are not in fact "Air Transportation" companies but more like "People Connecting/Impact-Of-Geography Reducing" companies with a knack for making our business easier and more comfortable... wouldn't it have been amazing if they had seen that the rise of the internet basically would equal less air travel, and have all those airline companies start delivering on their promise of connecting people and geogrphies by building networked business applications, and providing video conferencing facilities (possibly at their gigantic airports to start), and maybe even becoming ISPs, in an effort to embrace a business problem they 'claimed' to already understand better than anyone else, rather than clinging to their old styles of operation and praying that the air-transport lasts forever.
By the way, I think this approach I'm talking about could have allowed a company like, say Air Canada to keep their traditional non-low-cost carrier model for the air business they still would have, and would have even left enough room for the low-cost carriers to grow-up in pretty much the same way they did over the past 5-10 years. (because companies like Air Canada don't really care about low-cost air travel)
I think the failure of Air Canada to even survive, and the struggling air transportation business all over the world points out the basic point that the strategy of "cling to the past and hope we're okay" is not going to cut it for airlines anymore.
The sad part is that with their gigantic businesses behind them, they could quickly and easily invent, build, and become the biggest player in this new "business liason" market. As it stands, I think for a long time this market will simply not exist, and then some tech companies will do it terribly, and then someone will do it properly. Finally. And most of the airlines will be out of business.
