The car and IT industries are a good indication for what BA will face in the next few years.
Air travel is mostly a commodity for the vast majority of travellers. As with any commodity (seats in this case) you survive only by cutting costs to a margin where you can be profitable. As everyone does this, you can’t differentiate on price, so your differentiator will be customer care.
But, simple as it sounds, those companies lumbered with pensions, health schemes, and highly unionised workforces make change difficult and add to your cost base making it hard to adapt and reduce margins.
If you look at Ford, GM and other US car companies, they are all nearing the end of their lives - if they continue to operate in the US. They all have cost bases which make competition impossible with the likes of Honda, Toyota and others without the legacy of 50+ years of operation. I guess the Honda equivalent for BA is Virgin, Emirates etc.
18 years ago who would have considered that IBM would be the company it is today? One of the most respected consultants at the time wrote a book called 'In search of excellence' promoting IBM as the case study for all companies to follow. 3 years later IBM posted the biggest corporate loss of all time. Now its main business has little to do with personal computers. But, the PC market is still alive and well; Dell could start from scratch and produce PCs at a fraction of the cost that IBM could.
A deregulated airline industry will face the same challenges. It will be interesting to see how the management of BA will face it.