Originally Posted by
kwateow
Bernard Ziegler was never sales or marketing, although he fancied himself at it.
I have a feeling he was what we would call a "product evangelist" in this day and age. Even so, he was still no engineer.
But remember that it was allowing loose canons to express themselves that gave Airbus the marketing edge in the 1980s & 90s.
Hmm... not sure. I'd say that Habsheim and the resulting backlash probably undid a lot of the confidence initially inspired by that tack. I think (and I've had some agreement) that what allowed AI to go from a single wide-body type offering to going toe-to-toe with Boeing - and successfully come out on top occasionally within a decade - was the unprecedented degree of flight deck commonality across the FBW range from the narrow-body short-medium haul A320 all the way up to the wide-body long-haul A340 (and later A380) - reducing conversion training costs by a significant margin and by extension making it easier for independent airlines to start small and expand to long-haul operations at a much lower cost than was previously possible, as long as they bought Airbus aircraft to make that expansion.
I say this as a non-business person (and with 20:20 hindsight), but I believe that Boeing missed a trick when they decided to develop the 737NG as they did - they'd made major advances in flight deck commonality with the 757 and 767, and they could have extensively reworked the 737NG to become part of that progression (and capitalised on the 737's enduring popularity at the short term expense of commonality with the Classic and Jurassic, and associated training and conversion costs).
Unfortunately the 737's popularity worked against that idea, because there were more Jurassic and Classic 737s in service than 757s and 767s combined. As such the NG was an extensively re-engineered beast compared to its elder brethren - and in many ways thoroughly modernised, but conversion across Boeing's product range was still more complex and expensive than what AI had to offer. As such it could almost be argued that Boeing became the victims of their own success, as the very ubiquity of their best-selling short-haul airliner forced on them difficult business decisions that AI, working from a clean sheet in terms of short-haul airliner design, didn't have to worry about.