[email protected] (Jesse 1 Robinson) writes: > Airlines are no longer 'heavily regulated'. They used to be. Telecom > was deregulated. Banks were deregulated. There was more competition in > all these industries when regulation was in place. The 'natural > tendency' of any industry is to consolidate to maximize profits and to > dodge regulatory intervention. That's why Delta is so big and > independent. And so unaccountable. > > So it's cheaper to fly than ever before. Whoopee. This is what we get > for lower fares.
1st part of 90s (after I had left IBM), I was brought into the largest airline res system to look at the ten impossible things that they couldn't do. It turns out it was a mainframe implementation left over from a 1960s paradigm. With significant change in technology over 30yrs ... it was possible to adopt totally different paradigm. After a couple months, I came back with a different implementation (for routes ... find flts for person to get from A-to-B), that was implemented on ten RS6000/990s ... ran 100 times faster, could handle all transactions for all airlines in the world and implemented all ten impossible things. They then wrung their hands for 6-12 months and finally said that they hadn't intended that I fix the ten impossible things (many because they were still using 60s paradigm requiring large staff to supplement/complement), they said they just wanted to tell the board that I was working on it (for next 5yrs, they hadn't planned on I would actually do it). Now they had reorged things so that the airline operations and the airline reservation system were in different subsidiaries with nearly all the profit booked in the res subsidiary ... airline operations was loosing money at the time, but the res subsidiary was making such large profits ... the parent company showed significant overall profit. Large human intensive operations were doing things like that starting in the 80s ... moving profit out of human intensive operations into subsidiary that had much fewer number of humans. Last decade a new twist was added ... moving the subsidiary where the profit is booked, into a tax haven where tax rate had been negotiated to be nearly zero. The poster child is large equipment manufacture that built and sold to customers in the US. They created distribution subsidiary in an over seas tax haven, paper "transfer" US built equipment to the (offshore) distribution subsidiary at cost, which then sells to US customers and the profit is all booked offshore (and the US manufacturing plant still ships directly to US customers). some more scenarios here: https://www.icij.org/project/luxembourg-leaks -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
