Slate has a good article up on Boeing; I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know exactly how bad they are. They really dropped the ball and didn’t know that they had dropped it for quite some time, it seems.
For me, reading stories like this, one makes parallels with one’s own employer. That is quite an interesting thought experiment.
SLATE Jet Lag – How Boeing blew it.
An interesting thing is, even if Boeing does go ahead with the 7E7, a significant chunk of the up-front R&D costs, as well as the final manufacturing, will be done by a Japanese consortium led by Mitsubishi. This would jump-start the Japanese aerospace industry (which already makes 22% of the 777), and possibly create another series of headaches for Boeing in the future if the technology transfer is too successful.