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Lots of speculation here but I just want to offer some real world impact this has made to my and some of my colleagues plans for next year. I work for a large tech company in Seattle area that Delta has been wooing for sometime. Many of us, myself included have slowly been seeing that moving our status to Delta just started making more and more sense. But it also meant that by doing so we had fewer choices in an already overbooked world of business travel, especially on Delta. Alaska just brew the doors off of the choices I can now much more easily make when choosing my travel. Instead of going out of my way to book a DL/AF/KL itinerary to Europe (and gasp, connecting through Detroit on occasion) I now have a whole host of other options with British that didn't exist before. (Well, they existed but the incentive didn't). And moving status to Delta would have only compounded the problem. So the net result is that now rather than pumping miles into SkyMiles next year as we had planned, we are now going to stick with Alaska. And even though we end up qualifying for Gold and 75k through partner flights, it means the domestic trips we take are almost guaranteed to be on Alaska. Whereas had we moved to SkyMiles program we all would have been flying Delta much more domestically. So I see this as... Attract more international elites to capitalize on more domestic corporate traffic, and profit.

To me this is all a win-win. Bravo Alaska well played!