Originally Posted by
wco81
A company as big as Boeing can only develop one new aircraft at a time?
A company in Boeing's state is capital-constrained -- that was precisely the point of my post upthread.
Originally Posted by
CApreppie
To me a clean-sheet plane would be preferable to a woefully out of date platform band-aided plane to meet buyer expectation.
In a utopian world where there was plenty of money and no competition, yes. In this timeline, probably not possible. Boeing went for a "band-aided plane" based on a "woefully out of date platform," e.g. the Max, to save money, sell fleet commonality / low-impact training to the airlines, and try to beat Airbus to market. Those were the real-world, non-utopian pressures, and Boeing's answer was to tweak a 52-year-old planform one last time. The result was not non-competitive, exactly -- Boeing took 5,700+ orders for the Max -- but it turns out to have been a ghastly, deadly engineering mistake that will cost Boeing far more money than it saved.
It is not popular to say, but I think Boeing's combined 737 Max / 737NG / 777X / 787 woes could yet drive the company to seek bankruptcy protection.