Originally Posted by
Unimatrix One
How stupid does he think we are?
Extremely. See, for example, Base Business.
Steve Jobs was famously said to have a "reality distortion field," allowing him to believe this most audacious ideas (and then to convince others of them). At times it feels like Kirby purchased it from the Jobs estate.
Originally Posted by
halls120
Kirby claims that a merger between United and American would allow this new entity to better compete with foreign carriers – but he doesn’t really explain why United or American can’t compete with the product that those carriers currently offer. And I think we all know the answer, which is most of those foreign carriers have no competition within their own countries - and that is the secret Kirby doesn’t want to discuss. He doesn’t want to admit that a United and American merger would call all the shots domestically on fares flights and services, because there would be no domestic competition.
While I'm not particularly in favor of the idea of a AA+UA merger, I don't think it would create that much of a stranglehold on the US market -- you'd still have DL, AS, and WN, and you'd probably see one or two new entrants try to move in. And I don't think that the fact that most foreign airlines have little domestic competition is really a particularly big problem for the US3 -- except for China, no other country has a domestic market that even approaches the US market. SQ doesn't have a position of market leadership because it lacks competition in the domestic Singapore market.
