I’m fascinated by this behemoth airplane from Airbus called the A-380. I watched a show on Discovery that documented the engineering feats that had to be accomplished to build this thing – quite impressive. Today, I am reading about the delays in delivering this product on time.
The plane is overweight which means it won’t travel the distances that the company claimed it would travel. The wings had a design flaw that has been “fixed” though strangely testing has not been completed yet. The plane will need to have a 10 mile gap behind it due to its jet wash which will require special handling by air traffic controllers.
Is it any wonder Singapore Airlines placed an order with Boeing today due to these issues? Yet the COO of Airbus states he “does not believe Airbus will lose any orders.”
Right.
I learned a good sales lesson years ago in the high-tech industry. It is far safer to sell what you have as opposed to what you hope to have. I was burnt by preselling a product that hadn’t been completed. The product was finished late and did not perform as we had been led to believe. You can imagine the fires we had to put out with our good customers once they received this underwhelming machine.
There is no problem in creating some buzz about an upcoming product or service, but I would suggest that customers are too hard to come by to risk on a hypothetical solution.