[TulliusCicero]

It's easy for old, incumbent companies to become ossified, where their internal culture and bureaucracy and processes are hilariously inefficient. At any given time, there will be some people pushing back on that, but there will always be more people there who are okay with it -- because the ones who couldn't handle the ossification left, while the people who were okay with it stayed. Survivorship bias, in other words; sometimes this is called the Dead Sea effect: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-... (this article talks about it in terms of IT competence, but you can easily apply it to other aspects of a business' culture)

That's why it's so important for it to be easy for new entrants to start up in an economic sector. You need them to pressure the old guard, or failing that, to replace them.

[jvanderbot]

Boeing is definitely in on it, but let's be clear, the gov as a consumer was not really asking for 100 launches a year, and was not in the business of paying for the change necessary to completely reinvent lift as a service. So why wouldn't they just keep charging what they were charging, and building what they always did.

There just wasn't an appetite for risk and reinvention, at least not enough to bring it down and start over, the way an eccentric billionaire could.

[TulliusCicero]

> So why wouldn't they just keep charging what they were charging, and building what they always did.

So that they can keep up with any eventual newcomers?

[jvanderbot]

IIRC, large primes have limited IRAD funding for the most part - in some cases fixed %, so to do research you have to charge more to the Gov. That's just plain a "cost saving measure" enacted by government.