it'll be interesting to see what happens, but my perspective is pretty different from yours, which is surprising to me since we're talking about an area you have intimate and deep knowledge of. i'll explain my perspective here, in the knowledge that probably the reason for our disagreement is largely things you do know and i don't, so i fully expect this to make me look very foolish. hopefully you'll be kind enough to correct my ignorance, impressive though it may be

information technology is pretty important to travel and to logistics in general. remember that ibm tpf was originally the 'airline control program', and before that, sabre, developed in collaboration with aa. and travel and logistics planning are of course among the most economically significant uses of mixed integer linear programming.

the key question is, i think, whether operational excellence in it operations is an economically significant competitive advantage. will customers switch airlines (or hotel chains, or car rental companies, or travel agencies) because of corporate incompetence at operating their data centers? how would they even know if their airline or hotel chain or travel agency sucks at resolving operational problems, has colossal security breaches due to utter incompetence, and struggles to roll out new it-enabled features?

well, we can start with travel agencies. most travel agencies have already gone out of business. orbitz, expedia, and hipmunk ate their lunch. priceline came in and obliterated the discount special ticket market, growing into booking.com. all of these so-called online travel agencies live and die by their computer systems, and large parts of their workforce consist of programmers

how about airlines?

in 02016 delta had to cancel half their flights one day because of it incompetence: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/outage-causes-massive-delays-ca...

aa (remember, the company for which modern transaction processing was developed) had a half-hour-long nationwide outage in 02018 due to it incompetence: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/29/american-airlines-flights-de...

twice in 02022, british airways had a not-quite-systemwide outage due to it incompetence: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/british-airways-i... and most ominously the reporting included the phrase, 'BA has a long history of outages that have impacted passengers.'

also in 02022, westjet had a systemwide outage due to it incompetence: https://simpleflying.com/westjet-suffers-major-system-outage...

and most famously, in 02022, southwest had an enormous systemwide outage over the christmas holidays that led them to cancel 16700 flights and cost it a billion dollars: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest...

and this doesn't affect competition much, but the usa as a whole had an hour-and-a-half outage due to it incompetence in january of last year: https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2023/01/11/wide...

later last year, spirit airlines had a systemwide outage: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12148955/Spirit-Air...

and so did southwest, again: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/southwest...

mckinsey has a list of recent airline problems due to it incompetence that have affected customers, including in some cases not only delayed flights but leaks of private data customers are legally required to provide to airlines: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Travel%... (but unfortunately they have carefully purged it of details that would make each case independently verifiable)

so i would say that specifically in the case of travel, incompetence at information technology operations is a significant public relations problem already; it regularly makes national and world news. and we should expect this to get much worse before it gets better. today the saving grace is that no airline currently has reasonably competent information technology operations, so there's no competitor eating southwest's lunch. but when your incompetence at running your computer systems loses you a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, sooner or later it starts to add up to real money

with respect to manufacturing, i think it's well known that jit supply chain management is extremely demanding on it operations, and since covid began, supply-chain disruption has been an enormous stress on the profitability of manufacturing operations—in particular, in the automotive sector

more broadly, though, increasing automation of manufacturing is a crucial competitive advantage; to take one example, today jlcpcb or pcbway will sell you custom pcb manufacturing services for fifty dollars (or two dollars as a promotional offer) that would cost you a thousand dollars and up from flextronics. and now they're moving into cnc machining, as well, and of course service bureaus like shapeways have been around for a while, gradually moving up the value chain. all of this is crucially dependent on the operational stability of their web sites and their resistance to data breaches and ransomware, but so far they're doing a lot better than the airlines

this is not just a big challenge for traditional job shops, who are at risk of being ghettoized into a constantly shrinking super-premium market as disruptive innovation eats them from below; it's also a huge opportunity for new kinds of products that depend on the low-cost availability of such highly automated custom manufacturing for their profitability

in a related development, many high-value, highly complex products manufactured using traditional techniques—most obviously mechanical wristwatches, cameras, and various kinds of on-orbit systems, but also timers, governors, carburetors, power transmission systems, internal combustion engines, and now even lightswitches and lightbulbs—are being replaced by mechanically much simpler systems which instead rely heavily on embedded software and, in some cases, centralized cloud services and much more highly automated manufacturing

having your car start reliably, and your steering and braking systems work reliably, and being able to turn on the heater without taking your eyes off the road, hasn't been much of a competitive advantage for decades; but, as much of the unreliability of those systems starts to stem from software incompetence instead of incompetence at hydraulics and gears, we should start to see automotive suppliers competing not just on how efficient their inventory management is but on how reliable and featureful and usable their firmware is. at the most prosaic level, if the bluetooth audio only works half the time you get into your friend's chevrolet, you're more likely to buy a hyundai

utilities, though, i agree. that's because utilities are regulated monopolies, so it doesn't matter how incompetent they are; relatively few companies and fewer people are going to move out of texas because ercot and its member utilities can't mitigate even the most glaring risks to system stability. pg&e might be an exception, because its sky-high energy prices are making california heavy industry as a whole economically uncompetitive on the world scene, but pg&e isn't going to go bankrupt; its customers are

fundamentally, though, in the 20th century companies were operated by managers, and in the 21st century, increasingly, they are operated by computers—as are physical products. outsourcing your computing makes as much sense as outsourcing your management