Originally Posted by
Larry in TN
You can't built $50M+ airplanes that you don't already know your customers will buy. The customers would have bought Airbus neos.
Yes you can, and in fact, those were some of Boeings best-ever designs.
Many customers bought Airbus NEOs because the NEO beat the max to the market anyway. The airbus order slots were already booked up... Boeing felt time pressure, but in fact they had plenty of time.
Boeing needed to do a clean sheet, period. They didn't, and it ended up costing them more than developing two clean sheet planes.