The global airline industry is one of the most popular industries to be showcased in Business School classrooms. This is not any different in my case. A couple of years ago I co-authored a case study on AirAsia X, the long-haul extension of the very successful budget airline startup AirAsia from Malaysia. It was a classic case where the incumbents failed to provide a service for an underserved segment. Now in the airplane-manufacturing world it is interesting to see that a few years back, when the A380 was introduced the two main global competitors EADS and Boeing saw the world as evolving very differently when it came to future air-travel. Given the level of maturity of the industry, the concentration and consolidation within it, and it's profitability, common management theory would suggest that main rivals would rather mimic each other than converge on such a fundamental level. Read more about it in the New York Times.