Is three the charm for Boeing? And AI's wait-and-hurry-up problem

When we last saw our hero — we might as well treat the Boeing strike as a serial story now. Because, another week, another major development. But will the third deal Boeing has convinced union leadership to bring to their members be a charm? On the surface, it's hard to fathom.?

The headline is that the offer does not re-install the defined-benefits retirement plan members have said is their red line. BUT — it ups the $7,000 signing bonus to $12,000, commits to an increase to the current 401(k) and increases the salary offer to 38%.

Considering that we started at 25% and got rejected by a 99% vote and then hit the whisper number of 35% only to be rejected by 64% … we'll see. The union started at 40%, so splitting the difference between the last offer and the initial demand may work on workers who haven't gotten a paycheck at all for seven weeks . And — oh yes — the union is pointing out that the compounded net of the salary offer is actually 43% over the life of the four-year pact.

Oh, but the retirement plan … Per the AP : "Workers on picked lines in the Seattle area have stressed pensions , but the company based in Arlington, Virginia, is unwilling to bend on the issue."

I wrote last week that this divide didn't seem bridgeable with mere money. It felt like a non-negotiable point for both parties. Of course, the union leadership has negotiated it away, but they don't get the last say. And there is still some egg on their face from the last offer they said was good enough.

This third offer (well, fourth if you count Boeing's ignored "best-and-final") could be a diamond in the rough. Diamonds are made with time, heat and pressure. This saga still has them all.

So there will be two important elections next week. On Monday, Boeing rank-and-file will decide whether this offer is enough for them to pick up their tools. There's another one the next day about … something.

The search wars are heating up. The last time anyone said that was at the turn of the century, though LinkedIn-parent Microsoft did enter the fray in 2009. Back in 2000, a little, two-year-old company named Google declared it had essentially dethroned Yahoo — by far the world leader at the time — by becoming Yahoo's default search engine. Per New York Magazine :

In June 2000, Google announced that it had won the search wars. “Google will now provide the default search service for Yahoo!” wrote founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page with a very 2000 sign-off: “Keep on Googlin’.”

But in the topsy-turvy world of tech, "that" is only just the beginning. Whatever "that" is.

Search has either vastly improved (advertisers might say) or become less useful (users might say, in part because of advertising) in the ensuing quarter-century. But we are at a crossroads again, because of — no surprise here — AI.

I've struggled to imagine the killer-app use case for consumers — that is, non-enterprise deployments by folks who aren't trying to make money or such. This is what internet search began as: It put the entire world's knowledge at your fingertips, and all you had to do was ask. For us boomers, who in our youth had to buy encyclopedias and go to the library to ask reference librarians to look up stuff, the paradigm shift was unbelievable. Almost like portable TV — but I digress …

When OpenAI first unveiled what it called then SearchGPT in July, I wrote that it "seemed to come out of nowhere ." That hyperbole masked what I think is a deeper truth: that AI in search was not only inevitable, but foretold decades earlier. As a wrote a month before that :

Getting a quick, accurate answer from a computer is not too much to ask. It's something my generation assumed we'd have by now, because we saw it in the late 1960s on the USS Enterprise and from HAL .?

Now ChatGPT Search is here , doing at least the basic things you want in search — quick, timely answers to obvious questions. It's a start. Eventually, everyone in search will have AI-infused search. But it's hard to know how this will shake out. Yahoo seemed unstoppable, until Google came along. Google seemed unstoppable – until the Justice Department came along . Bing and Yahoo have reportedly made "notable gains " vs. Google. Microsoft is the largest corporate backer of OpenAI …

Good luck getting an answer from anyone — or anything — on how this plays out.

Note the time: AI — Apple Intelligence — is in the wild. As we reported this week :

Call it? … the end of the beginning. Apple Intelligence is finally in the wild, available to the general public for the first time. Still, you need *at least an iPhone 15 pro and while there are some cool features the flashiest are still slated for later this year.

So, speaking of B2C use cases, this one feels like the big enchilada. We really won't know until the flashiest stuff is rolled out. But the reason this feels as big as the actual rollout of Siri herself is that it's all about the platform. The coolest thing is worthless if it can't reach the masses. Whether or not Apple builds or buys (narrator: it is building), as the gatekeeper to a massive installed base, it wins either way.

As we reported Friday, the massive AI outlays aren't exactly being realized in any ROI. But this is a long bet. AI's penetration into virtually everything seems more a matter of when, not if.