"Even if tomorrow Airbus will get back to the business of competing vigorously, today is Boeing’s day — a day to celebrate the 787," Airbus co-CEO Louis Gallois said in a letter to McNerney.
Pretty classy way to react to a competitor, especially given that Airbus has had it’s clock cleaned several times over by the Dreamliner.
The Dreamliner case study is also an abject lesson that simply reacting to a competitor is not a strategy, Boeing could have followed Airbus into bigger and bigger super jumbos, which is what everyone in the media and pundit business was suggesting, but instead they focused on a broad set of customer requirements that were not entirely apparent to those who’s were busy telling Boeing what to do.
As was taught to me by someone I consider an expert in such matters, the best way to disrupt a competitors strategy is to restructure the environment in which the competitor operates in.