Boeing sabotaged itself with its monumental arrogance and some very poor design choices in the past 30 years.
Boeing sabotaged itself by merging with McDonnell-Douglas, adopting their pathetically stupid business approach that emphasized short-term economics over engineering, and most of all by letting one of the most pathetically ignorant of a very large number of pathetically stupid CEOs, Jack the unethical pinhead Welch, run the company. If talent determined wealth most CEOs would be living in trailers.
Somehow Boeing made one of the safest planes in the 777, but also the 737 and 787.
Bingo. Boeing went from having quality and safety in engineering, production, and service as their highest priority to being driven by complex accounting and lowest immediate cost. Ten years, ago, I was shocked to hear airline pilots at a private gathering complain in detail of the decline in quality by Boeing’s airliners and praise for Airbus’s models. Several of them predicted that new Boeing models like the 787 and 737 Max would have serious defects and that they would retire rather than fly them.