

ITA Emerges from Google's Shadow, Unveils New Airline Platform - gthuang1
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/03/01/ita-software-emerges-from-googles-shadow-with-new-airline-platform/

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SnowLprd
I'm particularly interested to see how the airlines react to the re-emergence
of ITA and its new airline platform. For years, airlines have essentially had
one choice in reservation systems: Sabre. Sure, there are other systems, but
none of them offer the functional breadth that Sabre provides -- including
ITA, of course. But where it may get interesting is that, according to a
colleague who works at Sabre, many of their customers are growing increasingly
frustrated with large numbers of unaddressed bugs, lagging system response
time, and overall system instability. Some airlines may decide they've had
enough and jump to ITA, and even if ITA isn't successful at wooing away some
of Sabre's customers, hopefully the new platform will at least spur Sabre
enough to improve its aging product offering.

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kiwidrew
Do Amadeus and Travelport not also host airlines? And there is HP/EDS who also
host some major airlines. Plus SITA, which hosts many smaller airlines.

Regardless, all of these systems are very ancient. It's refreshing to see a
new generation emerge.

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epikur
Related: I really like ITA's flight search interface. It does everything I
need, correctly.

<http://matrix.itasoftware.com/>

~~~
bitwize
Then you're gonna _love_ Google Flights:

<http://flights.google.com>

Powered by ITA's backend.

~~~
jcdavis
The obvious thing google flights misses over ITA is the month-long search
option, which I use a lot. For the power users, ITA has a very useful regex-
like syntax for specifiying flight queries, but that is understandably not of
as much interest to the vast majority of people

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joshwa
I live and die by the "advanced routing codes" on Matrix... see my previous
post here:

    
    
         SFO,LAX CX,AA,KE F HKG,ICN,NRT ~CZ+ KMG
    

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3090362>

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mindblink
Partially to spur conversation and partially because I don't remember the
details of previous discussions, does ITA still use LISP?

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anonymoushn
When I interviewed there in early 2010 they still used LISP. They said it was
mostly because their hires fresh out of MIT wanted to use it, so I don't know
whether they will continue to use it now that their MIT kids will no longer
want to use it...

~~~
pavelludiq
I imagine rewriting a large code base in any language to be very expensive, I
doubt somebody can justify such an expense just because a bunch of new hires
don't want to use a language. Companies don't rewrite java apps in lisp
because a new of college grads don't want to use java.

~~~
freehunter
No matter how much I wish they would...

~~~
pavelludiq
I can't say i disagree with BigCo on this one. If one wishes to use better
languages the options are to switch jobs, start your own company or stay, but
push to augment the existing codebase with other JVM languages. Clojure and
Scala people have had some success starting skunkworks projects. But a
complete switch? In most cases thats insanity. Companies have actually died
trying to rewrite their apps from scratch. And even a slow gradual rewrite
might take too long and be too expensive, not to mention not bringing any
immediate benefits, because you're not adding new functionality and fixing
existing bugs.

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AznHisoka
I think Google should just experiment and dabble in every single niche in the
internet field.. just push the envelope. Start a dating site to compete with
Match. Start an auction site to compete with eBay. Start a ticket exchange to
compete with StubHub. Just throw a bunch of stuff in the wall, and I'm sure a
new billion dollar business will emerge.

~~~
irrationalfab
This was the strategy that they with Schmidt. Page changed it and shut down a
lot of products to focus on the company core. The shotgun approach seldom
works in business. It is better to develop and nurture cash cows.

Personally, I think that they should focus in the search field to stay ahead
of the curve and prevent a competitor from introducing an iPhone caliber
product that would make them look myopic like Blackberry. They used to claim
that search was a 99% solved problem. I don't think that me looking to a list
of blue links is 99% solved problem.

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joshbaptiste
Amadeus employee here..

Indeed one of the largest issues we face is not just building a new
reservations, inventory, departure control platform on Linux but having them
work in conjunction with our legacy TPF systems. Newer airline systems don't
have this problem and have complete degrees of freedom. Interesting to see a
new reservations platform and not just flight search coming out into the wild.

