The hidden treasure inside a bankrupt company
Article excerpt
Highlighted: the sentence this signal was extracted from
Google offered US$10 million for the purchase of Spirit Airlines' digital archives. In doing so, it wasn't looking to acquire planes, routes, or passengers: it was looking for something that could prove much more valuable in the next stage of artificial intelligence: it wanted to know how a company works in reality. For Revista Mercado, by Norberto Luongo When an airline disappears, it's common to imagine a fairly predictable inventory of remains. Planes that change owners, spare parts, airport equipment, offices, contracts, licenses, and perhaps some brand that still retains value. Creditors do their sums, assets are sold, and, little by little, what was once a functioning company disassembles into pieces. But when Spirit Airlines went into liquidation, a buyer appeared interested in something much less visible. Google offered US$10 million for the company's data. Not for the passenger list, nor for its planes. Nor, at least primarily, for its routes or for the accumulated knowledge about the airline business. What piqued the tech giant's interest was the gigantic digital memory the company had left behind: around 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, documents, calendars, spreadsheets, operational information, and tens of millions of lines of software. At first glance, it seems like a monumental collection of corporate junk, but viewed from Silicon...
Keep reading with a free account
The rest of this article, and every signal for Spirit Airlines, is in your free account.
