Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, disrupting airline-related industry is hard if you're an outsider. The technology is one hard thing, but knowing all the actors in the industry is the main advantage of GDSes. BTW switching the reservation system is hard, but not impossible. Southwest migrated its international reservations from internal system to Amadeus this very week (after a lengthy development of course).
The farther I get in my career, the more I realize that relationships are often just as, or more important than the engineering in order to get a business off the ground.
This is true on a lot of levels. My therapist says that when a group is working toward a goal, there are two levels of operation that need to be managed. At the first level there's the way the group works together to solve the problem. But sometimes group members need to dip down to the personal level and resolve issues with the way individuals relate to each other in order to be able to focus on the original goal. Organizations composed of people that can't relate to each other are less effective because the personal issues get in the way of problem-solving.