Completely wrong! The 747 was designed by Boeing's "B" team (excellent BBC documentary on it) whilst the "A" team worked on the Boeing 2707 SST;
I know that US firms looked at SSTs - and they have revisited the idea time and again. But rather than being completely wrong, I'm completely right. The Europeans didn't have the resources (and more certainly vision) to work on both wide body and SST through the 1960s, and as a result the majority of 747 design work was completed before work really started on the A300 (itself only 260 passengers). To an extent there's the state direction of European aviation at the time, and that always results in vanity projects, "picking winners", and misplaced political judgements.
There was then a repeat of history, when in 1992 Airbus launched the fuel guzzling four engined A340, which was not what airlines really wanted, particularly when they knew the B777 twin motor of similar capacity and range was only months away (you can argue the details on performance, sales volumes speak for themselves). And of course, the low fuel prices of the early 1990s didn't last, and airlines simply couldn't afford to run a jet fuel hog like the A340 by the mid 2000s.
Sadly Airbus still suffer from that heritage and a corporate inferiority complex, and that led directly to the belated attempt to build a bigger and better 747, the financially troubled A380, enthusiastically launched into a market actually demanding large, high efficiency long range twin motors. And with Airbus's skills being drained by the A380, the A350 went into service three and a half years after the B787. The A350 might be the right aircraft for a change, but there's almost ten times as many 787s flying as A350s. The opportunity cost of wasting excessive resource on a single project is a long one, and Airbus still haven't learned that lesson.
Seems to me that the US aircraft industry are generally rather better at predicting what airlines will want. That's not to take away from the individual successes of the Airbus programme (like the A320), simply to state that Airbus have a strong track record of not seeing opportunities from their customer's perspectives, not managing their development resource well, betting too much on high profile, high risk programmes, and as a result too often having the wrong product in the shop. And interesting to observe that the A320 design programme was started as a standalone from the core of Airbus.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
