Boeing will not go out of business because the government will not let it happen. All the aerospace industry starting from Boeing and ending with SpaceX is built on the pockets of tax payers. But, of course, the profits are private.
Yeah, the saving grace for them is definitely their incestuous relationship with the US Government. But while that can save them from total collapse, it can't prop up their civil aviation activities on its own.
The world may not have a choice but to do so; midsize and large planes were already a duopoly, and both had backlogged orders in the thousands. Airbus can't absorb all these new orders, and there are no other options (not for lack of trying; Japan, Russia and China among others are all having difficulties with their state-backed aircraft development programs; the planes are late, overbudget, and generally poorer quality (e.g. shorter range, less efficient)). Not to mention the huge fleet of perfectly fine Boeing aircraft already operating that still need servicing and maintenance.
Boeing will go out of business, it's inevitable at this point. They've outsourced too much of their core engineering competencies, core manufacturing operations, and are mostly a financial re-packager of other people's products. They can't innovate, they don't know how, they can only cut costs.
The workers they're laying off, that's the remainder of your operational knowledge walking out the door. They didn't train a new crop of engineers to replace the aging ones.
I think we'll see Lockheed or Northrup acquire whatever components the DoD needs, and the commercial aviation division will be acquired by another conglomerate.
