David,
I think it's due to corporate greed - or rather the ceaseless, irrational and destructive forces of international capitalism!
For example, a company that makes x billion profit one year can never be satisfied with maintaining that - there's always the push for "growth" (ie: make more money). So, what can they do? Mostly they've achieved saturation in terms of customer base - everyone uses them - so the only way to squeeze more out it to cut costs. It does this by reducing quality - service, quality of the goods sold etc... So, we see production facilities and customer services moved repeatedly to cheaper and cheaper countries. Standards fall - technical problems can't be solved, or products fall apart much more quickly. Customers lose faith and trust in the company and migrate to other companies, or just buy less from them. And most companies (too stupid to do anything else) just continue the downward spiral to shore up ever diminishing returns to shareholders, until there's nothing left.
We've seen this happen with quite a few companies in this country -
Marks and Spencer nearly went to the wall because it cut costs and quality too much - the very thing its customers trusted it for - and has spent the last number of years having to regain that customer confidence.
Ratners used to be (one of the) biggest jewelery chains - in that case the CEO helped its demise along with some truthful comments about quality!
Dear old BT - how much has it spent on those p**y TV adverts trying to tempt customers "back to BT", without ever, ever, ever, asking why those customers left in the first place? As you say, David, how on earth can anyone have any faith left in a company that's supposed to be at the cutting edge of technology, but can't even code a
website hosting efficiently? Especially since that
website hosting is the "shop front" and "customer service area" for the whole thing? What confidence can anyone have in a company that purports to be on the cutting edge, but which can't even run its web servers properly, or manage its online billing service properly?
It's a bit like going to see your GP and finding an obese, chain-smoking, alcoholic depressive with acne and BO dispensing advice about healthy life styles.
