"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
John Rumm wrote:
Can you imaging ordering your GPO "internet" facility, and having to
wait six months for an engineer to come out and install your GPO branded
dial up modem, which you rent from them at £4/month extra. Oh, and you
can't have it near the computer, you will need to move that to the hall!

Can you just imagine having a state owned company running the railways or
generating power, etc.

Yet that's exactly what we have. But owned by another state - not the UK.

Very easy to make any industry a failing one. State owned or private. Just
starve it of investment. That killed off most UK industries nicely. But
not elsewhere.

The other sure-fire way of killing any industry is to split it into lots of
separate business centres which charge each other money to do business with
each other, and expend money and time in keeping track of these costs,
whereas previously there was a spirit of "we're all one big company so we've
got to cooperate with each other". I've seen it happen so many times in the
computer industry (Ferranti, ICL, Fujitsu) where other departments want to
be paid explicitly for the service that they provide us, which is a great
disincentive for using them when it used to be "for free" (ie rolled up into
an invisible cost that was not on a per-use basis).