In article , NY
wrote:
"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).

The BBC suffered in this was, too.

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England