"NY" wrote in message
o.uk...
"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).

I worked for a company that decided its car pool had to work on a commercial
basis (the same department also managed the company cars)

They came up with a scale of charges that made it cheaper to get a car from
the high street hire shop, and you got a new car instead of the 10 year old
heap that was in the pool.

(The company got taken over 6 months later and I was "managed out" of the
job, so I have no idea how it ended)

tim