Barry Fox

Around 10 years ago one of the world's largest photo companies was buying new computers for its UK offices.

The manager in charge of the purchase was a time-server, one of those people who stay with a company for life and is promoted as a reward for years in the job, not ability.

He had several competing systems on loan and took them home for hands-on trials. The system he finally chose was the one that looked the most stylish.

The trial equipment went back to the office, and a friend of mine - who was a computer whiz - borrowed the winning system.

The computer had never been used. It couldn't have been, as the keyboard was faulty. The manager hadn't dared admit that he knew nothing about IT and had been too proud to ask for advice from someone junior who did. He had saved face by taking the stuff home and then made the purchase order on looks alone.

And that is why so much of what we buy today from so many companies gives us so much unnecessary trouble. The decision makers are hopelessly out of their depth and too puffed with pride to admit it.

They are using technology which has been set up by the lab or IT department, and when it goes wrong it is fixed by a tame expert. They are terrified that an admission of ignorance might lose them their position and fat salary.

Have you noticed how shareholders who ask questions at a company's AGM are asked to give advance notice of their points?

As they are waiting their turn to speak, the question is being relayed to a team of experts in a back room who then key in facts and figures that are displayed on monitor screens hidden on the directors' desks so they can appear far more knowledgeable than they are.

A recent NOP survey showed that 83 per cent of mobile phone users have never sent an MMS message. As a test I recently asked O2's email help service for help on setting up to two phones (a Handspring Treo and Nokia 6310) for GPRS with a pay-as-you-go Sim.

After a month and a dozen emails, O2's hopeless helpers had still not managed to show me the way to do it.

They had sent instructions that did not work or tally with the menus on the phones. They then tried to save face by asking for more irrelevant information.

When I politely itemised their incompetence, I got a message back saying that "due to technical difficulties we are unable to deal with your email".

What this seems to indicate is that O2's management can't have tried to use their own help service. They are therefore potentially tempting customers to switch to a rival network such as Orange, which now simply sends an SMS over the air to set up a phone to do what a customer requests.

Could this be one reason why BT recently signed a deal with Vodafone to sell phones that work either in the home by fixed line or away from home by cellphone connection and not with their old partner O2/Cellnet?

Satellite giant Astra recently teamed up with AVC to offer a broadband-by-satellite service to homes and small offices that are not yet within reach of an ADSL exchange.

The system works well, with a low-speed uplink by conventional 56Kbps modem and the data downlink beamed over the satellite at 512Kbps to a USB receiver.

It's a brute to set up though. An existing Sky minidish will usually need alignment tweaking, a new LNB and low-loss cable. The PC must have proxy software which talks over the internet to a server in Luxembourg. The proxy software may be blocked by a firewall and not work with a home network.

So Astra/AVC send out skilled engineers to set it all up. They know their job well and don't leave until the system is working smoothly.

But if any one thing in this world is a surefire certainty, it's that every Windows PC or system always crashes, usually sooner rather than later.

Then it loses the settings. And when this happens, either the whole Astra/AVC caboodle stops working or the PC gets data only from the dial-up connection, at ordinary snail speed.

So you read the manual, or try to. But there's no printed manual, only a CD-Rom. This comes as 25 separate pdf files spattered through a confusing tree of folders and sub-folders without any collated index.

No-one at high level in Astra can possibly have done a real-world hands-on trial before they put the company's name on a consumer system that misses something so obvious. This will come back and bite them, I fear.

If we buy a PC or product that goes wrong, then the dealer, Microsoft and Uncle Tom Cobley can all tell us to get stuffed.

But in this case Astra is selling a service. Customers can just stop paying if they can't keep it working. It's that simple.

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