In my experience, good mature organisations have clear review processes to ensure quality, improve collaboration and reduce errors and risk. This is regardless of field. It does slow you down - not 10x - but the benefits outweigh the downsides in the long run.
The worst places I’ve worked have a pattern where someone senior drives a major change without any oversight, review or understanding causing multiple ongoing issues. This problem then gets dumped onto more junior colleagues, at which point it becomes harder and more time consuming to fix (“technical debt”). The senior role then boasts about their successful agile delivery to their superiors who don’t have visibility of the issues, much to the eye-rolls of all the people dealing with the constant problems.
BT was only successful if you take a very narrow view of success. They dragged their heels on rolling out ADSL to maximise short-term profits from ISDN which has had a hugely negative effect on the country.
Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.
If this is the case, why are many other EU postal services still state-owned (e.g. Ireland, Poland, Cyprus, Greece)? The UK left the EU 5 years ago yet it’s still being used as cover for UK political decisions.
That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.
It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.
I’m beginning to think my reluctance to shamelessly copy has held me back in life. It’s clearly more widespread than I naively assumed (and I say that without casting judgment).
I’m convinced a major reason Windows Phone failed is because Google didn’t support it for self-serving reasons. It rarely gets mentioned but no YouTube or Google Maps apps is a big deal and a major barrier to adoption. The tech giants don’t want competition.