@The Beeb
A few years back, the BBC went through a major 'rebranding' exercise on their home page, intended (I imagine) to make it more iPad-friendly. Previously, you could 'design' your own front page by removing items you weren't interested in (in my case: football, pop charts and children's programmes) and moving the ones that you were interested in to the top of the page. All this customisation was thrown into the bit bucket, severely pissing off regular users who had spent a fair bit of time getting 'their' page to look how they wanted, and were now being bombarded with irrelevant dross (a bit like the perpetual adverts now infesting BBC output).
The BBC offered (prior to the change) the opportunity to beta test - the public comments were overwhelmingly negative. They went ahead with the change anyway. Within a few days there were over 2,000 comments, at least 98% of them negative. Initially, the managers responsible responded, but without any indication that they were prepared to do anything. Shortly thereafter the comments were cleared, within a few days there were another 1,000+, nearly all negative. Some of us used Google to locate 'old' versions of the home page lurking around the BBC site - if they were linked on the comments, the pages were soon closed down.
There seem to be only three rules for senior managers at the Beeb: never explain; never apologise; and never, ever admit that you might in any way ever have been wrong about anything. I can see no reason why the GDS would be any different.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
