Yes, OK, blame the shareholders for demanding short-term profits......but it isn't as simple as that. The shareholders in the frame are the executives whose over-generous, excessive remuneration packages include shares, so they are the share-holders who are sacrificing their company to make a quick few million bucks. Other shareholders, ie pension funds, financial funds and so on, and of course private investors, do not, on the whole, demand short term profits; they are in it for the long run.
I was recruited into BOAC to join an Associate Company and for years felt a huge sense of pride at belonging to that family, regarded world-wide as the acme of excellence.
As I have watched BA descend into being a foreign-owned carrier with an unfairly dominant position at LHR, whose standards of operations, customer service and maintenance have been for some time on a par with third-world failures, I am ashamed that it still has the gall to drag us in Great Britain down by calling itself "British", as though it were our national airline. I would like to think that there is a legal bar to false descriptions like that.
This latest fiasco with their IT will prove, I hope, the final nail in the coffin.
I hear that the official root cause is a "power failure". Words fail me; if that is true (who knows?) it shows staggering management incompetence. What would BA say if Heathrow were to shut down because of a "power failure"? No-break alternative supplies have been commonplace in any organisation that depends on its power for decades, including most of the airports that BA uses.
So I'm not impressed by a Spanish gentleman wearing a hi-vis jacket to pretend he's at the heart of things telling me that's the reason for the failure. It's the reason he should have been shoved out of the door by now. Without the mega-payoff. Followed closely by that brand-destroyer from Ireland.