Lots of software companies tend to do this too. You had an outage? Oh that was just the vendor. Or failed software projects being blamed on a contractor.
It's the meaning of nobody every got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/AWS. These were definitely never the cheapest. You paid a premium for being able to pass the buck--"hey, we just did what everybody else did and which was considered 'best practice'".
Don't forget, big companies used to have QA. They actually tested stuff before barfing out the perpetual betaware we have now. So relying on a vendor with deep pockets and QA used to kinda make sense.
Yeah I work part time in a b2b company that deals at the 'enterprise' level. A small business could almost always do it better and cheaper, but the big banks need a big name or they have no one to hide behind when things inevitably go wrong. Inevitable because the customers usually aren't very technical and we're often stuck talking to marketing people who care more about colours than business rules :D
This is the problem though, all your competitors go cheap, you go cheap. Customers (often, not always) don't notice until it affects them, and eventually acclimate to the new normal that is trash service.
Just see for example how shitty phone bots have replaced call centers which were already outsourced. The thing is no one chooses a cellular provider based on the customer service, we generally just accept the service will be terrible and optimize on cost of plan which will be what we use it for primarily anyway.
Yeah, that's true in a lot of industries. Airlines are another obvious example.
I pay more for our internet company (Aussie Broadband) because they promise not to over-provision and they have local support staff on the phone. They've been very quick to answer and helpful when I had to call and are willing to skip the basic troubleshooting when I explain what I've done already. And I've never had the evening peak slowdowns that my friends have had. But is it worth $20 a month more? Probably not, but it's nice not having those worries occupy my mind.
In the US those options don't exist. The whole field has found its maximization of variables at worse service, where the variables do not include customer satisfaction.
