BT: Bland leading the blind

Instead it is presented with the safe face of the BBC, an organisation hardly known for its business acumen.

Perhaps it's the latest in a string of disastrous decisions that Sir Iain Vallance, presumably soon to be elevated to the peerage as Lord of the Wires, has had a hand in.

silicon.com actually stood up for Vallance and his CEO last month - when the press was calling for his blood - and in a strange way the City seems to at least in part have agreed with us. Post-announcement, £1bn was wiped off BT's market cap.

Even so, Vallance's promotion to emeritus president (surely e-meritus?) is not before time. A career civil-servant, his appointment was a stitch-up with the City, and he never had the business head for a company that has changed more than any other in the 17 years since it floated.

Vallance took the helm of one of the richest and largest companies in the world and will leave it with a debt mountain. Along the way were notable disasters: the joint venture with IBM, the failed merger with MCI, the current alliance with AT&T.

Peter Cochrane, BT's former head of technology, left complaining of a lack of entrepreneurial and technological vision. Look at its research labs in Martlesham Heath. A world-class facility, but what has emerged from it?

Only the web - or at least part of it (the hyperlink bit) - and that was a development BT failed to notice until some staffer flipped through a stack of old patents. Then it was too late.

BT is a company that has tried to make safe decisions in a volatile market and failed almost every time.

It is not the only author of its downfall, but slow, heavy, public-sector thinking led it from a position of great strength to a position of abject desperation.

Sir Christopher Bland's appointment is in the same vein. TV married to telecoms is crucial to BT's vision of the future - so who better to appoint than someone from an organisation that has also been failing to take risks?