About 2004 major cost cutting started with a program called "fast forward", since then much of the pressure to increase returns for investors has been met by cost cutting rather than revenue growth. It is typical to get emails from the CEO that say words to the effect "well done we have grown revenues by 2%, ..... bla bla bla. We are going to cut XYZ". For the past 3 years I've seen cuts about every 6 months. Over the past 10 years it is hard to remember a year in which there were no cutbacks. In 10 years the IT department started off in-house then it was outsourced to IBM, then Fujitsi, then brought in house, now being outsourced again. There are the typical/stupid frustrations of we have budget for X but not for Y. For example no budget to buy descent computers for developers, rather than spend $1000 to upgrade a computer, they will pay someone much more to sit around and do nothing because they are waiting for their under powered out-dated computer. A lot of big company policies. You can choose any two from these, cheap, quick, quality. Cheap and quick is the priority now, quality used to be the priority, but that's no longer the case. Get the software out there and worry about it later appears to be the management motto now. There seems to be a belief that you can swap any team out, so a team that knows a product inside out can all be let got and the product handed over to a team that knows nothing about it; people and teams are not plug-and-play like that. Often a conservative approach to doing things, this does not mean quality it means unnecessarily sticking with old technology, this can be to the point where they are using hardware and software that is a decade beyond it's official end of life, indeed some hardware would more suited to a museum.
