Agree with most everything you've said. Just want to point out that IT stuff not working properly is only grudgingly accepted when users are captive. Could be a government service (as in your example), corporate monopoly, or a work mandated application. If it doesn't work properly, users are stuck with it no matter what.
But for anything where there's healthy competition, this completely changes. Errors, bugs, conceptual problems, etc absolutely will have an extremely negative impact.
As an example I once worked for a company selling tickets online, but there were numerous bugs, and the system would often crash under load. Long story short, we lost many users to competitors, that company is no longer independent, and all that code is now legacy.
Compare with the monopoly situation of Ticketmaster, they are far worse than this company ever was, and are quite successful, with a large user base. That hates them ;-)
But for anything where there's healthy competition, this completely changes. Errors, bugs, conceptual problems, etc absolutely will have an extremely negative impact.
As an example I once worked for a company selling tickets online, but there were numerous bugs, and the system would often crash under load. Long story short, we lost many users to competitors, that company is no longer independent, and all that code is now legacy.
Compare with the monopoly situation of Ticketmaster, they are far worse than this company ever was, and are quite successful, with a large user base. That hates them ;-)