Friends, family and grandads too

摘要

At the head office of bt (formerly British Telecom) in London it is hard to find any lingering evidence of imperial hubris. The firm that vied for the telecoms industry's top spot in the mid-1990s, promising to be "one of the first great companies of the 21st century", now ranks 28th in its industry by market value. It has long since been overtaken by emerging-market upstarts, including Bharti Airtel, an Indian firm it invested in during its infancy, and by European rivals that did a better job of weathering the dotcom crash of 2000-01.