Think of how wonderful the airlines are at annoying us. The more desperate we are to get someplace, the worse they treat us. They charge us more and then put us in the middle seat. The airlines get away with this because they can. They all operate with the same kind of customer disservice, and we put up with it because we have to.
Media companies are sometimes just as bad.
The products, even the best of them, are just plain hard to use. Take the New York Times on the Web. I wanted to see if I could find staff e-mail addresses on the site. Now, that's helpful. Undaunted, I continued to scroll down and finally found a listing of 32 Web staff members, six of whom have links to their e-mail addresses.