It is not just a question of people – and companies – putting the kit in first, then taking a while to figure out how best to use it. It is more that developing applications for any new technology always lags the technology itself.
Thus it has taken the best part of a decade for online booking of airline seats to become the norm, and online shopping is still in its infancy. So what? Well, what generally happens with the take-up of new technologies is that the social and economic effects lag quite some way behind the technical practicalities. Broadband take-up in the UK will clearly soar in the coming months with the price war sparked by Carphone Warehouse. More than half the internet connections in the UK are already on broadband, so expect dial-up to become a residual technology within the next 18 months.

But for their misjudgment in bringing this case, it might have been even more.j.warner independent.co.uk. Once the legal juggernaut had started to roll, it proved extraordinarily difficult to stop.Deloitte has done well on behalf of BCCI creditors, who have already received more than 80 per cent of their money back. The Bank was not being tried for negligence, but misfeasance, an offense no central bank could even tangentially admit to if it was ever to show its face in the capital markets again An out of court settlement was therefore impossible. Other targets of the liquidators’ legal actions have succeeded in just this purpose, so it is easy to see why they thought it might be possible to repeat the trick with the Bank.However, the thinking contained a fatal flaw, which was obvious to everyone other than the liquidators themselves. There was never any evidence of this and indeed it is hard to imagine why a government authority charged with protecting the interests of depositors would conceivably want to do such a thing.Yet the liquidators proceeded, apparently confident in the belief that the Bank would find it less painful to pay up and settle out of court than have its dirty laundry washed in public. Yesterday’s tirade brings final closure on an action that should never have been brought in the first place and will long serve as a warning to others of the dangers of vexatious litigation.The Bank could always reasonably be accused of negligence in its supervision of BCCI, which fraudulently collapsed in the early 1990s leaving depositors out of pocket to the tune of billions of pounds.Unfortunately for the liquidators, the law required them to prove misfeasance, or that the Bank deliberately and dishonestly set out to disadvantage depositors.

The liquidators, Deloitte, unconditionally discontinued their action last November, but unwilling to let the matter rest, the Bank of England demanded the full vindication of a written judgment. Their case against the Bank of England was described as “a farce” which bore little relation to the one the Lords had seen fit to bring to trial, while their counsel, Gordon Pollock QC, was accused of inappropriate and distracting behaviour and of “sustained rudeness” not in the normal traditions of the Bar.The Bank could not have hoped for a more unambiguous judgment on this utterly misconceived legal case, believed to have been the longest and most costly ever to have graced the commercial courts. That’s quite a challenge given the turnaround yet to be performed in the core retail business. The 5 per cent uplift in the share price yesterday none the less suggests there might be City support for such a strategy.Final closure for Bank on the BCCI d?cleIt is hard to imagine a more damning catalogue of criticism than that heaped yesterday by Mr Justice Tomlinson on the liquidators of BCCI and their legal team. Like-for-like sales are continuing to slide, and although the bottom line looks better, Ms Swann cannot for ever live on cost cutting alone. Speculation that WH Smith might want to go further into higher margin books by mounting a rival bid for Ottakar’s looks more than plausible.There would appear nothing to stop Ms Swann from entering the fray now that the Competition Commission has provisionally cleared Waterstone’s, this despite the fact that Ottakar’s acquisition by WH Smith would almost certainly lead to an even greater dumbing down of the range than a Waterstone’s takeover.In any case, Ms Swann could find herself in the interesting position of both demerging and acquiring at the same time.

Demerger will remove the problem and thereby help safeguard news distribution’s future.As for the retail operation, it still struggles to find a purpose amid the turmoil of today’s high street, despite the best endeavours of Kate Swann, the chief executive. However, major supermarket customers are already fractious about the distribution arm’s relationship with WH Smith the retailer, which is also a big customer.The potential for conflict of interest is all too obvious, and in any case, the big supermarket groups are increasingly unhappy with the idea that by subscribing to WH Smith’s distribution business they may in effect be subsidising a competitor in the form of the group’s retail chain. The future of news distribution is up in the air following confusion among competition regulators over whether to keep the present system of local monopolies or allow open competition in the distribution of magazines.As one of the largest distributors, WH Smith might be a net gainer from deregulation, even though it is on record as supporting the present system. Just as well, with the benefit of hindsight, that the transaction failed because news distribution may today be worth more than double what was being offered back then.Still, separation can be resisted no longer.