I am as frustrated as you any many others are in dealing with IM online, but to be fair as an Aussie I know that over the last few years the number of spectacular and expensive failures in new and updated IT systems by various government departments at both state and federal level has been significant, and the big banks and other commercial institutions haven't fared much better, and from my reading of the tech press the situation is similar in the UK, the USA and the EU and various European countries
and I have lost track of the number of hours I have wasted trying to deal with some of the local Thai bank, ISP/telco and e-commerce apps and websites so I would be interested to hear who exactly you and/or jippytum would like to see the IM app and website development farmed out to?
I think internationally it has been shown that finding "the skills to build out user friendly, effective and highly available, reliable and scalable enterprise solutions" is very difficult - but I don't see that as an excuse for IM to keep delivering unsatisfactory products as they have done so far - whether the developers or their masters give a "flying ####" or not, but I don't necessarily see just handing this off to outside contractors is necessarily a viable solution !