A real story would be that of De Havilland and the Comet airliner - Boeing and Airbus should never have existed, the UK had that market sewn up until the government of the day blew it...
Britain was a great innovator back when individual inventors could manage a project, they never seemed to transition into corporate innovation though.
But the firm got unstuck when it tried to enter the business market. Its Sinclair QL was designed to outperform IBM's PCs, but its tape-based Microdrive storage was unreliable and the British company did not offer the kind of telephone support the corporate sector required.
His failure wasn't in terms of price but of price/performance.
It was too expensive for a home computer and too much of a toy for a business: between two chairs.
Some of the corner-cutting was ingenious (the calculator where the power pulses just often enough for the screen and memory to stay on, allowing a watch battery to be used for a more slimline design) and some of it less so (iirc the same calculator displays 8 digits but is only accurate to 3 significant figures...)
I thought UK defence procurement policy was to double the cost and reduce capability by 50%.
Is it really worse? In Australia is see nothing but short term thinking, a lot of it is driven by parent companies in the UK and US.
In my personal experience, British business people have tended to favour the shitty, short-term-but-get-cash solution over doing things properly as well. Not at all a unique concept, but picking the easy way out seems to be much more common to me.