In the olden days, companies built and sold things, which required assembling the materials, training and supervising the employees, marketing and distributing the finished product, and servicing the goods after they were sold. Today, companies handle the business end, they occupy offices, not factories and warehouses and retail outlets. The other functions, like assembly or manufacture, even distribution and retailing, are subbed out to where the labor is cheapest.

When I worked for Uncle Frank in his TV repair shop, he could show me which brands were good and which were crappy, simply by pulling the chassis out of the cabinet and examining the quality of the soldering or how the wire harnesses were layed out. The quality of the components could be assessed directly, the excellence of the design could be evaluated by the accessibility of parts, ease of replacement, and even the accuracy and the level of detail in the published schematics.

Today, the hardware components are much more robust, but every other step in the total process is compromised. And of course, software issues are impenetrable, if it don't work, just get a new one. My new car (4 years old) is mechanically bulletproof, but three times since I got it it's refused to start and it has had to go to the shop to have the "chip" reprogrammed. Next time it goes south, I'm going to have to pay for it: the warranty's expired.

Quality just doesn't happen. You can't design it into a product up front, it comes from a conscious effort at every step of the process, from acquiring the raw materials to printing up the maintenance manuals the service personnel will be using. The compartmentalization of the production process by subbing it out to the cheapest contractor (usually overseas) removes the management from that responsibility. They no longer have to work at putting out a good product, they simply stay in the office and play the finance and marketing game. They will not be put out of business by a competitor who does a better job because all their competitors operate the same way. And they are all interconnected in a way no old-fashioned monopoly or cartel was: one single source of tainted additive and dozens of pet food companies are putting out a poison product. One defective seat belt latch and a score of car models are affected.

And as you point out, when the final product is not a real widget you can take back to a real dealer, but an intangible "service", the kind of nightmare you describe is inevitable. The service economy is designed to replace the widget with the stroke. We don't buy things any more, we purchase experiences. Even with major goods like automobiles, the trend is more to leasing than buying since the marketers know we tend to replace leased items more frequently than purchased ones. As average length of car ownership (or lease term) drops it will become profitable to lower prices by lowering quality standards. Even today, it is cheaper to replace many items than it is to do even minor maintenance on them. The dynamic is to force designers to deliberately design obsolesence into a product. Why build it to last if it will be discarded way before it's worn out? And why design it to be easily repaired if it probably never will be? It works for consumer electronics, and for very much the same reasons, for your new building.