Why are our government companies copycats?

The Norwegian postal service is a state owned limited company (Wikipedia tells me) and our state is the main shareholder in the largest company in the oil and gass industry, Statoil. Or StatoilHydro as it now is called after the merge with Norsk Hydro. No worries, they will change their name back to Statoil again by 2010.

Anyhow, does anyone know how these companies come to be such copycats?

Posten

Posten changed their logo from this good, old fashioned post horn

to this new, trendy, thingamablob

that totally looks like a Pokéball

and the Death Star somehow combined

Statoil

Statoil on the other hand have gone from a modern and iconic design

to a rather boring, and simple font during the merge

and now they are going to use this

which totally looks like the mobile phone plan, djuice

and even more like the old fashioned Norwegian domestic crafts guild

Summary

A noteworthy observation is that Posten goes from old fashioned to modern, while Statoil seems to go from modern to old fashined. What gives?

The idea for this post came from this tweet from Rygh