5 year olds are direct because they don't know how to sugar coat and spin things yet. It's not exactly a bad quality in adults. I'd rather someone just be direct with me than writing 8 paragraphs just hinting at something and hedging their bets carefully choosing every word to maximize their wiggle room. I'm at the point where I will respond to that type of e-mail with a very short "tell me exactly what you want from me" type of response. I won't exchange a dozen e-mails trying to drag the reality of a situation out of someone anymore.
Companies, or even countries, are remarkably childish when they have disagreements. Just read a bit of history and see how incredibly petty, uncompromising and unreasonable a lot of the diplomacy between countries in the WWI/WWII era was.
I think this is very interesting, but I don't have any good suggestion why this happens.
