So we are looking at new equipment, either a high end Canon digital color press or a couple of mid grade Minolta digital color and black and white presses. We went to the vendors office to put the equipment through it's paces, and yeah, two hours in my boss was asking me what the hell was taking to so long.

It's all in the details, okay? I was looking at web-to-print software, lots of packages had 90% of the features at 10% of the cost of big iron enterprise offerings -no brainer right? Wrong, it's a huge deal. Once I dug around I would find out that key features were only 90% implemented -making it very hard and clunky to use. And when it comes to automating huge, massively complex orders it's can't be 99% correct, it has to be 100%

Take for instance the Challenger shuttle disaster. It was caused by some leak and blah, blah, blah- the details are really only interesting to the engineers. What is interesting is that normally engineers build a system to some crazy nth degree of reliability, a product will be 99% okay, but if that product depends on 100 parts all working correctly, you would get (theoretically) a problem every time you turned it on.