> it's that (in theory) the sheer volume of man-hours spent pouring over every minute detail of them, incorporating lessons learned from every failure that's ever happened in the field, amount to a very very high success rate

and this is what company executives need to understand. Given the fleeting nature of software and the speed in which one can write working code (not strictly correct or bug-free, but something that apparently works) people are convinced that software development should be cheap -- or cheaper than say airplane design. Software design is thus seen as cost not investment and those flaws in specifying and writing correct core is then shown in not treated edge cases, sometimes catastrofically