Unless of course ones mission is to fly an aircraft, control a power station, connect a phone call, keep someone's heart beating... Just words... The above comm

Unless of course ones mission is to fly an aircraft, control a power station, connect a phone call, keep someone's heart beating... Just words... The above commenter has a point. Mission critical is also about the effective control of a physical process just as much as it can be about smooth flow of money (which is just another process). In some ways the article title is misleading as it touches on only a fraction of the software that actually runs the world - there is a shit load of software actually running the world (incl. making physical stuff go) and from what I can see most of it does a decent job, in general (of course there is always room for improvement). Disclosure: I'm a process control programmer so am biased in my view as to what actually 'runs the world' :). Taking nothing away from the money processing side of the business.