[lelanthran]

> The key stakeholders and their vendors are friends. They know each other, they get along, they get the product, and like you said, they've built their clout on the know-how of people and product.

It's not even a friendship in many cases: This is how CEOs fail upwards, after all. It's better to take on a CEO/vendor with a known incompetence level than take a risk on an unknown.

Look at it from this point of view: you're the customer, you have an existing supplier, who frequently fucks up. Due to the frequency, you already have controls in place to mitigate the fuck ups. Do you really want to try someone new with different fuckups that will get past your existing controls?