There is a term for this in mathematics and now I can't remember it, but with some systems, e.g. number crunching with large matrices, a very small change like this can magnify into huge differences and give you totally wrong results. It's definitely something you must be aware of and take into account.
Yeah, I guess if you're doing more complex math with the figures than just addition and subtraction there's the possibility for magnification effects. I'd be interested to see an actual example from business, though.
Don't know about business, but when you're working with audio it's very common to multiply the contents of a stream against those of an array, such as a filter kernel with the coefficients computed in advance. With multiple channels which are being mixed in unpredictable ways, there's plenty of room for errors to propagate.
Most of the time the only result is an imperceptible rise in noise, but it's not uncommon to have threshold-dependent routing of signal flow or for audio signals to used as input to modulation processors and vice versa. Every audio synthesis tool I've ever used had at least one bug resulting from error accumulation. They don't stand out very well in testing, but then people start reporting things like I was playing a tune with this patch and stopped to eat dinner, but when I came back my keyboard would only make a horrible noise, is it broken?
