Wait a minute... if they hadn't deployed, it's not like they would have gotten those lost sales.
The only actual damage done was that the few bids that failed left their customers with a bad taste in their mouths. If they hadn't deployed when they did, they still would not have seen the money.
Same words, different context. In many startups, shipping buggy software is a trivial danger compared to the risk of spending too much time carefully wringing the bugs out of software that nobody will use and that will never make any money.
In that context, when someone says "you should ship it right now", what they really mean is "you should test the market before wasting any more time polishing the product".
Obviously, the IT department of a brokerage firm is a much different environment. The market is already tested, and you should already know how many millions of dollars a showstopper bug is going to cost you.
Where IT is seen as a cost without benefit, developers are second class staff. When managers are non-technical, any request for time or resources may be seen as prevaricating.
The only actual damage done was that the few bids that failed left their customers with a bad taste in their mouths. If they hadn't deployed when they did, they still would not have seen the money.