It's the meaning of nobody every got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/AWS. These were definitely never the cheapest. You paid a premium for being able to pass the buck--"hey, we just did what everybody else did and which was considered 'best practice'".
Don't forget, big companies used to have QA. They actually tested stuff before barfing out the perpetual betaware we have now. So relying on a vendor with deep pockets and QA used to kinda make sense.
Yeah I work part time in a b2b company that deals at the 'enterprise' level. A small business could almost always do it better and cheaper, but the big banks need a big name or they have no one to hide behind when things inevitably go wrong. Inevitable because the customers usually aren't very technical and we're often stuck talking to marketing people who care more about colours than business rules :D
