Better-educated managers would have started to address this problem sooner and maybe more effectively, but they would not have prevented the bug from appearing in the first place. British railwaymen chose Stephenson's standard gauge over Brunel's wider one in the first half of the 19th century, as they did in America and most European countries. This standard, originally derived from horse-drawn wagons in British mines, has remained even as railway engineering has undergone 150 years of change. Not surprisingly, it is hopelessly inadequate. Such decisions endure because basic technologies evolve slowly.
Space missions are miracles of communications technology and precision engineering.
Cars are polluting, noisy and inefficient. Nearly a century after they first appeared, they are still powered by igniting a mixture of fuel and air. Entirely new technologies are foundlings that come into the world unrecognised except by a fanatical coterie. After the invention of dynamos in the early 1880s, it took electricity 40 years to improve the productivity of factories. And when a technology finally achieves prosperous middle age, inertia sets in.