Church Turing reduction - the vendor way

I'm sitting at QCon today getting some work done and I've overheard a bunch of vendors brilliantly apply the Church Turing Thesis to their products. The bit they use is the "any solvable problem can be reduced to a previously solved problem" and the conversation goes a bit like this

Vendor: So what are you looking at?
Customer: We are currently trying to solve the grand unified theory of everything/build a web-site/integrate our ERPs
Vendor: Well of course the most complex part of that challenge is the clustering/framework/distribution/deployment/management and its that bit which everything else relies on to work.
Customer: Well isn't that just a technology piece of the puzzle?
Vendor: Oh no, its what everything relies on, its basically the central part of everything.
Customer: Why is it so important?
Vendor: Well without clustering/framework/flying monkeys/deployment/management then nothing else will work and you will have complete chaos
Customer: But my last project worked and I didn't have your product
Vendor: But did you have problems?
Customer: Of course there are always problems
Vendor: This would remove all of those problems
Customer: But the problems had nothing to do with what your product does
Vendor: Well how you see the problems isn't where our product works, but not having our product is what manifested itself in the issues you saw
Customer: Errr sure.... give me a leaflet then.... errr I don't have any business cards on me at the moment....

Its amazing how so many things are the "central" part of IT, hell the centre of IT appears to be so big its where everything is, like a great big black hole that sucks in all the light. Sure I know they are just trying to make a living, but do they really think that claiming to be the cause of the big bang is really going to help their sale?

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