Condoning it is not the right way to describe my point of view. I see it as a business decision that must be made before the software is released.

I'm saying that a business has to make a decision as to what point it is right to release software. If we were to wait until our application was bug free, we would never release software. Imagine in MS waited until SQL 2005 was bug free before it was released, we would be getting it sometime in 2015, and would we even want it at that point?

What they and I would suspect every other software company do is determine where the point of diminishing returns is met, based on many variables, and then they release the software.

You choose to purchase software based on many factors. Some people will choose to buy the 1.0 version of software, even though it may be buggy, but it really does something that they need, Windows Mobile 5.0 on my iPAQ comes to mind. Others prefer to wait until a later version comes out because what they currently have is sufficient and they don't want to fight the hassles of buggy software.

In the same way, different software companies have different criteria for releasing software. Some may decide to release software because their customers are screaming for certain functionality, so they will reduce the time spent in QA in order to get the release out and follow up with another release soon after to clean up bugs that have been found. Other companies will spend more time testing their software because their customers have a lower tolerance for buggy software. These are generalities, but it points out that there are many different market requirements for software, and in order to remain in business, the software company has to decide what is the best time for the software that they sell for it to be released.