Or, they don’t want to have concrete numbers because they aren’t confident they can hit projections made by other people (see the pro-formas sold to VC’s…who is held accountable for hitting the numbers? the start-up CEOs? NO…the suckers who took the job attached to numbers someone else came up with.

Or, there are competing groups in a company that muddy the data. Who gets credit for the numbers on the sale of a laptop at Dell.com? The product team? The marketing team? The web team? The SEM team? The promotions team? Plenty of eyes checking data, but all stacking the deck in their favor to come closest to meet projections by their bosses (which also weren’t synced up to begin with).