Looks like more of the go cheap or go home mantra by Boeing to one of its suppliers - Collins- who did the software involved. Extract from NYT
For years, the company had been “a technology leader, an innovator,” Clayton Jones, then the chief executive, told Fortune Magazine “Unfortunately, along the way they forgot to hone their financial skills.”
In 1998, Boeing executives summoned Mr. Jones to Seattle, he later recalled in a speech, and made clear that, to get more of Boeing’s business, Collins would have to cut prices dramatically. In response, Collins introduced what it called “lean electronics,” its take on a belt-tightening philosophy popularized by Toyota.
Collins reorganized business units and retrained managers, with an eye toward efficiency and speed. It pushed its suppliers to do the same, and established partnerships with companies such as HCL Technologies, which provides outsourced, lower-cost engineering services from India.
Along the way, Collins unseated Honeywell as the provider of flight control computers on a predecessor of the Max, the 737 NG, and supplied numerous systems for the Boeing 787, which went into operation in 2011.
When Collins secured the contract for the Max displays in 2012, it credited the belt-tightening. “There were a lot of cost-saving measures — a lot of tough decisions — that had to be made,” one manager said at the time in a company publication The display system is now at issue in both the congressional investigation and the private lawsuits.