There is no such thing as perfection -- and it would be nice if vendors admit it. No matter how good a job they do, something, sometime will go wrong. They can do everything under their control to mitigate problems, but something not under their control will crop up to cause a problem they might not have anticipated.

Rackspace, a San Antonio-based company with data centers around the United States, allows other companies to use its data centers and systems to run Web sites and applications. It's a well-funded company with a seasoned management team, yet a recent incident shows how it may have overcommitted by guaranteeing 100 percent uptime to its clients.

The chain of events on Monday started with a traffic accident outside the company's Dallas data center. The accident caused a street-level power outage, which caused the data center to automatically switch over to emergency power. This, in turn, caused certain systems to shut down -- although temporarily -- and caused outages to the Web servers in the data center. Customers of Rackspace, such as Chicago-based 37Signals, found themselves without service for 2¹/₂ hours. Since 37Signals provides Internet services for other companies that use 37Signals' services to collaborate online, those customers also experienced outages in their abilities to do their own work.

Does this make Rackspace a bad company? Certainly not. But it points out a flaw in its marketing. It calls its offering "The Zero-Downtime Network." You might suggest that many companies use over-the-top marketing phrases to push home a point. But in this case, it's not just a single phrase. The company's Web site states "100% Network Uptime Isn't Wishful Thinking, It's a Guaranteed Reality." It even tries to provide evidence by giving seven aspects of the Zero-Downtime Network that the company says "makes it real."

Unfortunately, 100 percent uptime is wishful thinking. It's something that no company can guarantee.

I used to run seminar, workshop and classroom events for some of the largest technology companies in the United States. We'd march around the country, setting up in hotels and convention centers so customers and prospects of these tech companies could see their latest offerings and listen to how the offerings can work for them. On an average tour, we'd be in three cities a week for four or five weeks running. Yet even though we were working in partnership with hotels, shipping companies, technology vendors and other suppliers who go through this type of event consistently, we never guaranteed 100 percent.

We would strive for 100 percent, and even more importantly, we would strive (and almost always attain) beyond what we promised. But we recognized that sooner or later something would go wrong. In fact, part of our presentation to prospective customers was that it wasn't a question of whether something would go wrong; it was what would go wrong, when it would happen and how well-prepared we were to address it in a way that would not affect the presentation. That philosophy served us well.

The Rackspace incident put 37Signals down for only 2¹/₂ hours. But they were frustrating hours for 37Signals' customers, and 37Signals immediately announced that the company would take action to make further downtime events more rare. Great philosophy.

There is precedent in which marketers successfully promised less than 100 percent, building the product into an icon that sold well for a century. In 1891, Harley Procter and James Gamble, two of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, told consumers their Ivory Soap was 99 and 44/100 percent pure. The product is still selling 116 years later.