Another place where bus designs limit our choices is in performance. In general, only one device can be talking on a bus at any given time. So, if you have a bunch of devices sharing a bus, then you could have a performance bottleneck to go with your single fault zone. The obvious way to avoid this is to not use buses. (I usually take this opportunity to dis' fibre channel, but I'll spare you this time :-)  Today, we have many opportunities to replace buses with point-to-point technologies: parallel SCSI replaced by serial attached SCSI (SAS), IDE/ATA replaced by Serial ATA (SATA), DBus replaced by Safari, front side bus (FSB) replaced by HyperTransport, Ethernet hubs replaced by Ethernet switches, etc.