OverRun: ISO9000 is relevant to
any industry.
ISO9000 is about
quality management and what a company does to ensure that its products (or services) meet customer requirements. It is tough to gain ISO9000 approval (many written procedures must be in place - yes, including those for handling complaints) and any company worth its salt (including Dell, IBM, ... and their distributors) go out of their way to conform to the standards. It is no surprise that some car dealers follow the standards, too.
By the way - see also BS5750 in UK. Same idea, but a British standard. The above companies are also BS5750 approved.
I disagree with "Fact 2" as it happens. It may not be
cheap to fix a laptop, but I have had many repairs done to my IBM T20 ThinkPad, including a cracked screen (leaned on it!), keyboard (spilled Coke on it!) and internal modem+ethernet combo (I think it committed suicide after seeing my treatment of the other components), all of which took less than a day (each) to fix... In fact the modem/ether chip replacement took around 5 minutes. Hardly what could be termed major surgery. They are designed to be fixable (and in most cases upgradeable), even though they may not look like it
[ 29 October 2001: Message edited by: sanjosebaz ]