----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Donohue" <jim_donohue@computer.org> <SNIP> For the conventional manufacturer this is not all a good thing. While he would like to minimize infant mortality that would impact warranty costs he is not interesting in reducing failures after the warranty period. So unless he can get a warranty payback he is not interested. Given limited production runs he may even decide to take the warranty hits as cheaper than the cost of functional test...any he may be correct in the straight economics. <BIG SNIP> RON OFFERS - First a big thank you to Jim for his extraordinary insights and taking the time to clearly explain reliability issues from the manufacturer's point of view. Xerox's relatively unique business model highlights these decisions. The part that I snipped out above, really explains where the fire and forget manufacturer's motivations lie. Once MBAs and accountants indirectly or directly control production, there is little chance that quality for quality's sake can survive. Still, we do have Japanese cars, some manufactured here in the USA, that are high quality. And we now see a trend towards unreliability in Mercedes Benz (according to Consumers Report.) I think Jim's dissertation can explain some of this. When you have old-line manufacturers who pride themselves on quality or where a culture may require quality, the wise consumer has a better chance at reliability and performance. Sometimes, we pleasure boaters find ourselves in circumstances where we must rely upon radar and our GPS. On those relatively rare occasions, we expect (not hope) our gear to work. There may only be two people on board when this happens, but those are human lives after all. It would appear that the aviation industry has attempted to insure reliability through redundancy. Don't the big airliners have triple redundancy on some systems? After all, on some of these big planes we are down to two engines! The military gets this redundancy via another requirement - survival in a hostile environment where airplanes, tanks, and ships are expected to receive battle damage and continue to function. Jim and Arild opened my eyes to something that I thought was uniquely European with the exception of Intel. That is running one production line and then sorting production by part or assembly performance. The first time I encountered this was British Eley match ammunition. I think they had three grades and two production lines. The German manufacturer Heckler & Koch selected sniper rifles from one assembly line based on performance. In the USA, we still tend to custom build sniper weapons in the military and eschew assembly line selection. Intel rates the GHz of their CPUs based upon performance selection from the same assembly lines. Outside of infant mortality, we don't have much of a chance of insuring performance. Over time, our marketplace society is based upon voting with our pocketbooks. On the rare occasions when we buy a new yacht and it comes with a great electronics package at a great price, perhaps we should tell them to shove the package of we have learned that the product line or brand is unreliable. We should vote with our feet. If we get caught with a bad product we should scream like heck! Most people do not do that. Ron Rogers Annapolis, MD _/)