> Olin, I'm traveling and don't have much time to address this properly, but 
> basically the problem is that you equate "quality" with "goldplating".
>
> I understand "quality" to mean "conformance to requirements".

IMO with most things there are "essential requirements" and "nice to 
have features"

For example for a portable computer essential requirements might 
include, being able to be carried by a person, able to run on batteries 
and cheap enough to be afforded by a rich buisnessman.

Nice to have features might include running a reasonablly recent OS, 
having more processing power, being small, being light, being robust, 
having a long battery life etc.

One of the old luggables would meet the essential requiremnts 
requirements but you'd have a hard time selling one of those now (except 
to a collector at a tiny fraction of it's original manufacture cost) 
because there are much better (that is they do better in terms of the 
"nice to have features") things on the market. There is a wide range of 
different laptops because different people value those "nice to have 
features" and many of the nice to have features are somewhat 
contradictory so every laptop is a compromise.
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