[tivert]

> I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.

No. For a physical non-software-driven product, those things are pretty much orthogonal.

If a product is good, it's due to the attributes of the product itself, and those are mainly due to the design decisions and priorities of the manufacturer.

All the things you list may make the business more efficient and more successful, but they have little to do with the kinds of products I'm talking about.