I don't have a dog in this fight at all, but wanted to make a simple statement about breaking stuff, warrantee issues, etc.
On one hand, there is a person (an engineer for instance) who preceives a component to be a weak link and thus makes the company liable for more warrantee claims because of it.
On the other hand, there is a completely different group of people who are counting beans (soy more than likely!) and analyzing the target market segment. What they perceive that component should or should not be could be completely different than the engineer, and most likely for a radically different set of reasons.
And last but not least, there is some group in the company who is looking at the actual issue of warrantee claims and can decide that if there is a scrape on the housing, it has been abused and thus, no claim allowed.
My point is that even though a company person states a change was made for reason A or B, it may ultimately have no bearing what so ever as to why the company actually did what they did. IMO, companies with thousands of employees and hundreds of division/departments often times have zero cross-department communcations on what you and I would believe to be an extremely important phase of a project. (been there, done that....it's the truth!)
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