While discussing how technology will change education, Cringely makes a side-comment about Reputation vs. Certification:
I’ve written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.
It’s the Indian IT firms that find it worth the time and effort to get certified as “level 5″ software shops.