What should be concerned about when a vendor claims to support a standard?

Answer 1

The answer here depends a lot on what the gear is, and what level of standard support they claim. In many cases, it's pretty easy to tell if they support it correctly - if they don't, their stuff Just Won't Work. A more troublesom issue is when you've already bought the gear, and installed it, and find out that there's some subtle corner case in the standard that two vendors treated differently (often, just due to a nothing more than error. Getting *all* the timing rules right for a PCI-based motherboard is *hard* -and the engineer will probably not hotice that some chip doesn't latch some signal when the IRQ line is in the *midldle* of a transition.... you get the idea.. ;)

In real life, the purchase contract usually lumps "does it comply with standards" as a special case of "gear works as per the specs", and the contract then says what happens if the gear doesn't work to spec.