>They do much more than that. ISO - International Standards Organization is the international analog to ANSI - American National Standards Institute. ISO 900X standards apply to quality standards, but they set language, network, file format, protocol, environmental, manufacturing, etc. standards. Often, the ISO standard is the same as the ANSI standard (eg. ANSI C), but they standards can be quite divergent.

ISO does not say "you're going to do this like that". It's more like "Okay, so how do you want to do it? Fine, now stick to that!" So ISO does not insure quality - it just ensure you do the same thing the same way everytime, even if that makes it a crappy product.

And when you decide to change the way you do something, you've got to explain them why you made that change (ie more paperwork and more time).