Why no third party solutions?

[stevens@watson.ibm.com (Andrew Stevens)]

>	Funny--I was just thinking it would be a good business opportunity
>for a person to attack the niche of 3rd party notebook products (batteries
>& chargers in particular) in the major-notebook market (IBM, Toshiba, etc.).

actually, there is a company that specializes in batteries for
PC-compatible notebooks.  Of course, I can't remember their name, but
they had a booth at the PC Expo in NYC this past summer.  They had
lots of stuff for Toshibas and others, though very little for
Thinkpads.  I think this is because the Thinkpad is a relatively new
machine, and also because the Thinkpad battery is probably one of the
most sophisticated around (and thus harder to reverse-engineer and
bring to market).

If I can dig up the name for this company, I will post.

--andy