I can answer this from my sick bed - all vendors that we used were purchased as ICP-OES. If the vendors ran them on a different insturment and didn't let us know...that would make me grumpy.On a hobbyist level maybe nothing. If I was trying to land on the moon maybe everything. I guess my question was a bit vague and not my intent. To me it is a variable because one may be able to detect it and the other may not. Or at different levels. The initial tables with the results from vendor A, B, and C we can see that A, and C do not detect Cobalt (for topic of discussion) yet vendor B does. It could be that A and B are MS and C OES. I don't know but there is a difference. It very well could be nothing and just me grasping at the differences in the data.
FWIW, this happened to me once. I sent what was supposed to be and OES test and it was run on and MS. That made me pretty grumpy. I stopped using that service because that seems totally uncool.