Windows 7 Boosts Microsoft's Rep
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:25 pm
The University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) survey rates consumers’ opinion of a bunch of industries and major companies. Only one software outfit is big enough to receive an individual score. That would be Microsoft, and the report for the first quarter of 2010 has the company with its highest rating ever–76 out of 100. That’s a meaningful boost over its rating over the past few years, and the report’s analysis credits the improvement to the end of the Windows Vista era and the beginning of the Windows 7 one.
Note that the lowest Microsoft’s score got–69–was blah but not that blah: For instance, Comcast got a 61 this quarter. And while the 76 represents a nice bounceback, that score is also the average for the entire software industry. Which means that Microsoft’s result is, well, average.
Microsoft and Windows are close enough to being synonymous that it’s no shocker that the company’s reputation suffered the long national nightmare that was Vista–or that Windows 7 seems to be helping.
Your take?
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8 Comments For This Post
May 18th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
I love Windows 7 but being the geek that I am, I can’t wait to see what Windows 8 will bring.
May 19th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Frankly, Windows Seven only removed the negative pall that Vista cast over the perceived capability of the company. It’s an OS: You take them for granted, unless they don’t work properly. Operating Systems nowadays make money, not reputations (unless they create a new market sector, like, say, the iPhone OS on the iPad).
@AJ: Windows “7” is a label, not a number, so you can’t add one to it. As the real version of Seven is 6.1, the best we can say that the next version will be 6.2 or 7.0. Grrrrr….
May 19th, 2010 at 12:26 am
OK – I stand corrected. It seems that MS are themselves using “Windows 8” as a codename for the next version of Windows – proof, it seems, that even Microsoft don’t listen to their own statements.
I do feel a nostalgia for the days of Windows 3, when the version was the name and vice versa, and we didn’t have to work through a Tower of Babel created by marketing departments when trying to figure out version numbers.
May 19th, 2010 at 6:41 am
I find it increasingly difficult to care about Microsoft these days. They have been defeated in nearly every business venture they have attempted with the exception of operating systems and office productivity software. Judging by the recent news, it seems that they have resorting to patent trolling.
May 19th, 2010 at 8:13 am
I think people are expecting from Microsoft way more than MS can deliver.
On the other hand it’s Microsoft’s hype machine that’s raising the bar so high, by diversifying in lot’s of different markets simultaneously and promising to change them forever, without actually doing anything revolutionary, so nobody can blame those people.
The only thing Microsoft should get Rep for is they provide an easy API to run your programs on, which is a blessing from god for anyone that has tried to program through the mess that’s Unix/Linux (X windows/pulse audio/VAAPI, all of them so different in each distro, all of them so lame).
They also make a good word processor.
Everything else they make is fairly mediocre stuff.
May 19th, 2010 at 8:24 am
I haven’t used Windows 7, but Mircosoft’s rep with me, based on everything else I’ve used from that company, is 0.
May 19th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
I have a Dell Studio 1749 with Microsoft 7 OS. I don’t know if it’s the OS or the computer but this is the worst setup I’ve ever owned. It is the most unstable system I’ve ever worked with. I have more crashes in one night than I’ve ever had with any other computer. And the Dell customer service is so horrible I will never go back to them again.
May 20th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
“I think people are expecting from Microsoft way more than MS can deliver.”
Considering they haven’t a clue how to put their OS on top of UNIX fully 10 years after Apple DID IT, one can not ever expect MSFT any kind of actual progress out of MSFT.