IT Professionals give thumbs down to Microsoft

Silicon India
Bangalore: Microsoft has received some awful feedback from its customers with regard to its services. In a study conducted by VendorRate, all the products of the software giant have received poor ratings by IT professionals for customer satisfaction, integrity, reliability and more
The online survey was conducted by the market research firm on IT professionals of 347 hardware, software, telecom and service vendors during the second half of 2009. VendorRate asked the participants to rate vendors in 10 categories, including integrity, timeliness, communications, customer service, expertise, effectiveness, and whether they would recommend the vendor to others. It then added all the categories for each vendor to come up with a total.

For Microsoft, the ratings were generally miserable. Three different Microsoft businesses were given separate ratings, including operating systems, applications, and infrastructure. Looking at the poor ratings received by Microsoft for this quarter, Rick Schaefer, CEO of VendorRate says, "Microsoft's ratings simply fell off a cliff in this quarter."

IT professionals rating vendors in April, May and June has hit Microsoft with poor customer satisfaction scores for the company's server and infrastructure software (55 out of 100, down nearly 17 percent), operating systems (67, down 9.5 percent) and applications (64, off nearly 18 percent).

The survey also saw some of the other major technology companies take the bottom positions. Verizon was at the bottom of the list, with a 61 rating, followed by Sprint Nextel with 64, and Microsoft applications with 64. Microsoft operating systems was tied with AT&T Wireless for the next worst rating with a 67. That means Microsoft took two of the bottom five spots. IBM Informix, meanwhile, took the top spot for vendors with a 96. After this poor performance by Microsoft, all eyes are now on Windows 7, to see if that can bring some respite to the company.