PC Magazine's annual Service and Reliability Rankings:
Don't know if this has been posted yet, but here goes:
The poll was the 11th annual conducted by the magazine. Over 17,000 surveys were sent to readers; Over 8,000 readers responded. Respondents were asked 14 questions about desktops and notebooks, 4 of which count toward the service and reliability grade. Those four are: (1) Satisfaction with reliability, (2) Satisfaction with repair experience (repair satisfaction), (3) Satisfaction with technical support, (4) The percentage of units that have needed repair over the past 12 months.
Companies were rated A-E (A being the highest)
Desktops
A: Dell
Hewlett-Packard
IBM
B: Compaq
Digital
Gateway
Micron
Midwest Micro
Quantex
Sony
C: Apple
CompuAdd
DTK
Everex
NEC
Toshiba
Unisys
ZEOS
D: Acer
AST
AT & T
CompuDyne
Packard Bell
Tandy
Zenith Data Systems
Notebooks:
A: Dell
Gateway
B: IBM
Micron
C: Acer
Apple
Hewlett-Packard
Hitachi
NEC
Toshiba
D: AST
Compaq
Texas Instruments
WinBook
Zenith Data Systems
Interested comment from PC Magazine: "What makes IBM and Dell the best , year after year? For Dell, the pioneer of the direct model, it is the ability to talk to customers directly from the beginning of a relationship, without the variability of good or bad dealers in between."
For the question, would you buy from this vendor again? Dell scored the HIGHEST RANKING among 25 vendors for Desktops and 2nd highest (among 15 vendors) for notebooks....Micron came in first (too bad they are no longer going to be targeting large businesses, over 80% of Dell PC sales <<gg>>
Past rankings
Desktop 7/98 7/97 7/96 7/95 1/95 7/94
Dell A A A B A A
Compaq B B A A A A
Gateway B B B B A A
Hewlett-Packard A B A A A A
IBM A A A A A A
NEC C C B B C C
Packard Bell D D D C E E
Notebooks
Dell A A B C D C
Compaq D C A A A A
Gateway A C B B A B
Hewlett-Packard C B B B A B
IBM B B B B C C
NEC C B B B B B
Toshiba C B A A B B
You can find even more info in July's PC Magazine...
A couple closing thoughts: Survey's like this just kill the PC's are commodities argument....After all, when was the last time Exxon killed Gulf in a survey about getting your gas?...
This survey also supports the consolidation trend we are seeing among the big 5 in the industry.....Many of the smaller players have faired very poorly in this survey in recent years.....and are clearly losing ground (concerning service and reliability) to the big guys.....
Jim Patterson: Look at the rating for Packard Bell and then think about rephrasing your argument about Packard Bell undercutting everyone in price. Better yet, let me do it for you: Packard Bell sells their computers cheap, and look at the result....You get what you pay for.......
Finally, one big issue for me (going forward, every since I went Dell long) is: Can Dell continue to provide superior service and quality.....This has many implications (one of which, the branding campaign).....Until now, Dell has done an EXEMPLARY JOB! Amazing, also given their rate of growth.......
That's all for now....Glad to (finally) shoot some hardcore back to you, Meat!
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