WooHoo!

Microsoft Outpaces Apple in Customer Satisfaction

Yep, that’s right.  Just couldn’t pass up the chance to blog about this.  If you’re interested, I’m sure you’ll read the entire article, so I’ll do some summarizing here but not do any wholesale cut-paste.  My main reason for doing this post isn’t so much to brag about the obvious inference of the title (you believe that, don’t you?), or to add to the already great buzz around Windows 7 (hereafter referred to as Win7), but rather to point you to some (more) 3rd-party evidence that you can also show to your customers to help them overcome some of their Vista stigma or, in many cases, help them be more confident in rolling out what they likely perceive as “new technology” (but we both know that Win7 is leveraging all the reliability and security of the Vista platform while hopefully overcoming some of the negatives).

As you’ll see, this article is from Bloomberg.com and it centers around a “Chart of the Day” which in this case is a chart showing the results of satisfaction surveys done by a London-based research firm YouGov for both Microsoft and Apple around satisfaction with their most recent OS upgrades (Windows 7 and Snow Leopard [SL] respectively).  The chart is essentially an overlay of the two surveys which purports to show, by percentage of positive “grades”, the relative customer satisfaction levels with the 2 products.  The basis of the article headline is that, since shortly after it’s release in Nov, Win7 has achieved higher percentages of positive grades than it’s rival (indeed, at the end of CY2009, according to the chart, Win7 was trending up and was at almost 75% satisfaction while SL remained consistently below 70%).

Some of the things that I noticed (from the chart) that I thought I’d point out are:
- after it’s release, SL briefly spiked up to just over 70% but then plunged to well below 60% (Win7 has never gone below 60%), then did another peak (to only around 65%) before diving again back under 60% until gaining back to launch time levels of mid-to-upper 60%.
- Win7 launched at about the same mid-60% range as SL but has not had any plunges like SL, it did dip a couple of percentage points but not even as much as the second plunge of SL which was smaller than its first. 
- I’ll be honest, I’m not doing research into why the dips happen (to find the “rest of the story” like I usually do), I just find it interesting that SL has only had better percentages for a few brief spikes all along the 7-month continuum, even when Win7 was still in pre-release.

Of course, you can draw your own conclusions from the chart, and I’m not going to try and push this as some be-all-end-all proof of anything, but what I do want to point out is that I think, with all the halo-effect and general positive perception that Apple seems to enjoy, and with the lack of halo-effect and some of the (unfounded) negative perception, which you know I’ve commented on in this blog over time, that most folks (meaning your customers) would be very surprised to find out that Win7 enjoys a level of satisfaction that’s, in fact, comparable to (yea, even perhaps beats) Mac’s latest OS.  Man, I wish we could come up a commercial around this.

You know I dislike anecdotal evidence being put forth as some sort of “leading indicator”, but in this case the quote was from an analyst for Directions on Microsoft and those folks are the real deal, so when they say something I generally find it much more credible that than average supposed expert comment that I typically see.  And, his quote that “People who were thinking about buying a new PC are more likely to do so now. You’ll see slightly better sales.” is supported by what I see and hear all over the press.  So, again, back to my back premise here – hopefully you can use articles like this one to show your customers that now is the time get off that legacy stuff and get onto the current generation OS technology, and hopefully they will feel comfortable with Win7 knowing that it actually does enjoy a high satisfaction level amongst those who have actually used it.  That’s what I’m talking here.  You know as well as I do that when many of them take the step up they’ll be glad they did (on several levels) and hopefully you’ll reap the benefits as their Microsoft partner and trusted advisor.

Interestingly, Apple declined to comment, go figure.