Given that Microsoft is rated at 70, which is "OK" by most people, I note that the following have HIGHER ratings:

"All other" - 75

US Postal Service 73

So one can conclude that "other" software is better than Microsoft, and the Postal Service can also do better with letters than Microsoft can with software. Who would have known!!

Unfortunately Fast Food (Limited Service restaurants) aren't much better, McDonalds only rates a 64. Oh, well.....

what the satisfaction rating would be if the majority of those "consumers" surveyed were IT support staff?

How many organizations that have IT Support Staff are using Office 2007 or Vista yet? I know that we've held onto XP, and we plan to keep it that way for as long as possible. It still works as well as it did last quarter, as does Office 2003.

I see how end user support could get interesting, but anyone working that field is most likely not going to be satisfied by anything short of mass user suicide.

- Nexox

> Unfortunately Fast Food (Limited Service restaurants) aren't much better,

> McDonalds only rates a 64. Oh, well.....

Well, if you have to wait in line for 15 minutes just to place an order for fried chicken (yes, the local McDonalds serve fried chicken), only to find out that they're out of it, you'd be piss-mad too.

Never crossed my mind as a solution during my years of support. Murder did, once or twice. Though I must admit after XP SP2 most support calls were due to poor user training. Prior to XP SP2, the majority of calls were in fact due to poor software.

If the majority of organisations had "upgraded" (not sure if that is the right word to use here) to vista I would imagine m$ satisfaction ratings would be in single figures.

I do rate m$ hardware though, Very happy with m$ branded mice and keyboards. However, is the design and build of such hardware outsourced?

They need to work a lot harder at marketing Vista.

If their claims of success were accurate, given that the average user home machine is probably a couple of years behind current entry level, they'd probably be lucky to manage a 50, given the complaint's I'm hearing all over the place about how much fun it is on current-generation workstations.

If the hangups in copying and deleting in Vista are as severe as some are reporting, we may see negative numbers in M$' near future...

Pushing users over the thrashing threshold is an M$ specialty.

Okay, we have a listing of 2006, and a listing of 2007. That's it. And then there's Microsoft, and everyone else. That's it. As much as I want shaudenfraude regarding Vista et al, this is way too limited a result to make any actual heads or tails of it.

"All Others"? Did someone phone this in? No mention of hardware manufacturers? What about IBM? Adobe? Apple? Logitech? Blizzard? EA? Sony? Sun? Dell? HP? RealNetworks? AOL, even? For all we know, the computer industry as a whole did much worse than MS, save for everyone and their iPods raising up that "All Others". Doubtful, but still, two points does not a curve make.

Also: I think Microsoft does outsource the peripherals. I can't find any proof of this, however, but I do remember some note about the Xbox being the first device they designed and made in-house.