Top 40 IT Vendors Rated 69
An anonymous reader writes "CIO Insight has asked its readers to rate their satisfaction with their vendors. Not surprisingly, 'CIOs are disappointed and disgruntled with the performance of their most important vendors. In fact, the number of companies with lower scores in 2006 than in 2005 outpaces those with higher scores by a margin of two to one.' In first place was CDW, edging out last year's top vendor, Red Hat, which tied for third place this year. Microsoft came in at number 24. The coverage includes a detailed methodology on how the survey was conducted. 826 qualified respondents participated."
well, there are reasons.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for one of these companies, and they come in the bottom five.... I'll not name the company, good luck in your quest to figure it out.
They laid me off after 21 years, a RCH away from full retirement with benefits... go figure. I was in the middle of a research project that would've connected the corporate on-line directory to APIs for IP phones (this was 3 years) ago. There was an entire team ready to fund my work and we figured in addition to increased productivity, there would be incredible hard dollars savings (no we hadn't done the business case yet). It was a promising project and there was a lot of buzz around it.
But, meanwhile, my real responsibilities were to be on the team that created the public facing web site...
Here's why a company like this doesn't end up in the top ratings: our team implemented the web site in .net 1.1 after
almost completely creating a java version of it -- Microsoft
convinced "us" it was important. And of course it was equally
important to port it to .net 2 when that came out, what a
nightmare.... those were decisions being made at the managerial
level. It didn't matter all of the extra work added
zero value to the customer experience, it
mattered we had .net 2.0.
At the team level, I once forgot to capitalize an object or method correctly and was confronted by a peer. This was a day after the code was checked in, tested, and part of the working code. He insisted/demanded it be made kosher, and we spent a little more than half a day getting it "fixed". (I know someone's going to say that's an easy fix... it isn't when the re-factoring tools don't work the way they're supposed to and you have to start pulling in the threads by hand -- and that's what we had to do.)
And our internal clients? Wow... we spent meeting after meeting trying to all agree on buttons and their shape and their color... mind you this was an argument about the shade of button, not selecting from a pallette of colors.
Attention to service for real outside customers? Nil.
Yeah, I liked the company once, it might be apparent on many levels why I don't now. By the time they booted me, I was reminded of the ill-fated Eastern Airlines crash [wikipedia.org] all for the sake of paying too much attention to some landing gear lights while the plane slowly flew into the ground. Way too much attention to virtually irrelevant detail and way too little attention to customer satisfaction.
Newegg (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Site Testing... (Score:3, Interesting)
More likely, IMHO, these are companies that have an Art/Video department and use Macs in that department. Also, 65% of the companies depended on Apple as a software vendor. I'll rashly assume this means products like Final Cut, Logic, FileMaker, WebObjects, and the QuickTime server software.