Apple, Google Still Tops in Customer Satisfaction
Apple still topped PCs in the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index survey, but the popularity of netbooks cut the margin, reports Computerworld.
The study done by the University of Michigan reiterates that low-cost netbooks that run Windows XP instead of Vista are on the rise.
Apple received a score of 84 percent reporting satisfaction, down from a record 85 in 2008. It lead second-place Dell by nine points and Hewlett-Packard and Gateway by 10 points. Gateway was acquired by Acer in 2007. Last year, Apple led HP by 13 points and Gateway by 12 points.
Google lead the satisfaction index for search engines with a score of 86, reports PCWorld.com. Its score was unchanged from last year. Only AOL improved its score, rising 1.4 percent to a 70 percent satisfaction rating.
The survey was done before the release of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which will take over that function for Yahoo in the agreement between the two companies. According to comScore, Bing has been gaining market share ever since its release. Its share for July was 8.9 percent of search queries in the United States, up from 8.4 percent in June and 8 percent in May, according to The New York Times. The story says Google at 64.7 percent and Yahoo at 19.3 percent each saw a decline of 0.3 percent during July.