An Apple for the teacher should go down well if the user survey findings of J D Power & Associates are to be believed. Agoura Hill, California-based Power, which wants to become a force in the personal computer polling business, conducted a national independent sample of nearly 1,100 companies and more than 2,000 end users of computer products in the US as part of Phase III of its first independent study of the computer industry to document end-user opinions. Phase III concentrated on large businesses, and Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh was ranked as Best Personal Computer and Apple also won Best Printer, while Borland International Inc was recognised as having the Best Software, an honour it also achieved in the earlier studies of smaller businesses. Users ranked relevant performance, ease of use, capability and support most important attributes in that order. The Mac was followed by machines from Dell Computer Corp, Compaq Computer Corp, AST Research Inc, Toshiba Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co – no sign of IBM Corp in the top six and it failed to make the top six in the Power survey of smaller users either. The next four in the ranking behind Borland in the Best Software stakes were Lotus Development Corp, WordPerfect Corp and Microsoft Corp. Following Apple in the Best Printer category were Hewlett-Packard, NEC Corp and Okidata Inc filling the next three places.
