An old Internet joke: if Microsoft built cars, a particular year's model wouldn't be available until after that year; Sun Microsystems would probably make a car that was solar-powered, twice as reliable and five times as fast - but only ran on 5 per cent of the roads; and occasionally your Microsoft car would just die for no reason, and you'd have to restart it.
Similarly, tales abound about the computer industry executive who told his assembled staff that if your standard passenger aircraft obeyed "Moore's Law" (the trend for microchips to double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so), during the past 20 years its price would have dropped to a few hundred dollars and you could fly from here to Timbuktu on 10 cents of petrol. "Yeah," says the cynical employee at the back of the room, "but who needs a plane that crashes twice a day?"
Yet PC buyers put up with it. It's almost as if they expect the worst to happen, for hardware to arrive from the factory "dead on arrival", or to be kept waiting on a customer support line for half an hour or more, then after that to wait for a month or more for the problem to be solved. Even if your machine is apparently "normal" and healthy, it still manages to crash or hang or freeze during so many ordinary, everyday operations such as looking at a few Web pages. Admittedly, PCs are now supposed to do very complex things. But could you imagine other firms in other industries, selling products costing well over £1,000 a time, adopting the same business attitude, from their designs to their helplines? How long would they last? A recent major survey organised by leading Irish computer magazines PCLive and ComputerScope puts the situation in context. The "DHL PC User Satisfaction Survey" gives an interesting picture of the level of service that PC buyers are now receiving, the varying standards of service and the amount of problems they often encounter. . .
1: Where do people go to buy their PCs? According to the DHL survey, direct sales now account for about a quarter of PCs bought in Ireland: 26 per cent of respondents ordered their new PCs by phone or post. Local dealers accounted for almost two fifths (38 per cent) of sales, 7 per cent of buyers went to a superstore and 6 per cent to an electronics or electrical shop.
2: How long do you have to wait for the PC to be delivered? Forty-five per cent received their machine within a week, but if you were in the unlucky 16 per cent it could be at least three to four weeks; 7 per cent of both IBM and Compaq customers were kept waiting more than four weeks.
3: When it arrives, will it have any problems? The survey found that over one in 10 machines was defective in some way - 11 per cent had components which were "DOA" (dead on arrival). The main problems were usually the fax/ modem, CD-Rom drive, monitor or sound card. Topping this table were:
Packard Bell - 24 per cent of its buyers;
Gateway - 14 per cent;
AST - 10 per cent;
4: What about their back-up service?
We get a good number of complaints from Computimes readers about being left waiting at one end of a helpline for long periods, and the survey shows a similar picture. Over a quarter of Gateway buyers who rang it looking for service were put on hold for more than 20 minutes. Almost a fifth of AST buyers who rang up (19 per cent) were also put on hold for 20 minutes or more.
5: Then all the problems were solved? Not necessarily. In some cases it took more than a month to resolve the problem completely - 15 per cent of people with IBM PCs, 12 per cent of Compaq buyers, and 11 per cent of AST buyers all had to wait that long.
6: But after all that, is everything problem-free? No: a quarter of respondents had their first problems more than 12 months after buying the machine, and the same proportion weren't covered by a warranty. Almost three in 10 problems (29 per cent) were due to faulty components.
7: And then everybody was happy?
Not always. According to the survey, 21 per cent of both IBM and Compaq users said their problems weren't resolved to their satisfaction. Asked "overall, how satisfied are you with the service and support?", IBM and AST fared badly: 28 per cent of IBM customers and 22 per cent of AST customers replied "not at all".
8: Wouldn't people be reluctant to buy the same machine again? Almost one in five of AST buyers (19 per cent) said they wouldn't buy the brand again, followed by 13 per cent for Packard Bell, and 10 per cent for Gateway.
Certain brands stood out at the other end of the table. Dell had the best record (91 per cent of buyers would go for the brand again, and only 2 per cent wouldn't), followed closely by Apple. And Dell and Apple also topped the league in terms of users finding "no problem ever" - 46 and 41 per cent of users respectively.
And asked a slightly different question, whether "based on the service and support you received, would you buy this brand of PC again?", 95 per cent of Apple buyers said yes, followed by 88 per cent of Dell buyers.
Around a quarter of IBM users (27 per cent) and AST users (25 per cent) said that on this basis they wouldn't buy the brand again.
The full DHL PC User Satisfaction Survey is at: www.infolinve.ie/dhlsurvey/ index.html