Best products: User picks, 11/12/01

When it comes to brand names in the network industry, Cisco and IBM glow as golden as a monarch's crown. In comparison, Microsoft would best be described as gray; frequently the market share king but never the user's favorite.

That's one of the findings of our third annual Best Products survey, in which we ask Network World readers to tell us which products they liked best in selected categories. This year, we queried on 10 categories ranging from commonly used management software to cutting-edge security products.

Participants voted IBM the winner in each of the four categories in which it was listed. Cisco, too, won all three of its categories. Microsoft won none of its three, even when it owned the biggest market share among participants - a circumstance unique to Microsoft.

More than 500 people participated in the Web survey, conducted for Network World by King, Brown & Partners, in Sausalito, Calif. However, each participant did not vote in every category.

We crowned winners based on two types of calculations. A straightforward calculation of best votes carried most of the weight. If a product achieved a statistically significant percentage of votes, we dubbed it "best." For instance, in the load-balancing switch category, Cisco's Catalyst 6500 series with load-balancing module won by earning 60% of the best votes - more than triple any other product.

If best votes were split tightly, we turned to a statistic called the Preference Rating to determine the winner. This rating adjusts for the statistical advantage of high market share (see story below).

What's a Preference Rating?
This specialized rating gives us a way of figuring out how a product's market share affects its rank in our Best Products survey.

The Preference Rating, which adjusts for the statistical advantage of high market share, supplements the straight percentage results we garner in our annual Best Products survey.

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The Preference Rating only came into play in the network-attached storage (NAS) category, in which Dell, Quantum, IBM and Compaq products grabbed nearly the same number of best votes - with Dell at 17%, Quantum at 16%, and Compaq and IBM at 15% each. Because IBM earned a 1.36 Preference Rating, compared with Dell's 0.77, Quantum's 0.80 and Compaq's 1.0, we dubbed it winner.

In all categories but NAS, participants dictated winners in near landslides.

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