I first asked readers to pick the company from a list of 20 major technology vendors that does the best job of treating its customers right. Not surprisingly, IBM and Apple were the biggest vote getters in that "Hall of Fame" poll, with IBM narrowly winning. From the same list of 20 companies, I then asked readers to say which in their experience did the worst job. Again, it was hardly a surprise that Microsoft ran away with the honors in the "Biggest Turkey" poll.

Out of curiosity, though, I decided to calculate the positive/negative ratio – the number of Hall of Fame votes versus Biggest Turkey votes – for each vendor. As of the votes tallied on New Year’s Day, the ratio (the bigger the number, the better) for each of the 20 vendors was: IBM 22.6, Apple 13.6, Adobe 9.8, EMC 5, SAP 4, BEA 2, Gateway 1.9, HP 1.6, Veritas 1.4, Cisco 1.1, Siebel 1, Dell .85, Symantec .28, Oracle .19, Network Associates .11, Microsoft .08, Computer Associates .05, AOL .04, Intuit .027, and VeriSign .023.

Note the big difference in the good/bad ratio between those companies that are primarily in the hardware business and those in software or networking. Dell, the only hardware company with a ratio worse than 1.0, still does better than eight of software/networking vendors. If you leave out the companies (SAP, BEA and Siebel) that got less than ten total votes between the two polls, it’s all hardware at the top of the list with the notable exception of Adobe.

What does that mean? I’m not sure, but I’ll hazard a guess that it has sometime to do with the different standards which hardware and software vendors are held to. Dell is at the top of the Hall of Shame because of the all the gripes we hear about its support, and its support is clearly abysmal compared to what it used to be. Yet, when you think about it, the practices Dell is being raked over the coals for by readers is pretty much what you expect from the big software companies.

Of course, I could be reading too much, or too little, into these postive/negiative numbers. What do you think? Post your comments or write to me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.