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Readers' Choice Awards (siteadm) Fri, 13 Jun

A Study of the Poll Results...

Posted by: rwrannells
Date posted: Mon, 16 Jun 1997

IW states that the statistical error for the poll is 5.8%. Because of this statistical error NT Workstation and IOMega Jazz drive are statiscally tied in the client category. Which is correct. What they omit is that Think Pad and Pilot are also statistcally tied in the Client and that Empson Stylus should be omitted from the report since it is below the statistical error.
Applying this type of analysis to the other categories you'll find that: in the server category Warp server and Backup Exec are below the statistical error bound; in Networking Lexmark and other are below the statistical error bound; in the internet category Adobe and MS ISS are below the statistical error bound and that MSIE and Front Page are statistically equivelent; in the Overall category NT Workstation, IOMega Jazz drive, other and NT Server are all in a Statistical tie.

So in light of these facts, the poll seems to be able to say very little. The overall category is a Statistical tie except for a dead end peice of software. The Client category has two ties out of four unrelated items. The Server and Networking categories have three different items left on them, all unrelated. The Internet category is the only place where tow competing pieces of software remain. So here we can actually draw a conclusion, which is that Netscape Navigator is significantly more popular then Internet Explorer. A second conclusion can also be drawn that MS Internet Explorer and MS Front Page are roughly equivelent in their popularity. Of course since browsers are dead end software, these two conslusions can also be ignored since they involve dead end software.

So it seems the IW didn't get much for the money they spent on their statistical poll. What we get out of it is the MS IE and MS Front Page are equivelent in popularity (this is hardly earth shattering news) and that Netscape is more popular then MS IE (nothing we didn't already know).

IW please try and give your reader somthing a little more useful next time around.


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