Users' Choice Awards 2002

The most coveted and the longest running IT product awards in the country are
back this year for the 14th year running, with 39 categories of IT
products. The Users' Choice 2002 is based on an all-India survey conducted by
IMRB across all sections ranging from large business, small businesses,
home-office businesses to households.

The past year has been quite tough for the Indian IT industry, with vendors trying very hard to keep their heads above water. In such trying times, the prime concern for most companies has been to concentrate on their sales and remain profitable.

Under such circumstances, it becomes very interesting to see which brands consumers prefer to choose and why. This year’s Users’ Choice
survey has thrown up some really interesting results.

For one, despite the slowdown there was one segment–multimedia–that saw a lot of action. That’s why we’ve included four categories from this segment in our survey, namely digital cameras, web cameras, DVD drives and PC speakers. The prime target for all these products are households, and therefore our questionnaire also aimed at capturing user preferences
there. The results are given in the pages to follow. Besides these, we also introduced two other new categories, namely corporate messaging servers and case tools.

Category	Brand
Hardware
Home PCs	Compaq
Office PCs	Compaq
Notebooks	IBM
Tape Backup Devices	HP
CD-Rewriters	Samsung
Hard Disks	Seagate
DVD Drives	Sony
General-purpose Servers	Compaq
High-end Servers	IBM
Network Switches	Cisco
Cellphones	Nokia
Monitors	Samsung
Dot-matrix Printers	Epson
Inkjet Printers	HP
Laser Printers	HP
Large-format Printers	HP
Desktop Scanners	HP
UPSs	APC
Modems	D-Link
ISDN Devices	D-Link
PC Speakers	Mercury
Web Cameras	Logitech
Digital Cameras	Sony
Software
Category	Brand
ERP s/w	SAP
Server Operating Systems	Win 2000
Corporate Messaging Servers	MS Exchange
Professional Graphics s/w	Adobe Photoshop
Web Graphics s/w	Adobe Photoshop
Software-development Tools	Visual Basic
Web-development s/w	Java
Case Tools	Rational Rose
Indian-language s/w	I-Leap
Anti-virus s/w	Norton
Accounting s/w	Tally
ISPs	VSNL
Free E-mail Services	Yahoo
Chat Clients	Yahoo
Indian Portal Sites	Rediff.com
Indian News Sites	Indiatimes.com
Brands of the Year The Survey

Besides determining which brand users preferred to buy in different categories, we also asked them to give the key reason for choosing it. We gave four reasons to the user to choose from: well-known brand, low price, good quality and better service.

Of these, good quality emerged as the overwhelming reason for corporates to shift to another brand in all categories. Among the households, good quality was the main reason for choosing a brand in 60% of the categories, while brand popularity was the main reason for the remaining 40%. Perhaps this is because homes are still not very IT savvy, and rely on ads and word of mouth to aid their decision-making process.

Anil Chopra