1996 OS/2 e-Zine! Readers' Choice Awards

These awards will be a recurring event here at OS/2 e-Zine!, with the voting next year being preceded by a nomination stage to begin in November. After this year's inaugural event we have gained a great deal of experience and ideas -- too late to make our tasks easier this year but they will improve the entire event for 1997.

In viewing these results, there are many things that readers should keep in mind.

First and foremost, these results are not meant to be taken as an indication of one program's superiority over any other. These results represent only our readers' opinions.

Also, as with any voluntary survey, these results must not be accepted as irrefutable proof of any program or developer's popularity or unpopularity. There are many variables that may have affected our results. Some (but not all) of them include:

1. Because readers were able to vote for any company or product name, some manual tabulation of results was necessary. For example, due to a change in ownership, we combined all votes for "Neologic Network Suite", "EmTec Network Suite" and many other variations of those names. This necessary manual sorting could have introduced error into our results (although we don't believe it did).

   As an interesting aside, we noted that while users may like a product, they do not always know the name of its developer. For example, in the "Best Freeware or Shareware Developer" category we received votes for "Nick Knight", "The developer of MR/2", "Nick Secant" (Nick's e-mail address is nick@secant.com, hence the confusion) and a host of other variations. (No offence meant to Nick, this confusion extended to every category and most developers; we use his name here as an example only.)

2. There were no safeguards in place during our voting period to stop developers from being "proactive". We did not directly encourage any users to vote but it is very likely that some developers did (while others did not). Obviously, if this did take place, it would skew our results.

3. While only one vote per category per person was allowed in our survey, it is possible that users "stuffed the ballot box" by sending us more than one vote using different e-mail addresses. We are certain that no one in the OS/2 community would stoop to this type of low tactic but, of course, it is possible.

As a closing note, we are eager to admit that we realize this survey is not perfect. Most notably, we missed one very important category in our on-line voting form: "Best Financial Software". One concerned reader wrote:

Your contest for rating OS/2 software does not have a category for personal-finance software, but I have a favorite program in that category: viz., InCharge!

I have used InCharge! for over 2 years now. I have been continually impressed by its user friendliness, its power (i.e., broad scope of functions), and the fact that its author provides the best support I have ever seen for a piece of software. (Re that "ever seen": I have been involved with computers for 45 years.)

If the next issue has any room for a section on "Special Mention" programs, I nominate InCharge!.

Until then, here are this year's results...

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