Mac OS X 10.2 (“Jaguar”) and the iPod won awards in the 2003 InfoWorld Readers’ Choice Awards. Mac OS X took home “Best Product” honors with 34 percent of the vote, while the iPod was named “Best Gadget” with 40 percent of the vote.
The second and third places in the “Best Product” division went to Apache Axis (19.2 percent of the votes) and Microsoft Office 2003 (18 percent). Taking those places in the “Best Gadget” department were the Palm Tungsten C (14.5 percent) and the RIM BlackBerry 6210 (14.4 percent).
In the “Best Operating System” category, Mac OS X 10.2 came in third with 23.4 percent of the votes, trailing Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (28.9 percent) and Red Hat Linux 8.0 (27.2 percent). Apple’s Xserve came in fourth in the “Best Server” contest with 18 percent of the vote, falling behind the Dell PowerEdge 1655MC (30.3 percent), Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL760 G2 (25.5 percent), and IBM eServer z990 (24.2 percent).
The biggest surprise of all may be that Apple and Microsoft were neck and neck for “Favorite Vendor” with Microsoft winning with 16.2 percent of reader votes compared to Apple’s 15.9 percent.
“Seventeen years of Readers’ Choice Awards have brought 17 years of surprises and many close contests — but none as close as this year’s horse race between Microsoft and Apple for Favorite Vendor,” a note on the InfoWorld Readers’ Choice Awards says. “In the end, the two giants tied statistically, but Microsoft edged ahead with just three votes.”