Recommended reading Archive for Faster Forward - Technology News, Observations and Occasional Rants by The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro

One Last Look at My Windows Vista Review

Those of us who write about computing for a living can be so busy trying out the next would-be-big thing that we often forget to follow up on our past predictions. So I was happy to see Technologizer tech writer Harry McCracken spent some time re-reading some of the first...

Survey: Apple, Google Gaining in Customer Satisfaction

One of my favorite ongoing research projects, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, released its latest quarterly findings yesterday. Like earlier studies conducted by this project of the University of Michigan's business school, the ACSI queries customers to find their likes and dislikes in a few selected industry sectors each quarter....

Survey Finds Like and Hate For TV, Wireless-Phone Service

The American Customer Satisfaction Index has just released its latest quarterly survey of consumer attitudes, and some telecom firms are not going to be happy about it. The Index, a project of the University of Michigan's National Quality Research Center, uses phone interviews of randomly chosen U.S. consumers to gauge...

Consumers Remain Less Than Thrilled About Computers

The University of Michigan's National Quality Research Center issued its latest American Customer Satisfaction Index findings this morning, and computer manufacturers should not feel flattered by the findings. The ACSI surveys customer happiness with different industries each quarter. This quarter's report [PDF] focuses on, among others, the personal-computer business. (It...

Search-Engine Privacy Scorecard

Just in time for yesterday's column on search engines, the Center for Democracy and Technology--a D.C.-based think tank--released a report (pdf) on the privacy policies of major search engines. Unlike a lot of the paper that streams out of K Street offices, this document is concise and readable, a mere...

Miscellaneous Monday-Morning Updates

Some news about recent topics of this blog: Internet radio royalties: Last week, Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Don Manzullo (R-Ill.) introduced a bill, the Internet Equality Radio Act (PDF text), that would bring commercial Webcasters under the same simple royalty system as satellite radio--they could pay 7.5 percent of...