Microsoft

I haven't shown too much of my techie leanings in these posts, but I am going to make an exception here. I recently purchased Microsoft Office Student Teacher Edition for our new home PC. Following installation, I constantly got a '1606' error (something to do with the installation files) whenever I tried to use anything beyond the most basic of functions. Very annoying. Well I filed an online service request and - what do you know - I got an intelligent response. Li "Leo" Chen, a Microsoft "helper", worked with me via email over 4 days and we solved the problem (not without a lot of fun [and scary] registry editing).

My point is this: Microsoft is frequently vilified as the Evil Empire, especially by snooty techie types. However, there's a reason for the company's success, and its not just monopoly power via the Windows OS franchise, it's also good, timely and effective customer service. Good products don't hurt either.