Current Landscape of Operating Systems in Canada among Canadian Financial Post 800 Companies

Information systems decision-makers at 300 of the Canadian Financial Post 800 Companies were asked to indicate which computer platforms are used in their organizations. For the most part, Canadian Financial Post 800 Companies employ some combination of IBM or Macintosh personal computers (84%), mid-range or mini computers (73%), workstations (56%) and IBM mainframes (20%).

In addition, the mid-range or mini computer is the primary Information System Platform for a majority (53%) of these companies. These Financial Post 800 Companies also indicate that they use PCs (21%), mainframe computers (12%) and workstations (9%) as their primary Information System Platform.

This Angus Reid Group poll was conducted by telephone between May 1 and May 19, 1998 among 300 randomly selected companies from the Canadian Financial Post 800 list of companies on behalf of Microsoft Canada Co.

With a national sample of 300, one can say with 95 percent certainty that the results are within ±5.8 percentage points of what they would have been had the entire adult Canadian population been polled. The margin of error will be larger within regions and for other sub-groupings of the survey population.

For more information on this news release, please contact:

Sandy Janzen
Research Manager
Angus Reid Group
(416) 324-2900