Novell is (was) super-stodgy; Microsoft, not so much

Microsoft is stodgy, but not very stodgy. But the company formerly known as Novell is super-stodgy. Salesforce.com is straddling the line. And Google is the last stodgy of them all.

That’s the result of a highly nonscientific survey, conducted over the past couple of months, by yours truly. As you may recall from my February 7 column, “Stodgy old Microsoft,” a financial analyst referred to the folks in Redmond that way during a story about their quarterly returns.

It’s time to share the complete results. Several hundred people filled out the survey, which was linked in my column, tweeted out and put on Facebook. Although there was no statistical rigor, the rankings are revealing.

Some folks commented, by the way, that I didn’t define what “stodgy” meant. That’s right, the question was simply, “Stodgy or not stodgy?” That was intentional, as I was wondering what you thought, without using my own definition, or a definition that I might find somewhere on the Internet. You can have fun Googling/Binging the word yourself.

Now, as to the rankings. There were 32 companies listed in the survey. Let’s do a Gartner-inspired quadrant system here. The eight most stodgy organizations, who we’ll call super-stodgy, were:

Organization % who said stodgy

Novell 95%

Symantec 94%

Hewlett-Packard 92%

SAP 91%

CA Technologies 90%

Oracle 90%

Accenture 84%

IBM 82%

Ouch for Novell, Symantec and HP – they were even worse than “big iron” companies like SAP, CA Technologies, Oracle, Accenture and IBM. But frankly, nobody should be proud to be in this category.

Let’s move on to the second group of eight, the “very stodgy” organizations; this still isn’t a happy place to be, unless what you’re selling is reliability instead of innovation.

Organization % who said stodgy

Attachmate 80%

Sony 80%

Research in Motion 77%

Dell 77%

Nokia 76%

Intel 71%

Motorola 70%

Yahoo 70%

The third quadrant are the eight companies that were fairly stodgy, but not overwhelming so. Let’s call them the “sort-of-stodgy.” The companies here are known for being innovative (how about those flip cameras, Cisco?), but aren’t living on the leading edge:

Organization % who said stodgy

Cisco 68%

Red Hat 60%

Microsoft 59%

Adobe 57%

Canonical 54%

Linux Foundation 51%

Salesforce.com 50%

VMware 44%

And finally, the eight most non-stodgy organizations – the “super-non-stodgy,” let’s say. Frankly, this quadrant surprised me. The four least stodgy, in Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, make perfect sense. But I honestly didn’t expect to find the four open-source organization clustered here:

Organization % who said stodgy

Free Software Foundation 43%

Eclipse Foundation 36%

Mozilla Foundation 29%

Apache Foundation 26%

Apple 24%

Facebook 21%

Amazon 20%

Google 18%