The 1994 leadership scorecard.

We'd like to put a more positive spin on this, but the simple truth is that this year's Leadership Scorecard poll--our annual survey of corporate reputations--seems to have fizzled. We sent out ballots in November to almost 1,500 Soft.letter subscribers; by our mid-December cutoff, only 42 responses had shown up, a small fraction of the turnout we've seen in past years. Apparently, interest in corporate fame can be as fleeting as fame itself.

We're not sure exactly what happened this year, but the scores from this year's ballots suggest one possibility: The poll has become boring and predictable. When we look at Scorecard standings over the past three years (see next page), we see remarkably little year-to-year change for most of the companies the poll has tracked. If there's any lesson here, it's that industry reputations change much more slowly than technology or financial performance.

That's perhaps not the best news for companies with fairly lackluster reputations. The hefty public relations budgets, the keynote speeches, the product awards--none of this stuff seems to have much impact on our subscribers, who tend to be close observers of software company performance. And we suspect that changing the opinions of other industry watchers--customers, investors, the press, potential employees--is probably even tougher. (On the bright side, of course, it should be equally hard to trash a strong reputation. Will anyone bear a grudge over Intel's Pentium fiasco six months from now? Probably not.)

In any case, this year's somewhat abbreviated Scorecard represents our final shot at tracking corporate reputations. AS the standings suggest, we asked our subscribers to "grade the performance" of the nine largest independent PC software companies (a list that reflected mergers that were actually consummated as of the date we mailed our ballots). We asked for grades in four categories of performance--senior management, technology and products, customer service, and marketing strategy. We then averaged these four categories to get composite scores.

And now the envelope, please.

For the second year in a row, Intuit topped our composite standings as the industry's most admired company, scoring 4.55 on a 5.00 scale. Intuit also topped all four of our individual performance categories, edging out Microsoft (the runner-up in composite standings) in senior management and marketing, Adobe in technology, and Novell in customer service. Obviously, Intuit brings more than just a hot personal finance product to its pending merger with Microsoft.

At the bottom of the Scorecard, meanwhile, Borland continued its three-year plunge from one of the industry's most admired companies to a virtual tie with the Santa Cruz Operation as the least admired. Another significant drop in the standings--from 3.87 in 1993 to this year's 3.46--showed up for Novell, whose merger with WordPerfect has been criticized as a poor strategic fit. By comparison, the Adobe-Aldus merger hardly budged Adobe's overall reputation, so it's clear that Soft.letter readers at least perceive a striking difference in the value of these two corporate marriages.

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