The survey polled readers concerning ten software categories: operating system, Web browser, standard productivity applications, database applications, graphics software, image manipulation software, sequence analysis and plasmid drawing software, graphing software, bibliographic management software, and primer analysis software. A number of labs also rely on other, more specialized types of software, for analysis of microarrays and gels, and for microscopy applications, for example. These applications tend to be proprietary and come bundled with hardware, so there is less flexibility in the selection of one product over another. These categories were therefore omitted from the survey. For each question, respondents were asked to indicate all software used in the lab; thus, the sum of the fractions represented by each answer does not necessarily equal 100 percent.
Not surprisingly, the lion's share of respondents use Microsoft Windows (86.3 percent) and Microsoft Office (94.8 percent), from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. A surprising 29.4 percent ...
