Apple and Google have long escaped the antagonism that other major players in the IT industry seem to attract. Microsoft has users; Apple has fans, despite getting away with product tie-ins that would have Microsoft executives hung at dawn. Google has become a rather cheerful verb.

Perhaps it's all that sun in California, where both Apple and Google are based, or some hangover from the hippy-trippy San Francisco days of the sixties.

But there are signs the Apple and Google halos are slipping. Customer  satisfaction with Apple has dropped five percent over the past year though it still ranks top at 79 percent, according to according to a report from the University of Michigan’s National Quality Research Center which uses a measure called the American Customer Satisfaction Index(ACSI).

Professor Claes Fornell, head of ACSI at Michigan, believes perceptions of Apple may have been affected by its recent rapid growth. "It’s not easy to manage quality and customer satisfaction when a company quickly has to increase production or provide service to a larger number of customers, ” he said.

Google's satisfaction rating fell four percent to a score of 78, though it remains the most popular search engine. Ask.com, with a score of 75, is catching up fast.

"[Google's] home page has not changed much, and some users say it looks stale compared to Ask.com, which has a very different display of search results," says the blurb on the new report.

So it's got nothing to do with Google trying to wrest control of our lives from Microsoft, then.