Posted on 02/09/2010 6:00:53 AM PST by ShadowAce
Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of OpenOffice.org, and that I think it has the potential to break through into the mainstream. Maybe it's already begun, judging by these figures from webmasterpro.de:
The numbers were collected using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analysed by the web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking (using Javascript) which fonts where installed on the system, we could identify the installed Office suites.
Spread around the world, those 200,000 users aren't a huge number, so I'd take the numbers quoted with large doses of NaCl. But even in their general indications, they are pretty remarkable. For example, Poland clocks up 22% for OpenOffice.org against Microsoft Office's 68%; the Czech Republic also had 22%, against 76%; while Germany did well with 21% and 72%. Nations in descending order thereafter were France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden and Austria.
The UK, almost needless to say, turned in a miserable 9% - the same as the US – alongside a massive and sheeplike 80% use of Microsoft Office (75% in the US). Shame.
What's interesting about these figures – particularly the high numbers in certain countries – is that it takes OpenOffice.org into the same kind of market-share territory that Firefox occupied a few years back. Which raises two interesting questions. First, are we seeing the start of the same kind of growth trajectory, and secondly, how can the open source community help propel it along that graph more rapidly?
As Simon Phipps rightly pointed out on Twitter, this development would make now a spectacularly bad time for Ubuntu to drop OpenOffice.org from its Netbook edition: on the contrary, it should go all-out to promote it as broadly as possible if it cares about the larger free software ecosystem. Maybe something for the incoming COO, Matt Asay, to think about in his first week at Canonical....
Huh?
The methodology and those figures are like the climate change “figures” from the British University of East Anglia. They are as fake as they come.
OpenOffice is pretty cool. I take online classes and they require Word though, OO won’t do some of the stuff they need.
With the latest releases of Ubuntu, Linux has finally matured into a good desktop for the masses. Even without marketing, it is slowly gaining a share of users. OO will come along with it.
Still, I doubt the market share will go much beyond 2 or 3 percent for the foreseeable future.
LOVE Open Office... works great for everything I could want...
UBUNTU is excellent.. and newest version had OO with it.
Only problem I had with Ubuntu was getting wireless internet to work.. wired worked great.
The last version of office I had was MS Office 2000. Since 2004, I’ve been using Open Office at work and home. There’s no sense in paying money for MS Office for features I don’t use, or just to have a “snappy” GUI. Plus, I can export my documents out as PDF.
I use MS Office 2007 for work (and 2003 on a separate project's system) and OpenOffice3.1 at home daily. The differences are many and obvious.
OO is comparable on many basic functions and missing others (email, calendar) but I cannot think of a single task that OO does better than Office. OpenOffice 3.1 is inferior to even MS Office 2003 and years behind MS Office 2007. If OO cost even $20-$30, I doubt anyone with Office2007 experience would choose it.
But the reality is . . . OO is free!
“Only problem I had with Ubuntu was getting wireless internet to work.. wired worked great.”
You are the first person I have heard that complaint from. I wonder if it is widespread. I have only installed it on two wireless machines so far, one netbook version and one full version. They both worked without incident.
The netbook with solid state hard drive is my favorite.
Has anybody else noticed that even Microsoft has noticed the popularity of Mahjong on Linux? Microsoft included their version with the games on Windows 7.
One thing OO does that Office can’t is convert Excel spreadsheets to PDF files out of the box.
Not a big deal.
Install PDF Creator (freeware) and Windows can convert anything to a PDF.
Can it do it in batch on a headless server?
Treating office suite selection into a moral issue? Weird.
It seems like it should.
From the online manual:
Server Installation: A server installation sets up a network printer for PDFCreator and allows computers on your network to create PDF documents, Bitmap images, and Postscript files remotely. If you use a server installation on a terminal server, make sure that you do not install PDFCreator in application mode.
I use open office and carry it on a thumb drive. There is a portable version that can be downloaded from portableapps.com
That is something you cannot do with office. I keep office on my desktop, but it’s a hog and in some cases slower than molasses. OpenOffice can in most cases do everything that microsoft office does and you can also swap documents between the two..
ROFL! No.
Sounds great, if only it ran on Unix.
Can you specify? Not questioning you, just curious.
OpenOffice is a joke. Microsoft Office is the gold standard for businesses, and no real company is going to switch over to some open source program that might not be around in a year. Office 2007 is an amazing product, and all indications are that Office 2010 is going to be even better. A perfect complement to the outstanding Windows 7.
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