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OpenOffice Five Times As Popular As Google Docs
CWmike writes "Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday. OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times." And reader Peter Toi informs us of the open source release of yet another office suite, Softmaker Office. Its claimed advantages are its compactness and speed (making it suitable for netbooks), its excellent MS Office filters, and the fact that it can be installed to USB flash drives.
Just what I need after the news that OOo may get ads.
As soon as it has full ODF support.
having used all three, i find the oo (especially the last version) to have the features, availability and deployment options i need and a price i don't disagree with.
Softmaker Office looks like a freeasinbeer release of the 2006 version to promote sales of the 2008 version. There's no link to sources on the site, anyway.
But nothing beats Keynote.
Google docs was found to be almost a hundred times less popular than World of Warcraft.
Whatever will Google do to escape from this calamity?
Perhaps they haven't hear of http://portableapps.com/
Or, more likely, they have but are just pretending...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
It has most of the features of Microsoft Works 97. With less fonts. The UI is clunky and slow. Granted it is great for being web based however compared to Office or Open Office it is way behind. Also I think people like their documents to be on there system and be able to disconnect from the internet all together sometimes just so they get their work done without the internet whispering in your ear "browse me"
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Wow, you must have *old* hardware.
Like 1998 era stuff.
Ram's cheap grandpa, upgrade!
Then the answer is not that OO.o is more popular than GD, but that it takes 5 times as long to do the same job in OO.o, so people spend more time in it.
You'll probably get modded to Hell for dissing a major open source app but ... yeah, Open Office has some performance issues.
The CEO of ClickStream, the independent company that did the research, used to do the exact same market research WHILE HE WAS AT MICROSOFT. Though they claim Microsoft didn't pay for this research study, they do say that Microsoft is a client for other studies...I'd hardly call this independent.
http://www.clickstreamtech.com/about.html
3.06 GHz quad-core Yorkfield.
4 GB of 1333-MHz DDR-3 DRAM.
You don't want to hear about my main-disk RAID-0 array.
OO.o is a pig. Even if the quick-start daemon is running, it takes for-fucking-ever to open the first document, and all other operations in it feel clunky.
Open-sourcers need to pay some attention to performance issues or they'll be marginalized by low-cost/free closed software.
The original submission noted that it was "free," but used it to mean "gratis." The submission is black & tagged binspam.
How many articles like this are we going to read over the next couple of weeks? Seriously! With OOo and Google Docs, they're comparing apples to oranges. They're both very good software, just done a different way. If what I read is true, and OOo is going to start sticking ads in the app, then lots of people will be moving to something else for sure.
Open Office is well known to have poor support for OS X. I'd like to blame the Cocoa API... so would the OOo team.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. On both Linux and Windows I haven't had any problem with excessive load times from OOo. I've got a 2.4 Ghz P4 with Hyperthreading enabled and 2 gigabytes of RAM. Yeah.. Netburst, remember that? I don't have ANY trouble opening OOo. It takes about 20-30 seconds to get it to launch the first time in a session for me.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Something is wrong with your setup, OO.o is snappy and responsive, even on my netbook.
Most people are accustomed to internet outages, whether the fault of their ISP, broken backbone, or individual sites. So, they are naturally reticent to use web-based utilities in favor of applications hosted on their local machine.
Until the 'net is bulletproof, on-line apps will never usurp local utilites and apps for critical applications--or even "casual" applications.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Ya really, on my laptop which has a modest 1.8 ghz celeron M and 2 gb of ram, OO.o takes at most 10 seconds to start but it usually takes around 5 seconds
I think they changed that in Oo.o 3
... are truly delusional. This notion we all want to put our corporate documents, small business docs and more on Google's dime shows a glaring weakness in Google's strategy.
With Web Services available for companies to easily develop their own Corporate presences, it makes more sense to have WebDAV services for clients on your own sites, virtually deployed around the nation in various data centers to then route to the closest path possible. Let's not forget that 90% of the Industry doesn't need the "global reach" of Google since most of their clients are local.
This is not a surprise, google can not claim to be the best at everything.
http://www.danlew.com
So first off, current incarnations of MS Office are considered the clear market leader. That's a fair observation. A traditionally installed local application manipulating files in a traditional way is popular.
OpenOffice.org is making inroads as a free alternative. More people are starting to find it a viable alternative for many circumstances, and opt not to explicitly buy MS Office. It behaves fundamentally the same way, and does basically the same stuff. Incidentally, I'm happy as it is a cross-platform application, but I think a greater portion of the userbase doesn't think about the source code or the cross-platform, they just didn't have to give money for it.
Then Google docs comes along. In terms of a strong brand to back the concept, it doesn't get much better than the word 'Google'. They find that despite the strong name and potential ability to fulfill at least the basic needs, people aren't excited about using it. The reason seems self-evident, people are more comfortable with traditional software models for this task. They feel they 'own' the software and have the most control over it. They may or may not back up to online storage, but they want to use a local application to edit it.
MS feels this means issuing their own webapp therefore would cement their lead. I think Google's failure indicates that such an offering is moot. People don't want subscription based software if non-subscription software can do the same thing or better. I've seen people throw out how it comes out cheaper in the long haul than buying the software every time, but it ignores the obvious, that people don't buy every iteration. I know people still using their copies of Office97 because they never had a reason to move. MS and many other companies hate this, but it is a simple fact.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Google announces ad prices for OpenOffice.org have doubled, since it is twice as good.
Think of the money they're making!
I run openoffice on my eee 900. It opens in about 10 seconds and never stutters. Sounds like someone needs to clean their computer out.
I don't understand the summary: it keeps using this word "its", which I don't think I've ever seen on Slashdot before, or really anywhere on the internet. The poster must have meant "it's"...
This is the way Bi-Coloured Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
From Jonathan Schwartz's Blog:
"An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits)."
Does this mean Sun intends to place ads on the documents I "fax ... copy ... [and] project"? Ads in my documents?
If so, it's goodbye OpenOffice.org!
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I tried it. They have versions for Windows and Linux, apparently not for Mac. It's not open source. They have a trial version that you can download for free and use for 30 days. The trial version is crippled: can't save to any other format besides their own proprietary .tmd format. They also offer a non-crippled 2006 Windows version for free -- but not the 2008 version, and not for Linux. The download page wants your name, country, and email address, and tells you that you'll automatically be subscribed to their email newsletter. It doesn't say that you can opt out of the newsletter. However, down below the form where they ask for this information, it says, in microscopic type, "Leave empty if you do not wish to register." It works if you simply click through to the download without filling anything in. They have the Linux download packaged with installers in rpm, deb, and shell flavors. I downloaded the deb version, but it wouldn't install on my machine, because my machine is x64. I copied the deb to an x86 box, and it installed fine. It made menu entries for itself in the Gnome Applications/Office menu. The first time you run it, it wants to set up a documents folder for you, which defaults to ~/SoftMaker. (I find this kind of thing annoying, and believe that it discourages people from developing good habits for organizing their files.)
I'm a little bit baffled right now as to why anyone would choose it. They claim "compactness" as an advantage, but the download is 80 MB, which doesn't seem very compact to me. (The 2006 Windows version is smaller.) Their web site says, "The Microsoft Word-compatible word processor that is so easy to use that you will wonder why you bothered with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org for so long," and then lists some bullet points. One is "Fast, powerful, reliable." Actually it didn't really seem any faster than OOo. On the machine I tried it on, the startup time was basically the same as OOo. "Reads and writes your Word documents seamlessly (Microsoft Word .doc 6.0 to 2007)" AFAICT the only advantage over OOo would be if it can read OOXML. (Although OOo can't write OOXML, I can't see why anyone would care; if you save in an older Word format and give the file to Word 2007 users, they'll still be able to read it.) The price is $80 US. Although that may be a lot less than full retail price for Word, it's a heck of a lot more than OOo. And of course I'd have to live with all the usual hassles of proprietary software. I won't get an x64 version unless they deign to compile one for me at some point in the future. I won't be able to upgrade without paying money. Sorry, I'm just spoiled -- apt-get and OSS work fine for me.
Find free books.
Sounds like someone needs to clean their computer out.
Its a trick from MSDOS/Win3 days. They make OO run slower so MS Office seems faster.
I like it, a lot, especially the very fine equation editor - it's top-notch, although I am used to the style in Open/StarOffice.
However, what I don't like that much is: it does not allow for creating of .pdf files, and it asks me for registration every freaking time I start it. It was supposed to be free as in beer, I thought!? Also, and this is minor, but still: the default document format is proprietary. It does allow you to save in .odf, which I think every non-MS office suite SHOULD do. It just would be nicer if this was their default format. I don't like the idea of yet another proprietary office format around.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I'm a big fan of KDE and their products, but KOffice is a very different beast than MS Office and OOo. To some that is a very good thing, but it isn't going to replace OOo for me, despite being lean and mean. I'm not entirely sure it is meant to compete in the same arena.
However, run it for yourself and make your own determinations. Pull the packages in your distro if you're on Linux, or grab them here on Windows.
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation
There should be native packages for Mac and OpenSolaris as well.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I thought OOo 3 supported Cocoa natively and no longer requires X11 to be installed for Mac users.
There is always NeoOffice as well. It is an OOo fork aimed at Mac OS X.
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is so obviously true, I find it hard to understand why it was published, let alone got to the Slashdot front page. OpenOffice has been out for how many years? Google Apps came out how many months ago? Of course OO.o is more popular; people have had well over ten times as long to adopt it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The boot time may not be 20 seconds on our machines, but the guy who wrote it might be running old hardware or a bloated box.
Anyhow, here is a real world example of the perception problem from a small office I support with a custom app.
I got OpenOffice accepted at an office with old Dell p4s - don't recall the speed of the processors - and I'm a software guy anyhow, so I didn't make much point of checking before installing OpenOffice on the machines. I do recall that there was plenty of ram for XP machines under their use scenario.
The customer had upgraded to Office 2007, but was having massive problems including unexplained resource locks that would take down machines and lose all unsaved data (this was a number of patches ago, so the MS product may have improved stability since this happened).
Open Office worked fine for everything they needed, but the boot time was at least three times that of the MS offering on those specific machines. Luckily, the controller wanted stability first - but her employees still grouse about her being a cheapskate. Even after using OO for a while they think of it as second tier and the only specific complaint they can back this attitude up with is that OO is slow.
I know their usage pattern and the only slow thing is the suite's boot time, and only then when compared to the older version of Office they were all used to using. So transitioning the customer to OpenOffice was actually harmful to the suite's reputation among the rank and file, and this issue comes up when the controller has to give out bad reviews to employees. Apparently some have cited having to use shitty software as a reason they cannot perform their duties well.
Now any manager in their right mind would think that those employees need to get new jobs, but MS penetration of the market has made it difficult to find rank and file that view OSS as anything other than a 'cheap' alternative, and small companies are not usually willing to part with long time employees over software issues.
You mortals!! LaTeX is my (old) new and only word processor!
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
What they should be blaming is themselves, because unlike Linux, Mac users have a native version of Microsoft Office available to them. They also have the choice of iWork '08 if they so desire. Both choices are attractive to Mac users and seemingly have made the demand for a better OOo on Mac not as dire as it would be on Linux.
You're acting as if OS X has a huge market share. It's not like porting an entire office suite to a new API is an easy thing. Not to mention the fact that many of the tools for Linux work on Windows as well. The way I see it, they were aiming for the largest audience while making interoperability a secondary priority. Cocoa can be difficult to port to, so it would make sense that there were some difficulties.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
More people are starting to find it a viable alternative for many circumstances, and opt not to explicitly buy MS Office.
While OO might not have all the bells an whistles of MSOffice some of the features are vastly superior such as equation editing. OO has a plugin, OOLatex, which lets you use LaTeX syntax to enter and edit equations. This is far, far superior to the MSOffice equation editor for those of us with complex equations to present.
Even the built in math editor lets you enter equations in text form, although the syntax is irritatingly not LaTeX. I know this is a rather specialized application but, at least in this one regard, OO far outshines MSOffice or Keynote and is why I use it.
That still doesn't explain how MS Office under wine/crossover is faster than openoffice, even though it has to load not only itself but the win32 libraries as well. There is no quick launch when using wine either, so that doesn't explain it.
That Microsoft Office only beats OOo by a factor of 10. I'm not being facetious -- That is a really good chunk for OOo! For the record, I removed MS Office from over 100 lab computers in my organization last year in favor of OOo. I'm also strongly urging staff to use OOo for at least a month. If, after that, they still insist on MS Office, I get it for them. Sadly, most opt for MS. Blows my mind, especially given the fact that the differences between Office 97/2000/xp/2003 and OOo are small compared to the differences between Office 97/2000/xp/2003 and Office 2007.
I am not left-handed, either!
It has a larger market share than Linux.
That's a stupid comparison. The two products fill different niches. Both Open Office and Google Docs are standard tools at Google, where I work*, and they're used for different tasks. If I need to do complex editing on a document that nobody else will modify, I use Open Office. If I want to have a shared doc that doesn't require fancy features, I use Google Docs. For other tasks, I use other tools, like emacs. Comparing OO and Google Docs makes no sense. *I do not speak for Google.
uhmmm... TeX anyone? Document source as editable text to everyone, output to dvi, pdf, ps and whatever else you could possibly want.
Where's the beef.
Chuck
PS - if you are composing DOCUMENTS and wish to SHARE them, don't use proprietary formats. Period.
You're posting as an AC what the fuck do you care about what you're modded? wtf..
Um, no it's not, your notebook aside. I've got a reasonably new laptop and OO.o is too slow to be usable when compared with MS Office. I use MS Office 2007 and it's markedly faster. The reason I purchased it was I came across an application that a customer used which created malformed Excel files that Gnumeric and OO.o could not read (they lack a proper magic number at the beginning.) Otherwise I'd stick with Abiword and Gnumeric.
There is a reason why MS has such a large user base with Office. It's hard for some people to acknowledge but Office is a fantastically well thought out product that has undergone the most extensive real-world testing of any Office suite in the world. OO.o is nice if you don't have the cash, if you want to get work done then buy Office.
At least as things stand now, anyway.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
I share your enthusiasm for Google Apps. I use them all the time to open silly attachments that people neglected to save as PDF before emailing to me. I also enjoy popping open a spreadsheet in Google Apps to run some numbers on a project without having to fire up a full-blown office suite that crushes my laptop's meager memory.
The online MS Office offering will only be available to holders of MS Office licenses. It's an additional offering for purchasers of the next release. People won't have the option of using the online version instead of the new release.
Seth
PS- I also use NeoOffice (Mac OS X version of Open Office codebase) when I need to create more complex spreadsheets. I'm wondering if the stats quoted by Ballmer, et. al. are considering the NeoOffice downloaders....
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Not by most reports for desktop use. JFGI.
Definately not even close if you include servers.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Last week my mom signed up for a gmail account. A few hours later she called me up. "I sent someone an e-mail about about my car and then there were all of these ads for my model of car? Why are they reading my e-mail; I don't like it."
If someone feels uncomfortable with letting someone lean over their shoulders why they send an e-mail, they are going to feel even more uncomfortable letting them peer at their spreadsheet.
As a writer over at The Register put it, Google fixes problem no one asked them to fix.
"Their products have a sole purpose - killing people"
What reports are you talking about here? I'm asking sincerely here, because I've not seen any report that gives Linux more than a small fraction of the Mac's desktop market share.
"Definately not even close if you include servers."
Which aren't used to run office software, and are therefore completely irrelevant to those writing and / or selling such software.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
If Google want to compete with MS they should really throw some resources behind openoffice, that way they can have a functional online suite which is fully integrated with an offline suite too...
Google apps provide all the features most non business users would need, most people just create simple spreadsheets and write simple 1-2 page letters and buying expensive software for such simple duties is a horrendous waste of money for them.
Business users are likely to avoid google apps because of the privacy concerns, at least i can't recommend it at any place i've worked for these reasons, on the other hand if we had a version we could install locally and fully integrate with openoffice that would be great. I doubt google will ever offer anything like that, but ms will be for sure, unfortunately it will be tied to their other products.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
How is this measured? I personally both use Google Docs and have OO installed (actually, I have OO installed on my 4 different computers, but only 1 Google Docs account which I use from all of them), but I spend about 90% of my word processing time in Google Docs and about 10% in OO.
Introduce Elvish as a language option?
Which elvish language? If you mean Sindarin, the language of Tolkien's elves, that can't happen until 1. the Unicode Consortium approves the tengwar proposal, and 2. operating system vendors implement rendering support for tengwar.
Unlike Notepad, Wordpad has bold, italic, etc - and no doubt there is a linux equiv (or ten). Launches instantly. Free. Perfectly good for 99% of uses.
I don't believe copying the MS Office 2007 ribbon is the way to go, but a more intuitive, clear and attractive interface would go a long way towards winning over more users.
Dockable dialogs like in Inkscape 0.46 are way better than the ribbon - they don't take up vertical space which is in direly short supply thanks to the taskbar, the window title bar and the ribbon, while the modern screens get broader rather than taller. The result is that you're left with either a tiny fragment of the document visible, or a lt of wasted screen space on the sides.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Too bad you were late to the party, twitter, and post at -1. Ha ha.
Taking things at face value to show their official perception and how it doesn't match.
I wouldn't touch webapps with a 10 foot pole if I could help it, personally.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Viable is less controversial to claim ;)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I am surprised that google docs is so big, even the size of 1/5 of oo users is pretty amazing, as i have always regarded it as an experiement (beta;) but now i have been using if for shared documents a year and it has just the right size and usefullness for most of my needs, when i am online. Using a mac i naturally use iwork, which imho is way and above any competition - fast, userfriendly, iphoto integration, useful themes and very easy to use, only been missing dual column editing - and cheap!
Sorry to "intrude" on you here Seth, especially since I am "offtopic" in doing so...
However:
I was curious about your take on this (post from a while back here, that is still "open" to feedback):
----
[b]Website Optimization:[/b]
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021803&cid=25687273
----
The original post you replied to there dealt in websites & their peripheral components, & one fellow mentioned the use of better CPU's (costly yes, but would work) & my methods also, on how to use hardware!
(Albeit NOT CPU's, but rather SSD's (I don't favor FLASH based units, but rather "true SSD's" based on DDR or SDRAM for instance (CENATEK RocketDrive &/or GigaByte IRAM are examples thereof, Quantum Rushmores are yet another)))
Just to also help "offset" bottlenecks (in combination with an approach such as YOU espoused, & which I wholeheartedly agree with by ALL means, as a 1st & BEST approach to optimizations in code + layout of DB schema & website materials, etc. et al).
APK
P.S.=> Thanks, just curious on this note is all... apk
I do find this hard to understand. Maybe OO.o is just not good on windows.
But for getting work done? They're almost identical. $LARG_CORP that I work for is now rolling it out in preference to MS because it's every bit as good, plus the odf support of course.
The moderation on my posts in this thread shows that the fanboys have not gained any subjectivity over the years.
.
1 Fearless Leader replaces his lusers core apps without asking first.
2 The peasants rebel - and Fearless Leader is forced into an inglorious retreat.
3 Without ever quite understanding what went wrong.
.
The fine print.
This is an unscientific - self-selected - on-line survey. "Your chance to win."
Home use only.
The demographics reported bear only a coincidental relationship to what is known about the U.S. population as a whole. Population of the United States by Race and Hispanic/Latino Origin, Census 2000 and July 1, 2005
From May to November 2008, ClickStream Technologies recruited 2,400 U.S. internet users over the age of 18 to complete a survey and install ClickSight®, a patent-pending data collection tool which records click-level user behavior data across all browsers and applications.
Participants were recruited through a market research firm which awards cash and prizes in exchange for completing online surveys.
Sample is self-reported (in initial recruitment survey) as 65.5% female, 34.5% male; 48.4% married; 76.4% Caucasian, 5.5% African American, 1.58% Asian, 1.73% Hispanic.
[A note to the geek: "MS Office" has expanded far beyond Word and Excel, or even PowerPoint. You need to be clear about that before suggesting OpenOffice.org as a plug-in replacement.]
U r doin it wrong, akshually
OO opens in 5l sec on a 2600+ with 512K and Windows XP. On a 2100+ with 512K and Mandriva 2008.1 it opens in 8 sec. I installed AbiWord because it was faster. It opens in 4 sec first time 1 sec the second time. It seams to be much slower on Windows. Does anyone have any data on how fast it is on Vista? I don't have Vista and never will. Am switching to linux. For those who like to grumble and complain ask them if they would be willing to give up thier job so that MS Office can be purchased.
Apk-
The device you've described could very well help reduce read/write times for a database by removing the physical limitations of traditional hard drives. I don't personally have any experience with this hardware, but I'm interpreting it as a hardware wrapper for memory-mapped drives. The SSD stuff probably will suffer repeated writes and wear out. The products you described that use real DDR memory will run superfast, but will be volatile and susceptible to power outages, spikes, etc. Even so, with the type of read-writes possible in that environment, it shouldn't be hard to mirror all the writes to a separate, non-volatile medium.
Seth