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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.
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.
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.
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
That's all true, plus no footnotes. Absolute deal-breaker.
I used it for a while when I was writing short texts that I wanted to access anywhere, but I quickly discovered that this offered no more advantages than writing these texts in emails I sent to myself. The formatting and other capabilities of GDocs are just that bad.
I also tried using it collaboratively, but I found that the changes I made while simultaneously working on a doc with a colleague were not instant enough to be of any synchronic use - we spent a lot of time discussing (on skype) what changes we did or would make. So again, not much better than asynchronous email.
You're part of the problem. Usability is key, and if an application takes 20 seconds to start, people will complain. The IT department can railroad it in, but that will lead to resentment, especially if they have attitudes like yours. People who are using office applications are not necessarily nerds, you know.
Anyway, OO is nowhere near as bad as you a painting it. It does not take anywhere near 20 seconds.... I don't know where you got that from.
And precisely why I ditched Acrobat Reader for FoxitPDF which is small and fast.
OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office if you want open formats. OpenOffice is also fairly feature-rich. However the app does take considerably longer to start (cold or hot) than MS Office on the same hardware.
That complaint is not only valid, but one share by many OOo devs who complain themselves at the performance. OOo's codebase is mammoth (comparable to the entire KDE codebase, including Koffice) and ancient. It is also very monolithic, as the suite exists as one huge app. Throw in the occasional Java feature that forces users to wait for Java to fire up, and they're just not going to be happy with performance.
I believe that OOo provides all the features that 95%+ of the users will want. Really I'd like to see Sun/Novell/Whomever to focus on stripping legacy code, making OOo more modular (don't load every aspect of the program unless it is needed at boot, move some features/aspects into libraries that can be loaded later if needed) and improve the interface.
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.
Derivative works like Red Office and Symphony have nicer UIs. How come OOo's UI has remained so static over the years?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I recommend to everyone to use Novell's fork/not-fork located at go-oo.org as it is. It uses less memory, provides more features, runs faster, etc. Yes, Novell signed a deal with the devil, but they're putting out a good product for free, so using it isn't supporting Novell. It is just using the superior product.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I just tested it on my system (a core 2 duo laptop running Ubuntu 8.04). OpenOffice 2.4 loads up in 12 seconds and the splash screen appeared after 4 seconds. I closed it and ran it again, the second time it loaded in 2 seconds.
OpenOffice is also very fast for me at least at opening new files when it's already running. If I'm doing a lot of office suite work (like, all day at a job for example) how likely is it that I'll be closing OpenOffice completely and relaunching it every time I need it?
Honesty, I think the big problems people have with adopting free software are brand loyalty and natural resistance to change. Microsoft is out there constantly delivering messages to people that their software is empowering and helpful. Windows and Office are easily two of the most recognizable brands amongst people that use computers. It's easy to see how people will dislike an alternative that they had never heard of until recently. Especially if they equate cost with value as many do. Office is several hundreds of dollars, so OpenOffice must seem terrible if it's just given away.
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.
I think there is also a "quickstart" app that pre-loads parts of it: i.e. make it behave more like MS Office.