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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.
If it gets ads, someone will fork it to remove them.
"Oh noes! it takes 20 seconds to boot!" // as if those nerds have anything better to do with their precious time
The problem is not the nerd's time, but the perception of the MS users to whom said nerds show the suite. Startup time for OpenOffice programs directly conflicts with the assertion that wins OSS converts, that OSS software will better utilize existing hardware.
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
... 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.
It's had footnotes for a few weeks.
I had never expected Google Docs to match Office in features. Feature bloat is after all one of the thing I was trying to escape.
I load e-mail attachments that are in doc format directly into Google Docs and in most cases they come out looking just fine.
For those that don't I use Open Office, at least long enough to convert it to a simple readable form.
For those that don't open in Open Office I contact the sender and explain to them how they are idiots for using special fonts that most people don't have, setting margins and table widths outside of page boundaries and using tables for bizarre page placements, often leaving huge numbers of empty cells from hours of tinkering, or worst of all, leaving change tracking on so that I see bits and pieces of every document they have ever created in what should be a one page 20K company newsletter.
Nevertheless it will be interesting to see the competition that this initiates.
Microsoft faces a rock and a hard place. If they make the online version too feature rich and also free, they will hurt their own sales. If they don't, Google will continue to grow its user base (and my guess is that Google is content for that base to grow slowly for now).
Beyond feature competition I think the game is who can most cost effectively do this with a combination of efficient server techniques, advertising, data center placement, etc. It's hard to imagine Microsoft winning such a competition and even if they win they will have significantly reduced their profit margin from what it is now.
You do realize that feature bloat isn't that much of an issue for a SaaS solution. As it is not your resources that you are filling up. In theory you have the Web Office Suit take a terabyte of code and it wouldn't effect you. As long as they made the UI clean enough to handle it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
also, the SoftMaker feature comparison (MS Excel 2003, PlanMaker 2008, and Calc from OO.o 2) page is rather deceptive. their screen shots seem to suggest that PlanMaker and Excel support AutoShapes whereas Calc does not, which is patently false. there are also intentionally manufactured discrepancies between the documents displayed in Calc versus those displayed in PlanMaker/Excel--such as using different gradient colors, font sizes, chart & graph styles, etc. to make Calc appear to render documents differently from PlanMaker/Excel.
i think this kind of intentionally deceptive marketing says a lot about the developers. i wouldn't be surprised if this "Peter Troi" mentioned in the Summary is an astroturfer working for SoftMaker, or that he intentionally lied about its being open source to mislead the editors and get free publicity for their proprietary office suite.
I work from explorer rather than from OpenOffice. A sever delay when I double click something is a royal pain. This is the same reason Adobe Reader sucks.
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.
Take out Quick Load, and I'll bet the load time for Office is just about the same as for OpenOffice.
It doesn't. I've always disabled programs from pre-loading at bootup (for ongoing performance issues, not just initial boot times) and Word 2007 opens a fresh document in 3 seconds (no previously opened documents or Office apps). After closing Word and re-opening, it loads a fresh document in 1 second.
Comparing this to OOo 3 and it takes 7 seconds for initial launch and 4 seconds for subsequent launches. To me, this is pretty conclusive that Quick Load isn't the reason MS Office loads faster but probably speaks for the MS Office team doing a better job writing optimised, modular code. These test results are of course subjective depending on the hardware you have but it's the kind of thing people notice when trying to convert them away from MS Office.
It's been said before but OO's problem is the monolithic and legacy nature of the code causing it to bloat. I imagine if OO developers completely rewrote the code, stripped out all the shit and didn't use Java then they could compete with MS Office for performance. Maybe, just maybe...
There is no knowledge that is not power.
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.
I don't get this. My co-worker recently got MS Office 2007 and it takes almost a minute to start up. 2003 was fast. She doesn't have OO.o, so I can't compare on the same machine, but 2007 seems to take forever.
Put identity in the browser.
Ok, well on my lil acer laptop running vista it took 6 seconds from the time I clicked the icon to get the untitled new word document up. After 6 seconds I could start typing up my paper. 1.8ghz Pentium something, and 1.5 gigs of ram.
hello