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.

Comments

What a bizarre conclusion...

[Junta]

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.