OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany

hweimer writes "A novel study analyzes the installed base of various office packages among German users. (Here is the original study report in German and a Google translation.) While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing. The authors use a clever method to determine the installed office suites of millions of web users: they look for the availability of characteristic fonts being shipped with the various suites. What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."

Comments

methodology?

[girlintraining]

What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."

That's probably because of a flaw in the methodology. Also, this study isn't a representative sample -- a lot of businesses don't allow internet access. Perhaps they are more likely to use one office package over another. This study is interesting, but hardly robust.

If you consider...

[brennanw]

... that StarOffice was a wildly popular office suite in Germany in the 90s (before Sun bought the code), I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher.

Newsflash: Linux users install fonts, too!

[Alan426]

What about everyone who installs msttcorefonts for compatibility? Not to mention all the other random fonts you have to accumulate to open documents?

Problem is

[Darkness404]

The problem I see with OOo is that it is marketed and used as "hey, there is a free (as in beer) MS Office clone!" rather than "Hey, this is better than MS Office" but the problem is the second statement isn't true. Firefox won out over IE not by "hey, we have a clone of IE" but by being -better- than IE.

Re:Problem is

[scdeimos]

The problem I see with OOo is that it is marketed and used as "hey, there is a free (as in beer) MS Office clone!" rather than "Hey, this is better than MS Office" but the problem is the second statement isn't true.

I'd say OOo is already better than MS Office because it doesn't have those annoyingly stupid ribbons. What a way to complicate usage - makes it difficult to find anything. (I have to use the MS version at work, unfortunately - damned SOE's.)

If OOo *ever* gets ribbons I'll stomp on the feet of the developer who added them!

Re:Problem is

[Totenglocke]

All ribbons did was take the menus and turn them into tabs, then the items buried under the menus are now out in the open once you select the tab. Most normal people actually find the ribbon much easier to use because they (and I as well) never wasted the countless hours to memorize how many menus deep you had to go to find X rarely used feature. Now X rarely used feature is out in the open once you select the tab for what general thing you're trying to do - no more digging for it.

Re:Problem is

[ratboy666]

But... openoffice.org is better than ms office. And, it's not an ms office clone.

Right now, I am giving presentations with impress. Slides to the projector, and my presenter screen on the laptop has the slide, the next slide, presenters notes and a clock.

openoffice.org actually runs on the platforms I use (Solaris and Linux).

openoffice.org integrates with LaTex.

openoffice.org offers PDF/A-1a export. openoffice.org font selection shows the font in the pulldown. (maybe recent MS stuff does these things too -- but MS needed to catch up).

Since openoffice.org runs on Solaris and Linux, and MS Office doesn't, it's absolutely a no-brainer. openoffice.org is better.

Re:Problem is

[Anonymous Coward]

But in the menu system they aren't given more real estate. Everything is hidden away, just more or less based on one idea of what is more important.

I tend to use a small subset of features frequently. The subsets may change depending on what task I am currently doing with the document (Formatting, Layout, Revision, etc) and the ribbon tabs allow all the features I will be using for one task to be clearly visible on the screen without any other features I don't use.

That's the part that makes the ribbon user friendly. You can make your own ribbons with your own sets of features that you use, and it already has standard ones for the most obvious tasks. A feature most people never use may just be a feature that someone uses all the time. Why shouldn't that person be able to give more real estate to that feature?

It doesn't have to be a 'ribbon' or a 'menu' but MS has given individual users control over what features they see and where instead of just telling their customers 'there's a reason your feature is 6 menus deep, it's because you're not important enough to us'

I doubt that most users care how features are delivered to them, as long as the features they want are the most accessible for them.

Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U

[Totenglocke]

If they couldn't open your documents then either one of you were screwing things up - perhaps they only had Office 2003 and you were saving as .docx? I've sent files back and forth between MS Office and Open Office with no problems plenty of times.

Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U

[Anonymous Coward]

PDF?

Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U

[plague911]

Open office and Microsoft office have significant formatting differences. Ive had 0 success loading saving a file in OO and having it look the same in Microsoft office. Additionally ive tried several builds of OO and I have again had significant problems with saving in OO and having it open the same the next day in OO...

Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U

[Ethanol-fueled]

BTW, do those word-counting universities have a stated goal of "simplifying" the language? Are they the same bitching about poor literacy of students?

In the American university setting they're about bloating, not simplifying. They wouldn't use word count as a metric if they cared about the clarity and substance of what was written.

Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen the crap that some people put together in Word or whatever and the documents don't open in Word or Open Office. However, repairing one of these in OO is possible but in Word, forget it... 10 minutes in OO produces something that prints. 30 min in Word produces nothing but garbage.

Really, all these people that have trouble are probably doing something bizarre, like using spaces to tab, or returns to get to the next page. Formatting goes wonky really fast with goofy methods.

That said, I never have a problem with Notepad documents. They always print what's there.

Your post proves the elitism in the MS camp

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post proves the elitism in the MS camp. How do YOU know they need MS Office? Do you know what MS Office provides that OOo doesn't? You're professing even more arrogance because you're not only assuming what MS Office would provide but that OOo doesn't provide it. AND that what MS Office doesn't provide (like, say, PDF printing) isn't wanted either.

AND that it's all FOSS's fault.