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OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany

Posted by kdawson on from the camel's-head-and-neck dept.

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."

9 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. If you consider... by brennanw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... 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.

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  2. Newsflash: Linux users install fonts, too! by Alan426 · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  3. Problem is by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Problem is by scdeimos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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!

    2. Re:Problem is by Totenglocke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

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    3. Re:Problem is by ratboy666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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  4. Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U by Totenglocke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
  5. Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U by plague911 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

  6. Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.