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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."

3 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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    Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
  2. 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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    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. 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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      Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061