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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."

11 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.

    --
    Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
  2. I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org by MarkWatson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have used OO.org to write several books, and it is what I recommend to people.

    That said, I prefer Latex :-)

    1. Re:I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I maintain a 500 page RPG rules book with Ooo which has complex layout, cross referencing, tons of graphics (going to OOo shrank the size of the documents by 75% because of how I could treat the graphics).

      I went to OOo because 2007 would NOT print the 2003 version of the documents.

      The first document took me about 8 hours to convert.

      It finally dropped to about 2 hours to convert 100 pages.

      First thing was to set up default styles, ( finally had a template document which I just opened empty and pasted the content into).

      Then I would rip out all the sections and put them back in manually (it's mostly dual column but with occasional single column for headers and the conversion engine created sectioning which was way to complex).

      The toughest thing for me to solve each time was 1-3% of the graphics which were at the top right corner of the page. They would float incorrectly and randomly until I nailed them down.

      I can't see going back to Word now. Even at $10 for a legitimate corporate user, home copy.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  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.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Problem is by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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"

      It's not going to be "better" than MS Office as long as .doc remains the de facto format. There are headhunters who require .doc resumes, entire departments who use only .doc, and there are professors who require .doc assignment submissions.

      One infuriating "feature" of OOo is the inability to permanently disable that annoying auto-numbering and auto-bulleting. The help and searches reveal that you have to manually turn one or the other off each time it thinks you want a list when you don't. It's especially annoying for writing code-style, where tabs and indents are done manually.

      And, in Math, formulas don't render correctly when converted to .doc, at least not when printed from a Windows computer. Multiplication symbols show up as hollow checkboxes. It's impossible to use superscripts and subscripts simultaneously, as when using chemical symbols (in before "use TeX").

    2. 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.

      --
      Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
    3. Re:Problem is by blind+biker · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      That's a notorious lie and people should really stop parroting it! No, a lot of commands are not now available, at least not through the ribbons. And worst is, you can't even add them to the ribbons, even if you know they exist (and they do, because you can find them when you try to add buttons to the button bar, which however the new Office discourages you from using).

      So please, just fucking stop repeating this mantra that you can access all the commands through the ribbon - any even slightly advanced user of Word or Excel knows that's bullshit on a popsicle stick.

      --
      "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  4. All about the fonts, baby by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's right. As long as Microsoft controls Zapf Wingdings, OpenOffice will never take off.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  5. 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.

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

    Why not submit them as PDFs? They can open it in any platform and it will appear as I intended. Besides it would make you look cool.

    Its working fine for me at my university.

  7. Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U by esmrg · · Score: 5, Informative

    plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files

    I didn't believe this statement so I looked it up.
    According to their student guide at http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/training/en_us/qs_student_en_us.pdf

    At the top of page 2:
    " We accept submissions in these formats: MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, HTML, and plain text (.txt)"

    So while I think plagiarism checkers are kind of a waste of resources, your statement is still false.