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Forrester Research Shows Steep Decline in Free Office Suite Stats
An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users (and others) are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. ... The poll included [shows totals] over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising, Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client."
.. and at risk of being modded a Troll and losing any rep.
Office 365 is a good piece of software. Okay, so it's complete shite to use but it's not just an office suite, it's a platform on which you can run your business. IMO for the first time in 20 years, Microsoft has actually come up with a good piece of software. They've certainly leveraged their proprietary format lockin in order to get businesses to use the platform, but using the platform isn't any particular problem.
The platform itself provides the fundamentals of what businesses need to get up and running. It's pretty stable and not horribly expensive. There are other competing platforms out there (some even much better) but they still don't fully support Microsoft's proprietary format. So Microsoft leverages that format but creates something that not only provides the tools you need, it empowers small business. They've done an excellent job to keep the Office brand running and kudos to them for that.
Any open source competitor will need to be hosted, provide better facilities, have a clear migration path and have format compatibility for any hope in the future.
Good point... this is a survey of 155 Forrester clients. People who are Forrester clients are the dinosaurs of the business world. They have to pay Forrester to get a clue. I wouldn't put much stock in these numbers.
(Interesting that the article shows 13% use Google Docs... maybe that's where all the users went.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What is the benefit of cloud-based office software? I understand it allows the service provider to demand rent indefinitely. What benefit does it provide to the end-user?
Easy. I can view my docs anywhere. From my phone, home pc, work pc, whatever. Dropbox has some of this but office file compatibility is a problem for example when it comes to spreadsheets.
Second, it is a damn pain in the ass to setup software to be updated and pushed on thousands of PCs in a work envrionment. With this you push a group policy for a hyperlink. Sovled as the website or intranet site takes care of everything. No hunting down damn Outlook archive folders when upgrading a PC. If a company wants something confidential they flag it and it instantly is unavailable elsewhere. On the cloud means it wont leave on flash drivers either.
http://saveie6.com/
How glorious! We're surrounded by technology and what do we do! Find ways to work MORE and more OFTEN! What are you working on? What are you producing? Where is all this work going? What happened to the leisure society?
Mostly random stuff.
A very minor not pick - the standard for law is Word Perfect. You said "share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc)".
More significant is the claim "share or READ". I've found that LibreOffice is MORE reliable for reading files from various versions of MS Office then MS Office itself is. For collaborative editing, sending a complex document back and forth, sure you'd want to both use the same version of the same software, if you forgot that much better collaborative platforms are available, such as Google Docs.
For collaboration, working on the same document via Google docs really works better than emailing different versions around and changes. That actually leaves a pretty narrow set of circumstances for which MS Office is actually the best choice. You realize that when a newer version of Word comes out that doesn't handle your existing Word 200x format documents properly.