OpenOffice Five Times As Popular As Google Docs

CWmike writes "Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday. OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times." And reader Peter Toi informs us of the open source release of yet another office suite, Softmaker Office. Its claimed advantages are its compactness and speed (making it suitable for netbooks), its excellent MS Office filters, and the fact that it can be installed to USB flash drives.

not surprised

[siddesu]

having used all three, i find the oo (especially the last version) to have the features, availability and deployment options i need and a price i don't disagree with.

Say what you want about Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

But nothing beats Keynote.

Even worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google docs was found to be almost a hundred times less popular than World of Warcraft.

Whatever will Google do to escape from this calamity?

Google Docs really isn't ready.

[jellomizer]

It has most of the features of Microsoft Works 97. With less fonts. The UI is clunky and slow. Granted it is great for being web based however compared to Office or Open Office it is way behind. Also I think people like their documents to be on there system and be able to disconnect from the internet all together sometimes just so they get their work done without the internet whispering in your ear "browse me"

Enough compairson of OOo and Google Docs

[onegear]

How many articles like this are we going to read over the next couple of weeks? Seriously! With OOo and Google Docs, they're comparing apples to oranges. They're both very good software, just done a different way. If what I read is true, and OOo is going to start sticking ads in the app, then lots of people will be moving to something else for sure.

No surprise here

[TFGeditor]

Most people are accustomed to internet outages, whether the fault of their ISP, broken backbone, or individual sites. So, they are naturally reticent to use web-based utilities in favor of applications hosted on their local machine.

Until the 'net is bulletproof, on-line apps will never usurp local utilites and apps for critical applications--or even "casual" applications.

What a bizarre conclusion...

[Junta]

So first off, current incarnations of MS Office are considered the clear market leader. That's a fair observation. A traditionally installed local application manipulating files in a traditional way is popular.

OpenOffice.org is making inroads as a free alternative. More people are starting to find it a viable alternative for many circumstances, and opt not to explicitly buy MS Office. It behaves fundamentally the same way, and does basically the same stuff. Incidentally, I'm happy as it is a cross-platform application, but I think a greater portion of the userbase doesn't think about the source code or the cross-platform, they just didn't have to give money for it.

Then Google docs comes along. In terms of a strong brand to back the concept, it doesn't get much better than the word 'Google'. They find that despite the strong name and potential ability to fulfill at least the basic needs, people aren't excited about using it. The reason seems self-evident, people are more comfortable with traditional software models for this task. They feel they 'own' the software and have the most control over it. They may or may not back up to online storage, but they want to use a local application to edit it.

MS feels this means issuing their own webapp therefore would cement their lead. I think Google's failure indicates that such an offering is moot. People don't want subscription based software if non-subscription software can do the same thing or better. I've seen people throw out how it comes out cheaper in the long haul than buying the software every time, but it ignores the obvious, that people don't buy every iteration. I know people still using their copies of Office97 because they never had a reason to move. MS and many other companies hate this, but it is a simple fact.

A blinding glimpse of the obvious

[techno-vampire]

This is so obviously true, I find it hard to understand why it was published, let alone got to the Slashdot front page. OpenOffice has been out for how many years? Google Apps came out how many months ago? Of course OO.o is more popular; people have had well over ten times as long to adopt it.

Re:Is Schwartz serious?

[Machtyn]

It really will be. Nothing causes a flock away from a product than ads. It's the same as raising a price. The more you raise, the less people purchase, the more you may end up losing. The price in this case are the ads.

Re:tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little bit baffled right now as to why anyone would choose it.

You probably didn't try many documents.

I have reasonably complex/large documents from work with tables and diagrams. Open Office completely breaks the document - many tables and diagrams are unreadable due to wrong widths or style and it takes a long time to open the file.

I just tried it with softmaker and it opened incredibly quickly, and has rendered perfectly (from my brief evaluation so far).

This is a huge improvement over Open Office. I'll evaluate it some more, but this looks extremely promising.