OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany

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."

I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org

[MarkWatson]

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

That said, I prefer Latex :-)

Panopticlick?

[Anonymous Coward]

This same data could be mined from what is collected by EFF's Panopticlick. Would be interesting at the very least...

Re:I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:If you consider...

[Hurricane78]

That’s reeealy long ago. Also, most people do not know at all, that they are related.
Plus, I find OpenOffice to be a badly-designed sluggishly slow and crappy Office suite. Different than MS Office, but not better or worse.

The reason is, that they both are waaaayyy over their maximum lifespan. They should have had a complete rewrite about 5-10 years ago.
Until that is going to happen, they will become more and more the upside-down pyramid of software design, that killed pre-NT Windows with ME.

Or in short: It needs a revolution. (And I’m on to one, actually.)

Re:Problem is

[Ethanol-fueled]

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").

Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U

[amiga500]

I managed to complete a post-graduate course using Open Office. Assignments were given as Word documents, and needed to be submitted as the same. I always saved in Word 2000 format and my professors never had a problem. If Word was offered at the same price as OO, I would buy Word. I've only used OO because I'm too cheap and don't using office apps enough at home to justify the price. I wish OO were better than MS Office, but it's far behind. When ever I try to format text Writer never does what I want. I've tried drawing diagrams in Draw but soon gave up due to the poor interface, and Impress, well that's the worst of the lot.

Re:Newsflash: Linux users install fonts, too!

[Japher]

I don't speak or read German, so I'm relying on the Google translation and a little intuition here, so please bear with me.

They mention testing for the Open Symbol font as the indicator for an OpenOffice install. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most Linux boxes come with Open Symbol installed? I know Debian does. How can they know that OpenOffice installed the font? I have a laptop on which I have never installed OpenOffice, but I do have XMing and it's font package. Guess what... my system has Open Symbol.

Take that along with the fact that they admit an error of +/-10% in the Microsoft numbers and it's clear that this study is seriously flawed.

Even if the font they're checking for could only have come from an OpenOffice install, the best they can say is that 21% of the computers had OpenOffice installed on them at one point. There is absolutely no guarantee that it wasn't removed but left the fonts behind.

I also couldn't find any information about the website they used to collect data. They could have a HUGE sampling bias here. What if, for example, the web site promotes open source software? Or is a resource for programmers and developers? Those users are far more likely to have OpenOffice installed than the average user.

Take this study with a grain of salt.

Open Office getting worse?

[Animats]

Open Office may have peaked in quality. Open Office Draw 3.1 crashes for me about twice an hour, while older versions never did. Draw also has some weird intermittent bug in selection, were suddenly everything goes grey for a few seconds. The last 2.x versions were solid.

I'm always amused that the crash reporter program wants the user to type in which OpenOffice program they were using. The crash reporter ought to know that.

Is Slashdot MS-only 00:00-09:00 CET?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is amazing, after all the stories I have read on slashdot about how OOo is just as useful (although maybe not as good) as MS-Office here we have a story about how in .de they are at more than 20% market penetration. Great news! But all I see is nay-sayers and complainers, people saying how they coulndt use OOo because their uni bans it, it crashes all the time, it's not compatible, how it ate their dog etc etc.

This shows something very interesting to me about the demographics of slashdot. During the european nighttime, especially after midnight CET, the demographic of slashdot is almost entirely USians. It's strange, since during the day, European time, slashdot is overwhelmingly pro-FOSS, but at night the opposite happens. This article was posted at 11pm slashdot time (GMT -5). 5am CET, 4am UK and Ireland time.

And what kind of comments do we get while the europeans are asleep? Overwhelmingly MS shills and anti-FOSS FUD. It's very enlightening. A pro FOSS success story posted, and the comments call into question the results, the methodology, the usefulness, the product itself, everything. It's a marketers dream. I would look to see if other pro-FOSS articles are gamed in this way, and if it depends on the time it's posted, but Im at work now.

Perhaps someone could investigate further.

Re:Open Office getting worse?

[je ne sais quoi]

That's strange, my experience has been the opposite, but I don't use draw. I dominantly use calc and I think the 3.x versions are much more usable. A lot of that has to do with the fact that charts are now anti-aliased and you don't cringe after making one any more. The charting ability in general has been the one area of weakness for me as to why I needed Excel. With the 3.x versions, that reason is pretty much gone because they're much easier now and the axis labels and scales don't freak out as often.