Why OpenOffice.org and thoughts on Market Share
October 21st, 2007Catching up on my post-holiday emails, I’ve seen a link to To Pay or Not To Pay: The World of Office Suites Opens Up which asks So why aren’t more people switching to OpenOffice from the more expensive Microsoft products? This is a question close to the heart of the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project, and it’s good to see some academic research into the question. This research was based on college students (the target population of choice for all lazy academic researchers), but it does confirm what we have believed for some time. Simply being free is not enough.
So what is OpenOffice.org’s proposition:
- It’s great software
- It’s easy to use
- It’s free
(in that order).
For more information, see the Why OpenOffice.org website.
Incidentally, this article also repeats Microsoft’s claim that MS-Office has a 95% market share (without giving a reference). The figure I have seen most commonly quoted from a Microsoft source is that MS-Office has 400 million paid users. However, Microsoft quote research that says 35% of software is pirated, suggesting a total user base of maybe 615 million users.
OpenOffice.org has seen over 100 million downloads from its website alone. By itself, this is not an accurate of user numbers:
- people upgrading from earlier versions are counted more than once
- direct downloads from the OpenOffice.org website are discouraged – people are diverted to local mirrors instead
- downloading is only one channel; many people use other media (CDs, pre-installed copies, etc)
Balancing all these factors, it looks as though OpenOffice.org’s market share is somewhere over the 15% mark, which is in line with our declared target of hitting a 40% share by 2010.
October 21st, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Well I had a discussion yesterday about some of the mentality of IT. How is the consultants are making money recomending OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office update. I recently came across the ultimate insult when a marketing guy “proved” how Microsoft Office is infinitely cheaper than OpenOffice.org, priced at almost 400 USD.
The guy wen through the incredibly stupid rationaled that with MSO you can do a great document in 3 minutes. While with OOo u will spend all morning long so you are still paying the employee.
January 28th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
[...] release – OpenOffice.org 3.0 – scheduled for release in the autumn. That’s good news for the tens of millions of users we expect to [...]
May 25th, 2008 at 2:06 am
I’m using office products for more than 8 years. Recently I downloaded openoffice.org and couldn’t find any significant advance of MS product over openoffice.org w.r.t to basic functionality. I found open office is more stable and faster in comparison to MS office product, morever this great product is free of cost. I belive openoffice.org will become the standard in future as it is open source program, which gives any IT companies the confidence, which MS product can’t give.