One FAQ from media folks is “What is OpenOffice.org’s market share?” We measure downloads from our main download site, but that’s only one way of many in which people can acquire the product. We have to rely largely on feedback from the marketplace.

Occasionally we strike lucky. For example, when one of the big name IT research companies found a market share higher than they had expecteed, they contacted us for an off the record conversation. The last thing these guys want is to be caught unprepared by question from a major client. As we can’t afford the mega-bucks they charge for their findings, we have to make do with what nuggets they are happy to share with us.

For a variety of reasons (see earlier postings), I usually estimate our percent market share as being in the high teens. I was pleased to see this report in Computerworld today:

OpenOffice.org is making inroads. The open source productivity suite has captured nearly 13 percent of Windows PCs sampled…

which is in the right order of magnitude for this population (our market share is much higher on GNU/Linux than MS-Windows, higher in Europe than N.America, etc).

My prediction for 2010? with another round of Microsoft enforced churn in the marketplace, I’m expecting to see an increasing number of surveys putting OpenOffice.org over the 20% mark.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 6:22 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.