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OpenOffice.org Breaks Records Everywhere
October 06, 2008
Posted by: Glyn Moody
All around the world, it seems, people just can't get enough of this amazing free office suite, which is now turning in serious market shares in some countries.
Open source zone
Have you checked out CWUK's open source zone ?
For, example, according to this report, there are now 12 million users in Brazil, representing fully 25% of the entire office market there. Meanwhile, plucky little Italy has notched up 4 million downloads in the last 12 months (that's downloads, not users, but still impressive).
I wonder what the corresponding figures for the UK would be? Not nearly so good I suspect, judging by the fact that the UK lies well back in the placings for Firefox uptake, and open source in general.
I presume this is the toxic influence of the UK government, which historically has always had a rather too cosy relationship with Microsoft (arise, Sir William Gates III). Are you doing your bit?
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About the author
Glyn Moody Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
Comments received
zaine_ridling said on Monday, 06 October 2008
As world economies tank thanks to the financial crisis in the US, look for OpenOffice adoption numbers to increase significantly over the next two years with version 3. Not that OpenOffice could not be this broadly used without being a solid and serious office suite.
Glyn Moody said on Monday, 06 October 2008
Well, that's always been the theory: we shall see. In any case, the huge base in Brazil is a great starting point.
anon said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
i use open office for school work and such and it reallly comes through for me.
the only thing i don't like about it is that when you save yoour work it has to save it as ann OPEN OFFICE DOCUMENT
so when you have to present your work at school where they don't use open office it's nnot going to work
Of course, you can always change the file save type to an rtf
so that merelly canncels it out
all in all, i like open office annd it works for me
pHreaksYcle said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
Buddy, you realize you can change it to .doc and even set it to .doc as the default?
Jimmy Smits said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
You have to admit that is pretty amazing stuff.
www.privacy.es.tc
ashok pai said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
open office, just works perfectly well for me. In fact this is the only office suite I've been using since I required very minimal daily usage. open office just works, and I love the pdf export !
What goes around, comes around said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
I remember when M$ was giving away Internet Explorer to crush Netscape...
How does it feel to be on the receiving end, boys??
Joe said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
anon & pHreaksYcle--
Better yet: at your school, download and install the ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office.
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/
Will said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
I personally dont like openoffice's word processor, i feel its a bit heavy on the system resources, so I use Abiword, another open source alternatitive to MS word. But for powerpoint and excel stuff, i use openoffice.
Drummer said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
I agree that downloads does NOT equal deployment. I've recently downloaded OOo 3.0rc3 twice (one Linux, one Windows), but installed it on 3 Linux and 10 Windows machines. A USB flash-drive lets me carry it from PC to PC. However, I should note that the RC versions replace earlier versions on all of these machines.
Kevin said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
I don't suppose that any of you maroons managed to correlate this at all to the annoying new default in the jre installation package that has Open Office selected for installation? Would we perhaps view that as a possible reason for this marvelous "popularity"? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for OpenOffice and I'm thankful for it's availability, quality, and the effort it takes to maintain and develop it. I just don't need it stuffed down my throat when I'm not paying attention on every one of my application servers that prompts to update java periodically.
Chris said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
I wonder how much of a dent it is actually making in MSofts profits. The people I see running OO are those that a few years ago would be running a hacked copy of MS Office. So maybe a lot of downloads are just people swapping illegal MS software for legal opensource stuff.
Crazy American said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
"toxic influence of the UK government"? Let's see...MS Office was a mature, high quality product 10 years ago. Microsoft also spends money on marketing. Thirdly, as the totally dominant product, people like to stay with what's familiar.
Is this article serious? I am still using my copy of Office 2000. I've been using it for 9 years now, and it does everything I need quite well.
I do use OpenOffice on Ubuntu once in a while. It's not bad.
Who cares?
Glyn Moody said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
10 years ago, buying MS Office was a reasonable decision - there was no free alternative; today it's not, given that OOo matches it in most respects, and is doubly free.
Certainly, people tend to be sheep-like, but that doesn't mean they can't change - they changed from Netscape to IE, and are now changing from IE to Firefox in Europe.
DaveS said on Tuesday, 07 October 2008
Happy UK user here man. Ubuntu/Openoffice. Dont even have a Windows partition.....
www.whatUrunning.com said on Friday, 10 October 2008
Its great to see this superb project doing so well, OpenOffice 3.0 is due out over the next few days and it looks like a big step forward which will help gain it some much deserved market share.
http://www.whatUrunning.com/The-Best-Office-Suite-Software.htm
Mark said on Monday, 13 October 2008
The banking crisis will, in general, make people reconsider their habits. OSS and OO will make large gains - who wants to be financially and technically tied to the monopoly as it crashes and burns?