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New OpenOffice.org Marketshare Numbers

February 14th, 2010 Benjamin Horst

In recent discussions of OpenOffice.org marketshare, two key facts stand out. The first is that OOo’s marketshare is much higher than most observers expected, and the second is that Microsoft Office’s marketshare is much lower than common knowledge has long dictated.

The current discussion of market share was first touched off by Webmasterpro.de, which published “International OpenOffice Market Shares” about a week ago. In this article, author Thomas Hümmer was able to determine approximate installed base / market share of OpenOffice.org and other competing office suites and broke down the numbers by country. Leading countries include Poland and the Czech Republic at 22%, Germany at 21%, France at 19% and Italy, Spain and Denmark close behind.

Hümmer points out some contributing factors to these high numbers, including the fact that many of their public administrations have adopted ODF or OpenOffice.org for their own use. He also notes the correlation between high adoption of OOo and Firefox, which itself has nearly 50% market share in both Poland and Germany, an increase from several years ago, when Firefox was in the same range as OOo is today. OOo’s continued growth thus seems very likely to follow a similar trajectory.

And what of the low marketshare numbers posted by MS Office? For years, common knowledge has been that “everyone has Microsoft Office” installed, which, to give it a number, one might translate to 95%. However, Webmasterpro found no country with greater than 88% penetration for MSO, while most were much lower (the USA only posted 75% installation of MSO, in fact). Germany and Poland were even lower, at 72% and 68%, respectively.

More discussion of this interesting new information can be found at Computerworld UK, in “Has the Irresistible Rise of OpenOffice.org Begun?” by Glyn Moody, at OStatic’s “OpenOffice.org by the Numbers” by Joe Brockmeier, and in many other recent articles.

Bob Sutor on ODF Support in WordPress

February 5th, 2010 Benjamin Horst

ODF support in more applications is always a good thing. It provides further utility to users, expands and strengthens the software ecosystem, and demonstrates the superiority of open data formats.

Along these lines, Bob Sutor asks, “What would ODF support for WordPress look like?

“Thinking of WordPress as a content management system, importing an ODF file means taking a word processing, presentation, or spreadsheet document and putting into a form that can be saved and displayed by WordPress, either in a blog post or a standalone page. For simple text, this would mean translating to HTML. Doing a bit more work, it could mean using HTML and CSS for formatting. Getting even fancier, it could incorporate extra JavaScript or PHP code to handle spreadsheets in a live manner.”

He points out a Drupal module serving a similar purpose, and collects some good comments from Rob Weir and Walt Hucks helping to further develop the idea.