International OpenOffice market shares
by Volker Weber
Due to the strong international interest in our study on OpenOffice's market share in Germany, we've compiled some numbers on international OpenOffice installations.
The numbers were collected using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analysed by the web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking (using Javascript) which fonts where installed on the system, we could identify the installed Office suites.
It is interesting to see that the adoption of OpenOffice shows huge differences in the analysed countries.
Comments
Don't quite understand how he got to the numbers. Surely there will be users who have several office suites installed, and yet most numbers add up to 100%.
Looks like the logic was "If openoffice font found, ++openofficecount, break" which would skew the result towards openoffice.
@andrew - if you read on you see:
"About half the OpenOffice users run it in addition to an installed MS Office."
"The error margin on OpenOffice may be as large as ±5% (MS Office ±15%), but the numbers can still be compared to each other"
What I find interesting, that in China there seems to be 30% of Computers with no Office at all
But what i find more troubling is that they say "he share of OpenOffice includes StarOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony and other smaller OpenOffice derivatives. " - and on the metodology site they say, that OOO is especially easy to detect since they look for the font OpenSymbol that comes with it, and with nothing else.
I do have Notes 8.5.2CDx installed on my mac and also Symphony 1.2.1 - but I do not have this font in the system.
Meanwhile I have checked my windows vmware with Notes 8.5.1 with embedded Symphony installed - no OpenSymbol there as well.
OOo 3.1 and MS-Office 2010 here and I've got OpenSymbol installed but on WinXP, OOo 3.1 and OOo 2.4 on Linux machines, both have OpenSymbol as well. Maybe it's a Mac specific issue?
@Mathias - no, its Symphony specific "issue" - Symphony is made from OOo but it is not OOo.
I would like to see some real world Symphony numbers.
