Stats on Usage of Microsoft Office and Rival Productivity Suites

Blogger: Guy Creese

At the end of the first week in November I submitted a report on alternatives to Microsoft Office (e.g., Corel WordPerfect, Google Apps, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice, ThinkFree, and Zoho) to Burton's Editing group. It's entitled, "Productivity Suite Proliferation: Is It Time to Ditch Microsoft Office?" and should be out in the next several months.

Every corporation needs to make up its own mind, but I came across some interesting stats that give a picture of current usage. A press release issued on November 14 by Clickstream Technologies entitled, "Study finds Google Docs Struggles to Gain Foothold in Productivity Suite Market Dominated by Microsoft," says,

From May to November 2008, ClickStream Technologies' standing panel of adult U.S. internet users showed that use of free productivity applications such as Google Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft Office is in use by over 50% of adult U.S. internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.1

Of all free productivity applications observed, OpenOffice (a client application) was the most popular, in use by 5% of all users. OpenOffice also had the heaviest and highest frequency of use among free apps, with an average of 548 clicks performed and 8.7 days of use per user.

Google Docs (a web-based application) was the 2nd most popular free productivity app, used by 1% of users. Google docs also had the lightest use of all productivity apps, with an average of 40 actions performed in the app (compare with 548 in OpenOffice and 1,797 in Microsoft Word), and the fewest average days used during the 6-month period. Although 1% of users had Gears installed on their machine, there was no evidence of its use in conjunction with Google Docs, nor did any user click on “Offline” or “Get Google Gears now” in their Docs account.

Of all participants who used Google Docs or Google Spreadsheets during the study, 68% also used Word at least once, indicating that Google Docs has yet to be considered a stand-alone product by most of its users. By contrast, only 26% of OpenOffice users also used Word during the 6-month study. Although Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been touted as a potential competitor to the Microsoft Office Suite, OpenOffice is currently the more likely app to take that position, possibly indicating the value of offline and local processing enabled by installed applications.