Study: Microsoft Office dominates free alternatives |
When it comes time to work I turn to Microsoft Office as do the majority of business people and users looking to do some word processing, check email or build spreadsheets. Microsoft Office is expensive for sure and several free products have turned up that offer Office-like capabilities.
Among the free offerings that are Office alternatives are Google Documents and OpenOffice. While both of these offerings are free, they still only have a tiny fraction of the users Microsoft has for Office. A new study from Clickstream Technologies polled Internet users to find out what productivity suite most people use.
According to the study, Microsoft Office is used by over 50% of adult Internet users in America. OpenOffice is the most popular of the free productivity suites and has a paltry by comparison user base of only 5% of users. Google docs was even worse with only 1% of internet users taking advantage of the Google offering. The study also showed that Office isn’t declining in popularity.
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Microsoft is fighting a losing battle on the home machines because of costs, virus infections and planned obsolescence. When the company I worked for made an arbitrary decision to use MS-Office as their standard, with every so-called update from Office 95, through -97, -2000, and now holding at -2003, I found people became less productive because they had to fight with the software to get their work done, especially with WORD. Openoffice.org is a fine replacement for Word and has features that Microsoft should have had in place years ago, but acts too much like Word for my liking. Too bad Corel has missed the boat with WordPerfect.I don’t understand why a word processor should be tied to a specific version of a browser. WordPerfect 5.1/6.0 for DOS can be made portable to run on a USB stick and still handles text and graphic boxes the best - a comment is attached to the box and moves with the box, not like Word/Openoffice… if only WordPerfect Windows could be made portable, and they brought back support for their abandoned Linux/Unix purchasers. (ABM - Anything but Microsoft!)
Let me guess - not only did the folks who “had to fight with the software to get their work done” not only never took a class but never opened a book or even did a web search for how to use the product.