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 back in 2010.
The numbers were collected back in 2010, using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analyzed by the former web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking which fonts where installed on the system (using Javascript), we were able identify the installed Office suites.
It is interesting to see that the adoption of OpenOffice shows huge differences in the analysed countries.
The following table shows the percentage of analysed visitors which had installed a certain Office suite on their computer on February 2010:
| Country | OpenOffice | MS Office | Apple iWork | WordPerfect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poland | 22 % | 68 % | 0.3 % | 1.4 % |
| Czech Republic | 22 % | 76 % | 0.1 % | 1.3 % |
| Germany | 21 % | 72 % | 1.4 % | 2.7 % |
| France | 19 % | 76 % | 2.9 % | 0.5 % |
| Italy | 18 % | 81 % | 1.5 % | 0.9 % |
| Spain | 15 % | 80 % | 1.9 % | 1.5 % |
| Norway | 18 % | 71 % | 2.0 % | 0.5 % |
| Denmark | 14 % | 79 % | 2.5 % | 1.1 % |
| Belgium | 14 % | 85 % | 1.9 % | 1.1 % |
| Sweden | 13 % | 68 % | 1.8 % | 0.2 % |
| Austria | 12 % | 85 % | 1.8 % | 2.2 % |
| Luxembourg | 12 % | 81 % | 3.7 % | 0.7 % |
| Switzerland | 11 % | 85 % | 3.4 % | 1.2 % |
| Canada | 11 % | 79 % | 3.4 % | 4.0 % |
| Hungary | 11 % | 77 % | 0.7 % | 1.4 % |
| Australia | 10 % | 78 % | 3.6 % | 0.9 % |
| United States | 9 % | 75 % | 3.3 % | 3.7 % |
| United Kingdom | 9 % | 80 % | 2.6 % | 0.7 % |
| Netherlands | 8 % | 88 % | 1.7 % | 0.9 % |
| Brazil | 8 % | 85 % | 0.7 % | 2.0 % |
| Romania | 8 % | 67 % | 0.3 % | 0.5 % |
| Ukraine | 7 % | 80 % | 0.4 % | 1.5 % |
| Bulgaria | 7 % | 77 % | 0.2 % | 2.2 % |
| Russian Federation | 6 % | 76 % | 0.2 % | 1.3 % |
| Turkey | 5 % | 82 % | 0.1 % | 0.8 % |
| India | 5 % | 88 % | 0.3 % | 4.1 % |
| China | 0.2 % | 68 % | 0.1 % | 0.2 % |
SoftMaker Office and KOffice (Version 1.6) have market shares below 0.3% in all of the countries. The share of OpenOffice includes StarOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony and other smaller OpenOffice derivatives.
About half the OpenOffice users run it in addition to an installed MS Office. This may be due to expired Office 2007 test versions that are often pre-installed on newer windows computers. Other explanations are that these users are just testing one of the office suites or are in the transition process.
We argue that the numbers reflect a realistic picture as the results correlate with certain parameters:
- Many of the leading countries have switched to OpenOffice (or the ODF file format) in their public administration, education system or in several municipal governments. (Examples from Denmark, Germany, Spain, full list at Openoffice.org)
- Most of the countries that show a big market share of OpenOffice also have a strong adoption of „alternative“ Browsers, like Firefox. Poland and Germany for example both have about 50% Firefox users.
- The strong adoption of OpenOffice in Germany can be a result that it originated from StarOffice, developed in Germany. Canada shows the strongest WordPerfect market share (4%), which perfectly reflects the fact that it is developed by the Canadian software company Corel.
The error margin on OpenOffice may be as large as ±5% (MS Office ±15%), but the numbers can still be compared to each other and they reflect the magnitude of OpenOffice adoption in different countries around the world. The results are a bit more error-prone compared to the original study in Germany: the sample of international visitors analysed in our former website statistic service FlashCounter is smaller since it is mostly used on German websites. However, detection errors, disabled or blocked Javascript (<2%), false positives (due to fonts manually installed) and systematic errors are included in the error margins stated above.
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