08 February 2010, 16:48

OpenOffice adoption: Germany leads while UK and US lag

According to Webmasterpro.de, a German IT service provider, international adoption of OpenOffice and its derivatives, such as StarOffice or IBM's Lotus Symphony, varies heavily from country to country. As a follow up to its previous German study, the company recently posted a list of international installation rankings for the open source office suite and some of its competitors, including Microsoft Office, Apple's iWork and Corel's WordPerfect. The results of the study show OpenOffice is installed on more than 21% of Polish, Czech Republic and German PCs, while the free office suite only has a 9% market share in the US and UK. In the UK, for example, Microsoft Office accounts for 80% of the install base, iWork 2.6% and WordPerfect 0.7%.

Overall, Microsoft Office market share ranges from 88% in the Netherlands and India to 68% in China and India. While Apple's iWork tops out at 3.7% in Luxembourg, it drops as low as 0.1% in the Czech Republic, Turkey and China. The highest WordPerfect market share is in India, at 4.1%, while in Sweden it's just 0.2%.

The company says that approximately half of OpenOffice users also have Microsoft Office installed, but notes that this may be due to expired trial versions of Office that came pre-installed on new Windows machines. Alternatively, Webmasterpro believes that users may be "just testing one of the office suites or are in the transition process".

The results of the survey were calculated using information from the company's FlashCounter Statistics Service and are based on a sample of over two hundred thousand international visitors. According to Webmasterpro, by using JavaScript to check which fonts are installed on a users system, they can identify which office suite is installed. The company says that its margin of error for determining if OpenOffice is installed is approximately ±5% and ± 15% for Microsoft Office.

See also: