Here’s a great post I picked up via the one of the OpenOffice.org mailing lists. It looks as though the 95% market share numbers for M$ Office are way off the mark! In reality, it could be more like 20% of the Office application market is actually OpenOffice.org’s and M$’s position could actually be going backwards!

Wharton’s analysis reveals the fallacy that 95% of users (PC users or office software users, pick one market) use Microsoft Office. Instead, the oft-quoted number simply measures that 95% of the revenue collected for the sale of office suites goes to MS (according to International Data Corp.). Thus, free products including OpenOffice.org and Google Docs are not measured by this statistic at all!

If you measure market share as the number of computers with the software installed, as a percentage of all computers, then Microsoft has far less than 95% and OOo has a good slice: Microsoft claims to have about 400 million MSO users, and some estimates place OOo users at 100 million. With these simple numbers, MS has 80% market share and OpenOffice has 20% (obviously excluding other players and overlap; these numbers could be refined).

Nice one Benjamin. I can’t wait for it to reach 50% - and I believe it will too.

Tell Someone Else!